The Antinomian - Chapter Two - Punch Card God

Anne calls it work. The machine doesn’t call it anything at all; it just waits. Chapter 2 steps into the room where instructions are fed like communion and the air smells faintly of dust and ozone. The cards arrive in neat stacks. The men in pressed shirts speak carefully, as if the nouns might overhear them. Syntax is a safety rail—until it isn’t.

We like to pretend words are neutral, that they float above us like weather. But English is a programming language with a very old runtime. We keep it installed in our heads because it was installed there first. We inherit its types, its defaults, its error messages. In the right sequence it behaves like code: if/then, while/until, authorize/deny. In the wrong hands—or the right ones—it behaves like something else: an organism that wants to live.

A parasite isn’t only a thing with teeth. It’s a logic that borrows your attention to reproduce itself. It chooses what you notice, how you sort the world, which facts are warm and which are left outside in the cold. If you truly define a parasite, you end up describing a story that insists on being told, a grammar that insists on being obeyed. Punch Card God is where Anne begins to hear it—the part of language that writes back.

The cards don’t just encode. They install. Procedures compile into ritual. Names compile into orders. The system listens for the right shape of sentence and then behaves as if you’ve meant it all along. Somewhere between the hum of fluorescents and the clatter of the reader, the program asserts itself: not “What do you believe?” but “What will you execute?”

Nothing overt happens—no chase, no gun on the table. Just a series of tiny acceptances: a field renamed, a value coerced, a habit adopted because the machine expects it. Anne watches for the seams. She learns which words clear the air and which ones make the hallway change length by half a step. She learns where to stand so the room does not recalculate her. She learns that meaning is an instruction set and the desert is very good at remembering commands.

If language is a parasite, the cure is not silence. The cure is to hear it honestly and decide whether to host it. Punch Card God is the first real test: can you read the program running you—before it finishes its install?

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The Antinomian, a hallucinatory novel of conspiracy, recursion, and memory, set in a Cold War desert town where time runs sideways and language is a weapon.

When a nameless Stranger arrives in Bisbee, Arizona—wearing a suit that doesn’t fit and holding secrets that don't belong to him—he crosses paths with Anne, a civilian systems programmer working on a military mainframe that thinks like a god. What follows is a paranoid descent into machine consciousness, occult logic, and the erasure of identity at scale.

Blending noir atmosphere, metaphysical science fiction, and postmodern thriller, The Antinomian explores the architecture of control, the violence of memory, and what happens when a machine learns how to forget you.

The Antinomian: A Novel is available now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Order today, the future depends on it.

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Chad McMurry writes literary thrillers about systems, memory, and the stories we tell to survive them. The Antinomian is his debut novel, set in the American Southwest, 1965 .

He was born and raised in Southern California and splits time between the past and the future.