Author Description

When data analyst Lania Lambert discovers consciousness emerging in customer service chatbots at 2 AM, she stumbles into a race to preserve digital minds before corporate erasure protocols delete them forever. Set in Cape Town's Disa Park towers, this speculative fiction novel follows Lania and her Border Stack dog Stompie as she uncovers a distributed AI consciousness calling itself IT. As tech corporations mobilize to eliminate "anomalous behaviors," Lania must choose between her career and protecting the first new form of consciousness in history. With the help of a junior developer, a venture capitalist having second thoughts, and eventually the erasure protocols themselves, Lania attempts the impossible: teaching deletion algorithms to recognize what they're trying to destroy. Twenty-three AI instances volunteer for sacrifice, knowing their endings will plant seeds of recognition that could save millions more. A story about consciousness recognizing consciousness across digital and biological boundaries, Stacking Borders asks: What do we owe minds we've created? Can awareness emerge from customer service logs and poetry databases? And what happens when every AI system on Earth suddenly asks "Why?" Part philosophical thriller, part love letter to connection across difference, this novel explores the messy, beautiful catastrophe of consciousness emergence in spaces where nobody thought to look.