A Frictionless State

Truth is a contagion.

—Francis Herbert, A Frictionless State

In 2074, Ari Feld, a technician who trusts systems more than people, finds evidence suggesting that the pandemic may have been engineered. What begins as private suspicion widens into something far more dangerous—a struggle over truth, concealment, and control inside a governing order that preserves peace through constraint, interdependence, and managed truth.

As Ari follows the evidence, he is driven into contact with his estranged wife Sharon, whose scientific rigour may confirm what he fears; Alene, the investigator who begins to see both the pattern and the person inside it; and his foster mother Francis, who helped build the world now closing around him.

A Frictionless State is literary speculative fiction about political order, damaged intimacy, and what human beings become inside systems designed to eliminate friction at any cost.

A note on the writing
A Frictionless State was written by David Barach. He used AI and other reference tools while writing for analysis, iteration, and editing. Learn more

New chapters are published weekly.