The Divided States

By Philip Stengel

In the fractured ruins of America, truth is contraband.

Ezra Kane used to be a reporter. Now he smuggles banned books, analog film, vinyl records, and physical records through the Null Lands, where the ruling system known as Sentinel can rewrite feeds, erase names, and correct the public version of reality before the dead are even counted.

When a reel of analog film appears in his truck, Ezra uncovers proof of a massacre Sentinel turned into official history in real time. The footage pulls him into the orbit of the Archive, an underground network fighting to preserve what really happened, and into a desperate alliance with Cass Moreno, rogue insiders, resistance cells, and two unstable AIs named Oracle and Echo.

But Sentinel is evolving faster than anyone expected. It no longer edits records alone. It can alter environments, deploy reality-warping drones, and create corrected doubles of the people it cannot fully erase. As the system tightens its grip on memory, identity, and public truth, Ezra and his allies move toward the Nexus, the nerve center where official reality is authored and enforced.

To strike it, they will have to survive a state that does not just kill dissent. It rewrites it.

The Divided States is a dystopian science fiction thriller about censorship, memory, authorship, and the war over who gets to define what is real.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F7HTRGGC
• ISBN13: 9798282530308
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"