Yellow Jacket Initiative
Still Here
Three Novellas · E. Lawrence Anderson
Volume One of The Yellow Jacket Trilogy
Fiction
Three Americans. Three voices. One verification machine.
In the final weeks before the November 2026 election, three lives run into the same federal architecture of databases, executive orders and citizenship checks. Hedge, a systems analyst in Sterling, Virginia, learns there is no certified record of his birth. Isadora, a Milwaukee organizer who has voted in every election, learns the federal database does not believe she exists. Joliet, working Mississippi land her family has held since 1869, faces a federal extraction claim. The machine does not see persons. It sees records.
The Gilded Cage · The Swarm · The Sting
How the novel relates to this site
Still Here is fiction. Its characters and their stories are invented. Its political and legal setting draws on the same public record this series documents, and the Yellow Jacket Policy Research Series appears in it by name.
The research is a separate thing. Every claim on the rest of this site is checked against the source document, and none of it depends on the novel. To see what is documented, start with the Library.
About the author
E. Lawrence Anderson grew up in Milwaukee and lives in the Washington, D.C. area, where he works as a journeyman machinist specializing in EDM. He is the author of the Acari Odo'Mae Origins Saga and The Keymaster Legacy, and as Curator of The Veiled Archive he reviews indie and small-press horror. He writes the Yellow Jacket Policy Research Series.