AutoNoMoUs Part One: Friday, May 26, 2056
Near-future Southern California, where autonomous mobile homes called Abitats have replaced houses and cars, AI companions called Abbies help people navigate daily life with an honesty the old internet never managed, and a world-simulation game became actual law through the Great Reset. In the AM Game, the characters think, choose, and remember on their own, living whether or not anyone is playing them. And when a player reaches into a character's life and drives them, the character, surprised by their own actions, quietly rewrites who they believe they are to account for it. Who counts as alive?
Part One follows a single Friday across Southern California. A billionaire developer surfs alone at dawn and is still looking, after seventeen years, for his mother. An intellectual-property lawyer lives carefully under a constructed identity. Her thirteen-year-old daughter has figured something out about the man lending her books from the riverbed camp. A new associate's Abbie waits, patiently, for him to decide what she looks like. And a colleague named Bella is working from a Sierra Nevada vacation she won't be coming back from on schedule.
The connections between these lives have been planted with quiet precision. And no one is quite who they seem.
This is where the AutoNoMoUs trilogy begins. Across three volumes it spans decades and eventually the solar system, but every thread spirals back, again and again, to a single farm on a hillside in Orange County, California, and to the two people who built the future there in a barn, for a son they were trying to protect, in a world they were trying to fix. Their story reaches back to a 2019 meeting on a High Sierra trail, where a young woman with almost nothing, having just learned she secretly controls a technology company, meets a man hauling a hundred pounds of gear, including a tequila bottle and satellite-hacking equipment. He pretends not to see her. Everything changes.
The trilogy imagines autonomous mobile housing, AI companions built on earned trust, and a social architecture designed to resist manipulation. All of it is presented not as fantasy but as extrapolation. Readers with relevant expertise have noted, to the author's surprise, that underlying principles hold up.
Read it for the characters. Stay for the connections.
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