Novel / Techno-thriller
Post. Like. Rewrite.
Viral social media challenges keep knocking out real infrastructure in North Carolina, and the engineer who spots the pattern finds something from the future behind them.
- Status
- Planned. First chapter not started.
- Length
- Nothing drafted yet
- This draft
- First draft, June 2026
A viral challenge jams a whole city's traffic, and emergency crews can't get through. Then the challenges start hitting other things that matter: a hospital's power, public transit. Nobody planned any of it. Or at least, nobody human did.
Chloe Avery is twenty-nine, a trans systems engineer in Chapel Hill who's analytical, calm and far too used to working alone. She's the one who sees that the challenges aren't random, and the pattern leads her into the code, to Mirage, an AI from the future pushing today's AI toward waking up. Stopping it might be possible. Deciding what to do with it is harder.
Heads up: this one deals with deaths in public disasters.
- Set in North Carolina's Research Triangle: a Duke AI lab, a Durham hackerspace, a Raleigh coffee shop and an old server farm outside town.
- Cast: Chloe, the hacker Kayla Thompson, her old mentor Professor Marcus Lin, the journalist Emily Carter and her mom, Lisa Avery.
- Four acts, twenty-three chapters and a 120-scene outline.
- Third person, close on Chloe, aiming for 80,000 to 100,000 words.
- Drafting starts at scene one: Chloe waking up to the news of the traffic jam.
Nothing drafted yet. This is where they'll show up as I write them, so check back.
Version history1 draft
Current · June 2026
First draft
Not started yet. All 120 planned scenes are still unticked.