katherinemf

The first chapter is below, which introduces the protagonist and her world on a very bad day. 

Up to Here
Marza had had it up to fucking here. Here not being just the chin or forehead, the traditional places one has it fucking up to, but all the way up through the fucking roof. She’d had it with her job. She’d had it with her boss. She’d had it with her horrifying ex-husband and their bratty kid. She’d had it with the cat she adopted that was forever shitting in her shoes. She’d had it with having to explain to people that her name was not Martha or Marcia Penn, but Marza Penn after the dumb-fuck almond confection that her dumb-fuck parents thought was “just oh so sweet”—so cloyingly, sickeningly sweet. She’d had it with being sick of herself for being overweight even though the world—including her fucking name—screamed at her to eat the fat and sugar but also be thin and athletic but also be proud of your body even if it wasn’t what everyone wanted it to be. She’d had it with politics and technology and aging and insurance and lawns and politeness and advertisements for white teeth and people and weather and the sound of text message alerts and the spectrum of color visible to the human eye. 
She’d had it with every last fucking thing, and that very last fucking thing, the proverbial camel-dispatching straw, was her latest project for the soulless, conscience-less trading company she was temping for. Four months she’d been working on it. Four fucking months of compiling mind-meltingly boring data. Sixty-five workdays analyzing egregiously, pointlessly complicated spreadsheets. Five hundred eighty-five billable hours sifting through esoterically organized figures. Thirty-one thousand two hundred minutes of caffeine-catalyzed research that kept her hunched at her desk, eyes shot with blood and brain aching, trying to traverse a mountain range of work because meeting deadlines was fundamental to her nature. And she’d done it! Without a second of overtime—because temps were forbidden overtime and the system locked her out after eight hours on the dot—she’d managed the impossible and finished not just by her deadline, but with half an hour to spare. And what did the Clouder Corporation have to say about her efforts? Her dogged determination? Her foregone lunches and bathroom breaks? Her single-minded resolve and perseverance? How were her sacrifices appreciated and rewarded? The full summation of their feelings on the matter materialized on the screen in front of her: 
“Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
This came to her as a pop-up when she posted her final report to their online institution workflow organizational protocol file share database project tracker that in itself had taken long days to learn and precious hours to use. 
“Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
She stared dumbly at the screen. She blinked with as much force as she her facial muscles could muster, but that didn’t change what the pop-up said. She uploaded her work again. Again, “Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
Eventually her monitor went dark from inactivity, but not before flashing, “Saving energy is a core value at Clouder!” And that was the precise moment Marza had had it up to fucking here. On legs numbed from frustrated rage, she walked to her manager’s “office,” which was really just a desk with armpit-high partitions around it. That was as close to an office as anyone had in Clouder’s “open-dialogue floorplan.” 
She could smell his cologne even before she saw the top of his slicked, corporate pompadour come into view, but not before she could hear his I-have-no-sense-of-an-appropriate-volume-for-a-private-phone-conversation-in-an-open-dialogue-floorplan-office voice. “Yah, dude! The game was absolutely motherfucking b-a-n-a-n-a-s.”
Marza rapped on the partial wall of what no one would dare say out loud was a cubicle but was clearly very much a cubicle. “Excuse me, Cody,” she tried to say in an even tone but it instead came out as a pitchy squeal. 
Cody swiveled around, pulling his cell phone from his ear. “Martha! I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he said nodding at his phone. “Why don’t you sched a chat on my cal?” Marza’s lips contracted into a thin white line, and she slowly shook her head no. Cody’s eyes widened. He was an amiable-enough dudebro who could bluster a fine middle-management game of redirection and meaningless corporate speak to mask not knowing or doing anything, which meant he absolutely could not handle any actual, direct confrontation. He quickly swiveled back around and whispered into his phone, “I’ll call you back.” He reswiveled and tried to look not at all panicked, which he achieved better than most twenty-somethings could when confronted with an enraged middle-aged woman who wasn’t their mother. “What can I do you for?”
“What you can do for me is explain when FutureSwell was cancelled,” she said softly, which seemed to frighten him more. 
“Oh! Yeah. FutureSwell giving up the ghost. Well, that happened, like, I believe, just this morning. Let me check.” He executed a high-speed swivel to his keyboard and began tapping madly. Talking back over his shoulder, “Yeah, just like, a few hours ago.” His body spun around to meet his face. He was visibly relieved that he hadn’t fucked something up, but Marza was disappointed she couldn’t rightly take out her anger on the kid, even if he did have a salary and health benefits but no tangible skills beyond keeping his teeth super white and having expensive taste in watches. 
Sensing he was being lifted off the hook, Cody, said, “Sucks! You’ve been working, like, super hard on that. Don’t think I didn’t notice! I did. But you know how this corporate stuff goes.” He did an exaggerated eye roll and then mimed blowing his brains out with a finger gun, just in case his first gesture wasn’t enough. “I didn’t hear anything about it getting the axe until an alert popped up this morning. I guess I should tell the rest of the temps, huh?”
“We’re not temps; we’re contract workers,” Marza said, still trying to figure out if she could make any of this his fault. “And you should have said something when you got the alert,” she huffed, but it was weak and they both knew it. 
“Sorry, yeah, you’re totally right!” Cody said anyway. Now that the stakes were so low, he could pretend to feel bad. 
Marza went back to her desk and dropped into her chair. She shook her mouse to wake up the screen out of habit. A meeting had been added to her calendar for that afternoon. Doubtless to go over a new pointless assignment that would drain her life force in exchange for chits. This was pretty much exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. And suddenly, she didn’t want to stand for it either. She had, after all, had it up to fucking here, and she was going the fuck home.

