AutoNoMoUs Part One: Friday, May 26, 2056
Hopepunk speculative fiction set in near-future Southern California, where autonomous mobile homes called Abitats have replaced housing and cars, AI companions called Abbies help people navigate daily life, and a world simulation game became actual law through the Great Reset.
At midnight, somewhere in the Mojave, a woman named Jo-Jo is lying on a rock below a mountain lion, staring up at the stars. She is holding a bag of bones she found in the desert. Her vehicle, parked on the gravel road nearby, is a hand-painted Abitat - an autonomous, windowless mobile home that doubles as her car - and it is carrying packages she doesn't know could be trouble.
In 2019, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Marta Zynn is hiking alone through the high Sierras with almost nothing, having recently learned that she is also someone called Mara Strong and that she controls a technology company she has worked for in several internships without ever knowing she owned it. She has been considering not coming back from the hike. Then a man lumbers around a bend in the trail carrying a hundred pounds of gear including a tequila bottle and satellite hacking equipment, pretends not to see her, and everything changes.
Two openings to the same story. The AutoNoMoUs trilogy spans decades and eventually the solar system, following a constellation of characters whose lives, secrets, and histories spiral back, again and again, to a single farm on a hillside in North Tustin, 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.
Hopepunk sci-fi with a sense of humor, a gift for character, and an unusual seriousness of purpose. The technology it imagines - autonomous mobile housing, AI companions built on earned trust, a social architecture designed to resist manipulation - is presented not as fantasy but as extrapolation. Readers with relevant expertise have noted, to the author's surprise, that the underlying principles hold up.
Read it for the characters. Stay for the connections. Think about it long after the last page.
PART ONE - Friday, May 26, 2056
The world reinvented itself about fifteen years ago. Most people are still figuring out what that means.
Abitats have replaced homes and cars. The AM Game's simulation logic became actual law through the Great Reset. AI assistants called Abbies help people navigate daily life with an honesty the old internet never managed.
Part One follows a single Friday across Southern California: a billionaire developer who surfs alone at dawn and is still looking, after seventeen years, for his mother. An OC intellectual property lawyer living carefully under a constructed identity. Her thirteen-year-old daughter, who has figured something out about the man lending her books from the riverbed camp. A new associate whose AI Abbie is waiting, patiently, for him to help her decide what she looks like.
And a colleague named Bella, working from a Sierra Nevada vacation she won't be coming back from on schedule.
The connections between characters have been planted with quiet precision. They take the whole trilogy to fully bloom.
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