Born Classified
Born Classified
Conspiracy thriller · Tim James
A near-future conspiracy thriller
A classified record sends special-operations veteran Abram Rhodes after a program that treats human lives as government property.
Manuscript complete
A near-future thriller. The manuscript is complete; publication details are still to come.
Exploratory cover study
About the book
In 2090, Abram Rhodes finds a classified record that should not exist.
A decorated special-operations veteran, Abram has spent his career serving the system. Then he discovers that embryos recorded as destroyed have instead been born, raised off the books, and treated as government property.
As he follows the evidence, the apparatus behind the program turns against him. Exposing it could cost him everything. Getting the children out means more than proving what happened to them.
Born Classified is a near-future conspiracy thriller about consent, identity, and the people hidden behind official designations.
Artwork & artifacts
Born Classified cover study
An exploratory cover study created for this reading room. Paperwork, redactions, and a fingerprint reflect the story’s questions about identity. Final cover art is still to come.
The Good Soldier
A short opening passage from Chapter One.
The drone found the boy at 02:17.
Abram Rhodes lay on his stomach in a dry irrigation trench south of the village when Matt Cole's voice came softly through his earpiece.
“Movement north side.”
Abram shifted his attention from the compound to the image projected along the lower edge of his right lens.
A pale figure moved across a black field beyond the north wall.
“I see it.”
He enlarged the drone feed with his thumb against the control pad beside his rifle grip.
The aircraft held nearly two hundred feet above the village. At that height, its electric rotors disappeared beneath the night wind and the distant hum of generators. The thermal view flattened the landscape into shades of gray: mud-brick houses, low walls, strips of open ground, the narrow road running east to west through the settlement.
Notes behind the book
The question behind the story
Can a government own a life because paperwork declared that life unwanted? The story examines consent, ownership, identity, and personhood through the people caught inside that question.
A future close to home
The novel is set in 2090. Abram is based in the Fort Bragg and Fayetteville region of North Carolina, grounding the speculative story in familiar places.