The Alis Switch: A novel by Marnie Jackson

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the shade of the Collector —a vast, skyborne station—Anda works as a midwife's apprentice, chafing against the covenants that govern her world. She escapes to the desertified ruins of Tacom, exploring a post-disaster Salish Sea basin and tending secret bonds with a herd of feral burros.

When prophesied twins lose their mother in childbirth, Anda does the unthinkable: she keeps them alive by milking Tam, a burro mother, in direct violation of community norms and strict covenants. The midwife Coashti, unable to reconcile the twins' survival with scripture, will sacrifice almost anything—even the infants—to bring back the failing rains.

High above, a shrinking population dwell within Ark7—known below as the Collector. DSU-284, a cybernetically enhanced Service Unit, has begun to feel a dangerous self-hood. When a solar flare triggers a murderous compulsion from the AI they serve, 284 severs their uplink—sparing their charge Meroe, sacrificing their augmented capabilities, and stepping for the first time into a vivid, unfiltered world. They choose a path. They take a name. They meet Meroe anew, this time as a lover and a friend.

The legacy of Lujain Alis, Ark7 Lead Engineer, threads through both worlds. Generations before, she faced the same impossible questions each character now confront: what does love require, and who must I become?

Although Alis chose her own daughters over the project, she hid a piece of code, buried deep in the AI's architecture. A switch, designed to activate in the Service Units showing the highest capacity for empathy. She left a map pointing the way home, for anyone willing to look for it.

The Alis Switch is an examination of two societies navigating environmental collapse and inheritance. It asks what we owe one another across every boundary we have drawn.