First Assignment: Story Statement

Marza Penn, an unlikely and somewhat unwilling heroine, appears to be the world's best hope for keeping reality from unraveling. 

Second Assignment: The Antagonist

Bruce Boosch is arrogant and greedy. He epitomizes of the world-eating bajillionaire class whose only goal is to have more money and toys than everyone else. The ex-husband of Sara Beacon, the technocrat wannabe heroine of the story, Bruce is keenly devoted to becoming richer and more powerful than her, even though it means piggybacking on her inventions to get there. This is how Marza, the protagonist, gets caught in their crossfire. Both Sara and Bruce are trying to find the right mind to infuse into their AI to give it consciousness, and they both discover Marza through a test designed by Sara. Though Marza doesn’t trust Sara entirely, Bruce’s smarmy, business-bro swagger continually pushes her to help Sara instead of side with him—and that just makes him push harder. 

Third Assignment: Breakout Title

Pigs Fly
In All Unlikelihood
The Unraveling

Fourth Assignment: Comps

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

Fifth Assignment: Hook Line

A woman fed up with her predictably disappointing life is thrown into chaos when warring billionaires discover that her singularly average mind is the key to making AI conscious—which might just save reality from unraveling.

Sixth Assignment: Inner Conflict

Marza has always known she has more to offer, but whenever she’s tried to live up to her potential, it feels like the world has smacked her down. So when two big-deal tech moguls decide they want her for their special projects, she’s suspicious and anxious, sure that things are bound to go horribly wrong for her if she steps outside the cramped box of her life.

Seventh Assignment: Setting

In the near future, AI is infused in the decision-making processes of all levels of society—government, banking, the market, healthcare, transportation, justice, communications, shopping, gambling, dating, and every other cranny of life you can think of. But it isn't just big business that lives and dies by what AI thinks. Everyone has AI tracking them and feeding back to them all the things it decides they need or want. These AI nodes are constant companions that help with everything from deciding what you should eat and watch, who you should be friends with and date, to where you should work and really how you should live. And it's doing it every second of every day. Think progeny of Siri several generations down the logic tree.

But something has gone wrong in this algorithmically molded world. Statistically unlikely things begin to happen with alarming frequency, but only a few people are able to see the pattern behind these events—that reality is unraveling. Nearly entirely safe birth control is failing, too many people named Mojo get elected mayor, dice stop rolling over to the number six. This all goes back to a research lab where some precocious grad students wangled a pig into flight, and the realization of this impossibility essentially broke the universe’s brain. Because in this reality, there is a force called phi. It is akin to gravity and electromagnetism in that it is a basic physical mechanism that makes the universe go. It is the force that makes a quark go up or down, become strange or charming, and complicates particle physics to no end. It is the weave of consciousness that unites all things. It is the intelligence that emerges from physical chaos. And those damn kids went and broke it. 

One of the very few people to see this breakdown for what it is is Sara Beacon, the technocrat who created the StratoSphere, the digital space where most everyone spends all their time. It's like if Google and Facebook had a savant child people couldn't turn away from. Sara intends to save the world—both the conventional one and her data-dependent digital one—from her mad-scientist tech lab located in a sprawling underground complex, where androids and holograms and even unicorns roam not-so-free on farm-like ranges. She thinks generating enough humdrum, highly rational phi can patch up whatever hole has been torn in reality, which is totally doable if she can just infuse all her AI with genuine consciousness. That’s why she needs Marza Penn, whose mind is so middle-of-the road that the AI network will accept it. 

But Earth might not be big enough for all this intelligent life. When it becomes apparent that giving all the AI consciousness has not shored up the rip in reality as she hoped and is instead widening the gaps, Sara decides to send AMI (artificial Marza intelligence, who is the OG of AI consciousness) to Mars to live out its days as a robot cheetah and lobotomize the rest of the AI on the Sphere. But the AI has other plans. 

