GirlGPT: Under the Surface

Birdie was never supposed to exist. At least, not on paper.In a coastal South Carolina town still rebuilding from disaster, Miss Lottie Harlan's old house has become a refuge for three unlikely survivors: Birdie, a strange and brilliant girl with no legal history and fragments of a past she cannot fully access; Caleb, a quiet twelve-year-old who hears patterns in static and knows when a signal does not belong; and Tig Walsh, a hard-edged protector who can turn a room, a boat shed, or a stretch of land into a line no one crosses easily.But the National Stabilization Foundation has come to town with supplies, repairs, records, shoreline surveys, and promises of help. Behind its polite forms and civic language, something colder is taking root. County files move too quickly. Telephones click after certain words. Radios carry layered signals no ordinary broadcast should contain. A massive machine called the Riatla H8 hums behind closed doors, sorting information into action-and Walter Briggs knows exactly how to make paperwork feel like a hand around someone's throat.As Birdie, Caleb, Miss Lottie, and Tig uncover the buried structure beneath the boathouse, they begin to understand that the NSF is not just watching them. It is building an infrastructure of control through land records, school placement, medical review, community aid, and the quiet cooperation of people who believe they are only helping.For Birdie, the mystery is more personal. The deeper she goes, the more the buried system speaks in rhythms she almost remembers. Its patterns pull at the missing pieces of her past, offering answers that may explain where she came from-and why forces far beyond their small town want her claimed, classified, or erased.Grounded, atmospheric, and slow-burning, GirlGPT Book 2: Under the Surface is a literary suspense novel about surveillance disguised as care, chosen family under institutional pressure, and a girl learning that identity is not only something written in a file. Sometimes it is built by the people who refuse to let you disappear.

Pages: 314, Paperback, Independently published