A third state

I am not announcing a book so much as admitting an obsession that has stopped being private. For weeks now my notebooks have filled with balanced ternary: a logic that does not settle for yes and no, but holds a third state in the middle, something like true, false, and the unsettled ground between them. It arrived as a technical curiosity and stayed as a shape that felt familiar in the bones.

The research is early, which means I am still in the phase of reading until my eyes ache and misunderstanding things on purpose so they will explain themselves again. Soviet computing history has a particular texture. Grand claims beside quiet rooms. Machines that existed, briefly and stubbornly, outside the binary consensus most of the world adopted. I keep circling the idea of a third state because so many of the lives I write about occupied exactly that position: not officially present, not entirely erased, held in a suspension the paperwork could not name.

I do not yet know the full architecture of the novel. I know it will have a Kyiv frame, and I know it will take the machinery seriously without turning into a manual. What draws me is less the hardware than the permission the logic seems to grant. A story about hidden lives needs more than on and off. It needs the voltage of the in-between, the place where a person continues even when the record has already decided they do not.

For now I am living with the idea the way you live with a new coat in cold weather: wearing it around the flat, testing the pockets, seeing whether it keeps the wind out. If it holds, there will be more to say. If it does not, the notebooks will still have been good company.