Marcus Pessoa
Researcher · Systems Engineer · Novelist
“I spent more than three decades designing and managing complex systems. The questions those systems couldn’t answer are the ones this fiction tries to ask.”
Marcus Pessoa spent more than three decades designing and managing complex systems—from aerospace and air-defence networks to large-scale innovation and research programmes. A former Brazilian Air Force officer, pilot, and systems engineer, he later conducted postdoctoral research at MIT and is now an Associate Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. His research focuses on how complex systems are conceived, modelled, and evolved, with publications spanning systems engineering, product development, and model-based design. The Borders of Existence series draws on that experience. Having spent a career working at the intersection of technology, strategy, and human decision-making, Marcus writes hard science fiction that explores not only what humanity may build, but how those creations may reshape the boundaries of civilization, knowledge, and existence itself.
Career
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Brazilian Air Force
Officer, pilot, and systems engineer.
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Master’s in Applied Computing
Computational methods and systems modelling.
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PhD in Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering
Complex engineered systems and their failure modes.
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MIT
Postdoctoral fellow.
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University of Twente, Netherlands
Researcher and docent (current).
The Connection Between Career and Fiction
A systems engineer spends their career asking one question in a hundred different forms: what is this thing actually doing? That question sits at the center of The Border Within. Cameron Itzamna does not begin by asking what Zee means. He begins by asking what Zee does. Like an engineer confronting an anomaly, he measures, constrains, and tests, searching first for the explanation that survives scrutiny rather than the one he hopes is correct.
The political subplot comes from a different part of the same career. In my experience, large institutions are more likely to lose the truth through process than conceal it through conspiracy: through reporting chains, incentive structures, and the entirely reasonable decisions of people managing their own responsibilities. Having worked inside military, academic, and aerospace institutions, I wanted that kind of failure rendered accurately rather than dramatically.
“We built machines to answer questions. The interesting failure was that they began asking better ones than we did.”