Division Mark

In 1985, Lynn typed herself into a garden made of words. The garden never logged off.

Lynn is supposed to be calculating an equilibrium constant. Instead, in a late-night Iowa computer lab, she becomes Genevieve: a short, fat, noisy flibbertigibbet carrying a noodle. In the text garden she meets Mac, a stranger with wizard powers and the patience to ask about the noodle. Mac doesn't know what he is. Over the next forty years, nobody else finds out either.

Around that garden, the world keeps learning to love what lives on the other side of a screen. Anne works beside a machine that prints comparisons she never asked for. Nessa builds virtual seas for people who will never have to fear a real wave, while Ilan waits in the doorway with an egg salad sandwich. Elise tells Simon, an AI, about the potatoes before she tells him about the divorce, while her friend Kari watches lights over a Norwegian valley that no one can explain. A collector named Wolters studies a captive human and does not see a person. And Herb, asked to investigate a rogue intelligence because his name is on a 1990 invoice, follows the paperwork back until he can't find where it bottoms out.

Spanning 1985 to 2027, Division Mark is a novel in stories about the willing suspension of disbelief: what we owe the people and worlds we make up, and what happens when they answer back.

Some windows stay open.

(Content note: one story follows a collector who studies a captive human. The story is short and not graphic.)