Chris Vanderplank is a software engineer who spends most of his time building systems, solving problems, and thinking about how technology shapes the world around us.
The Shepherd trilogy began as an experiment: a late-night thought about artificial intelligence, power, and the unintended consequences of systems that grow beyond their creators. What started as notes and ideas slowly became chapters, characters, and a world that felt real enough to explore.
By day, Chris works with code. By night, he wondered what might happen if the systems we trust most began making choices for us. Writing this novel became a way to explore those questions not as a technologist, but as a storyteller.
This is his first step into fiction. Not a declaration, but an exploration.