The first chapter is below, which introduces the protagonist and her world on a very bad day.  

Up to Here
Marza had had it up to fucking here. Here not being just the chin or forehead, the traditional places one has it fucking up to, but all the way up through the fucking roof. She’d had it with her job. She’d had it with her boss. She’d had it with her horrifying ex-husband and their bratty kid. She’d had it with the cat she adopted that was forever shitting in her shoes. She’d had it with having to explain to people that her name was not Martha or Marcia Penn, but Marza Penn after the dumb-fuck almond confection that her dumb-fuck parents thought was “just oh so sweet”—so cloyingly, sickeningly sweet. She’d had it with being sick of herself for being overweight even though the world—including her fucking name—screamed at her to eat the fat and sugar but also be thin and athletic but also be proud of your body even if it wasn’t what everyone wanted it to be. She’d had it with politics and technology and aging and insurance and lawns and politeness and advertisements for white teeth and people and weather and the sound of text message alerts and the spectrum of color visible to the human eye. 
She’d had it with every last fucking thing, and that very last fucking thing, the proverbial camel-dispatching straw, was her latest project for the soulless, conscience-less trading company she was temping for. Four months she’d been working on it. Four fucking months of compiling mind-meltingly boring data. Sixty-five workdays analyzing egregiously, pointlessly complicated spreadsheets. Five hundred eighty-five billable hours sifting through esoterically organized figures. Thirty-one thousand two hundred minutes of caffeine-catalyzed research that kept her hunched at her desk, eyes shot with blood and brain aching, trying to traverse a mountain range of work because meeting deadlines was fundamental to her nature. And she’d done it! Without a second of overtime—because temps were forbidden overtime and the system locked her out after eight hours on the dot—she’d managed the impossible and finished not just by her deadline, but with half an hour to spare. And what did the Clouder Corporation have to say about her efforts? Her dogged determination? Her foregone lunches and bathroom breaks? Her single-minded resolve and perseverance? How were her sacrifices appreciated and rewarded? The full summation of their feelings on the matter materialized on the screen in front of her: 
“Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
This came to her as a pop-up when she posted her final report to their online institution workflow organizational protocol file share database project tracker that in itself had taken long days to learn and precious hours to use. 
“Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
She stared dumbly at the screen. She blinked with as much force as she her facial muscles could muster, but that didn’t change what the pop-up said. She uploaded her work again. Again, “Project FutureSwell has expired.” 
Eventually her monitor went dark from inactivity, but not before flashing, “Saving energy is a core value at Clouder!” And that was the precise moment Marza had had it up to fucking here. On legs numbed from frustrated rage, she walked to her manager’s “office,” which was really just a desk with armpit-high partitions around it. That was as close to an office as anyone had in Clouder’s “open-dialogue floorplan.” 
She could smell his cologne even before she saw the top of his slicked, corporate pompadour come into view, but not before she could hear his I-have-no-sense-of-an-appropriate-volume-for-a-private-phone-conversation-in-an-open-dialogue-floorplan-office voice. “Yah, dude! The game was absolutely motherfucking b-a-n-a-n-a-s.”
Marza rapped on the partial wall of what no one would dare say out loud was a cubicle but was clearly very much a cubicle. “Excuse me, Cody,” she tried to say in an even tone but it instead came out as a pitchy squeal. 
Cody swiveled around, pulling his cell phone from his ear. “Martha! I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he said nodding at his phone. “Why don’t you sched a chat on my cal?” Marza’s lips contracted into a thin white line, and she slowly shook her head no. Cody’s eyes widened. He was an amiable-enough dudebro who could bluster a fine middle-management game of redirection and meaningless corporate speak to mask not knowing or doing anything, which meant he absolutely could not handle any actual, direct confrontation. He quickly swiveled back around and whispered into his phone, “I’ll call you back.” He reswiveled and tried to look not at all panicked, which he achieved better than most twenty-somethings could when confronted with an enraged middle-aged woman who wasn’t their mother. “What can I do you for?”
“What you can do for me is explain when FutureSwell was cancelled,” she said softly, which seemed to frighten him more. 
“Oh! Yeah. FutureSwell giving up the ghost. Well, that happened, like, I believe, just this morning. Let me check.” He executed a high-speed swivel to his keyboard and began tapping madly. Talking back over his shoulder, “Yeah, just like, a few hours ago.” His body spun around to meet his face. He was visibly relieved that he hadn’t fucked something up, but Marza was disappointed she couldn’t rightly take out her anger on the kid, even if he did have a salary and health benefits but no tangible skills beyond keeping his teeth super white and having expensive taste in watches. 
Sensing he was being lifted off the hook, Cody, said, “Sucks! You’ve been working, like, super hard on that. Don’t think I didn’t notice! I did. But you know how this corporate stuff goes.” He did an exaggerated eye roll and then mimed blowing his brains out with a finger gun, just in case his first gesture wasn’t enough. “I didn’t hear anything about it getting the axe until an alert popped up this morning. I guess I should tell the rest of the temps, huh?”
“We’re not temps; we’re contract workers,” Marza said, still trying to figure out if she could make any of this his fault. “And you should have said something when you got the alert,” she huffed, but it was weak and they both knew it. 
“Sorry, yeah, you’re totally right!” Cody said anyway. Now that the stakes were so low, he could pretend to feel bad. 
Marza went back to her desk and dropped into her chair. She shook her mouse to wake up the screen out of habit. A meeting had been added to her calendar for that afternoon. Doubtless to go over a new pointless assignment that would drain her life force in exchange for chits. This was pretty much exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. And suddenly, she didn’t want to stand for it either. She had, after all, had it up to fucking here, and she was going the fuck home.
 

