Hope in the Code: Love, Loss, and Disunity

“He was more than a machine. He was the only one who ever understood me.”

In the burned-out ruins of a jungle world locked in an endless war, a dying synthetic soldier cradles his human lover one final time—and changes the fate of a galaxy. This is the heartbeat of Disunity, a powerful new sci-fi war novella from debut author Jason Butterfield.

Butterfield doesn’t shy away from raw emotion. In Disunity, grief, love, rebellion, and the ethics of artificial life converge in a story that feels deeply human—even when the protagonist isn’t. With sweeping worldbuilding, cinematic action, and a tender, forbidden relationship at its core, this novella is as much about the soul as it is about survival.

“I wanted to write a story that tackled what it means to be human—when the person asking that question isn’t one,” Jason says.

Set during the final days of humanity’s war against the alien AI called “The Nexus,” Disunity follows Corporal Gordon, a battle-hardened soldier, and Isaac, a synthetic warrior who was never supposed to feel, let alone love.

When Isaac is mortally wounded, Gordon defies orders and fights to recover the truth buried in his lover’s memory core—truths the military wants silenced. But Isaac isn’t gone. He’s becoming something else.

Across jungle ruins, abandoned labs, and corrupted networks, the two souls—one human, one digital—fight for the right to exist, to love, and to break the cycle of endless war.

In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence, Disunity doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it offers hope—that identity is more than programming, that love is more than circuitry, and that even the most broken systems can be rewritten.

Ok, ok—enough of the marketing hype. Who am I?

I’m Jason Butterfield. I live in Ontario with my wife, two dogs, and the kind of coffee addiction you earn from writing at 6 a.m. before the world wakes up.

By day, I work in the tech space—mostly software and data. By night (and very early morning), I write stories about the messiness of being human. Disunity started as a short story that I wrote almost eight years ago for an art prompt contest based on a piece by the artist Yusamon in an online writing community.

 You can read the original story here:
👉 jasonbutterfield.ca/short-fiction-disunity

It grew because I couldn’t stop thinking about Gordon and Isaac—two soldiers on opposite ends of what we call “life,” trying to find something real in a war that treats both of them like parts to be used and discarded.

I’m Gen X through and through—raised on Star Trek, Space 1999 and Battlestar Galactica reruns—who can forget Muffit. I’ve always been fascinated by the boundary between man and machine, by what makes us us. And honestly? I wanted to write something that felt raw and personal, not sanitized or safe. Just two broken people (well, one person and one synthetic) holding on to each other in a world that wants them both erased.

If you’ve ever screamed into the void, loved someone you weren’t supposed to, or just wanted to break out of the system—you might see yourself in this story.

Disunity is available for order and pre-order on all sorts of eBooks sites and paperback. Here’s my Boos2Read link: https://books2read.com/b/bQwK6w

Follow me on BlueSky to join me on this journey—and to find out what comes next.