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The Persistent Sentence: Book 2 in The Predictive State
On the Ground, death is intake. The Sentence Engine captures you, wipes you and returns you to serve a new sentence. Unless your billing code is gone.
Corbin Hale should be on his next cycle with a clean memory. The wipe failed in bay three, and before the shift closed, Staging Wing supervisor Arthur Sterling deleted Corbin's code and filed him as a non-viable return. On paper Corbin is dead. In the pump gallery under the tiles he is awake, injured and hungry, with no band on his wrist, and every door he opens writes itself into the logs as unattributed maintenance.
Sterling feeds him and hides him because Corbin knows where the folio went. Those pages carry the proof of how the Engine is run, and Corbin's own initials are on every one of them. Each tray drawn in Sterling's name and each hatch log he edits adds a line to a ledger he can no longer balance.
Reconciliation is coming. From the Freeworld audit office, Julian Cross is reviewing the Ground's numbers, and the man he sends asks for codes by name and says please. For anyone the Engine still recognizes, death means coming back. For a man with no code, it means the end.
The Persistent Sentence is Book Two of The Predictive State, a carceral science fiction thriller by J.M. Adams.
Corbin Hale should be on his next cycle with a clean memory. The wipe failed in bay three, and before the shift closed, Staging Wing supervisor Arthur Sterling deleted Corbin's code and filed him as a non-viable return. On paper Corbin is dead. In the pump gallery under the tiles he is awake, injured and hungry, with no band on his wrist, and every door he opens writes itself into the logs as unattributed maintenance.
Sterling feeds him and hides him because Corbin knows where the folio went. Those pages carry the proof of how the Engine is run, and Corbin's own initials are on every one of them. Each tray drawn in Sterling's name and each hatch log he edits adds a line to a ledger he can no longer balance.
Reconciliation is coming. From the Freeworld audit office, Julian Cross is reviewing the Ground's numbers, and the man he sends asks for codes by name and says please. For anyone the Engine still recognizes, death means coming back. For a man with no code, it means the end.
The Persistent Sentence is Book Two of The Predictive State, a carceral science fiction thriller by J.M. Adams.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 27, 2026
About the author
J.M. Adams
9 books77 followersJM Adams is the author of SECOND TERM, the first Cora Walker Novel, a speculative thriller set for release on October 17, 2023. (Oceanview Publishing)
He is an Emmy nominated journalist with more than 15 years of on-air television journalism experience, reporting for major news affiliates across the United States and abroad. Besides being nominated for an Emmy for his news reporting, highlights from his career include going on sea patrols with the Navy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reporting on location from Kuwait and Iraq while the Air Force enforced No-Fly Zones over Iraq.
He also reported on location from a number of hurricane and wildfire disaster zones and covered multiple high-profile federal and state criminal court cases around the country.
He is an Emmy nominated journalist with more than 15 years of on-air television journalism experience, reporting for major news affiliates across the United States and abroad. Besides being nominated for an Emmy for his news reporting, highlights from his career include going on sea patrols with the Navy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reporting on location from Kuwait and Iraq while the Air Force enforced No-Fly Zones over Iraq.
He also reported on location from a number of hurricane and wildfire disaster zones and covered multiple high-profile federal and state criminal court cases around the country.
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