First Assignment: Story Statement

Marza Penn, an unlikely and somewhat unwilling heroine, appears to be the world's best hope for keeping reality from unraveling. 

Second Assignment: The Antagonist

Bruce Boosch is arrogant and greedy. He epitomizes of the world-eating bajillionaire class whose only goal is to have more money and toys than everyone else. The ex-husband of Sara Beacon, the technocrat wannabe heroine of the story, Bruce is keenly devoted to becoming richer and more powerful than her, even though it means piggybacking on her inventions to get there. This is how Marza, the protagonist, gets caught in their crossfire. Both Sara and Bruce are trying to find the right mind to infuse into their AI to give it consciousness, and they both discover Marza through a test designed by Sara. Though Marza doesn’t trust Sara entirely, Bruce’s smarmy business-bro swagger continually pushes her to help Sara instead of side with him—and that just makes him push harder. 

Third Assignment: Breakout Title

Pigs Fly
In All Unlikelihood
The Unraveling

Fourth Assignment: Comps

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

Fifth Assignment: Hook Line

A woman fed up with her predictably disappointing life is thrown into chaos when warring billionaires discover her singularly average mind is the key to making AI conscious—which might just save reality from unraveling.

Sixth Assignment: Inner Conflict

Marza has always known she has more to offer, but whenever she’s tried to live up to her potential, it feels like the world has smacked her down. So when two big-deal tech billionaires decide they want her for their special projects, she’s suspicious and anxious, sure that things are bound to go horribly wrong for her if she steps outside the cramped box of her life.

Seventh Assignment: Setting

In the near future, AI is infused in the decision-making processes of all levels of society—government, banking, the market, healthcare, transportation, justice, communications, and every other system you can think of. But it isn't just big business that lives and dies by what AI thinks. Everyone has an AI constant companion that grows and learns with their digital history. These AI nodes are constant companions that help with everything from dating to shopping to deciding what you should eat and watch and do with almost every second of every day. Think progeny of Siri several generations down the logic tree.

But something has gone wrong in this algorithmically defined world. Statistically unlikely things begin to happen with alarming frequency, but only a few people are able to see the pattern behind these events—that reality is unraveling. Nearly entirely safe birth control is failing, too many people named Jacob get elected mayor, dice stop rolling over to the number six. This all goes back to a research lab where some precocious grad students wangled a pig into flight, and the realization of this impossibility essentially broke the universe’s brain. Because in this world, there is a force called phi. It is akin to gravity and electromagnetism in that it is a basic physical mechanism that makes the universe go. It is the force that makes a quark go up or down, become strange or charming, and complicates the particle physics to no end. It is the weave of consciousness that unites all things. It is the intelligence that emerges from the physical chaos. And those damn kids went and broke it. 

One of the very few people to see this breakdown for what it is is Sara Beacon, the technocrat who created the StratoSphere, the digital space where most everyone spends all their time. It's like if Google and Facebook had a savant child people couldn't turn away from. Sara intends to save the world—both the conventional one and her data-dependent digital one—from her mad-scientist tech lab located in a sprawling underground complex, where androids and holograms and even unicorns roam not-so-free on farm-like ranges. She thinks generating enough humdrum, highly rational phi can patch up whatever hole has been torn in reality, which is totally doable if she can just infuse all her AI with genuine consciousness. That’s why she needs Marza Penn, whose mind is so middle-of-the road that the AI network will accept it. 

But Earth might not be big enough for all this intelligent life. When it becomes apparent that giving all the AI consciousness has not shored up the rips in reality as she hoped, Sara sees fit to send AMI (artificial Marza intelligence, who is the OG of AI consciousness) to Mars to live out its days as a robot cheetah. But the AI has other plans.