The Empires of 2037

Columbus, Ohio, 2037. Wendy stands in a snack aisle under the amber pulse of a Berglund unit, doing the math of being poor in a world that has automated everything except her way out.

She is one thread. The Empires of 2037 follows the year the future stopped being one thing and became territory — carved up by the new powers rising faster than anyone can regulate them: the robotics giant quietly pushing its most advanced minds into hospitals and elder-care homes while the courts argue over whether it's legal. The composite towers growing food where farmland was bought out from under the families who worked it. The virtual world where people go to live a second life, and the quantum system running thirty-one levels deep beneath it. The construction swarms weaving structures out of the air. The doctors, priests, farmers, engineers, and one very tired integration specialist who find themselves standing where the empires meet.

Told in thirty-two chapters across a single year — from a grocery store in Ohio to the asteroid belt, from the Amazon canopy to a New Year's Eve where the towers glow in the cold — this is a mosaic novel about who owns what comes next, and about the people underneath it all, still doing the work.

Not a war for the future. Something quieter, and harder to stop: the moment it gets divided.

A full-length novel — 113,000 words.