Dead Signal: They Came For What We Felt

April 12, 2047. The telepathy grid that binds three hundred million minds across New Chicago dies in a shower of sparks - and Peter, a former relief-corps medic, has no idea he's just watched the world end.The collapse wasn't an accident. It was the first move in a conspiracy decades deep. Severed from the global network, nuclear reactors begin to fail one by one, the oceans rise to swallow whole continents, and the only intact civilization left on Earth glows on the African coast - a coalition of dome cities running on technology no human invented.Because the aliens who visited Earth left more than ruins. They left instructions: clean energy, self-healing climate, a path back from the brink. A gift to a drowning species.Peter and the people he meets along the way - Megan, who built the relay that could free the world; Wendy, whose mind becomes a weapon she never agreed to be; Blair, an android learning the most dangerous thing a machine can learn - will cross a flooded planet and reach all the way to Mars to understand what was really left behind.But the gift was never a gift. It was infrastructure. And what the aliens came to harvest was the one resource a saved world produces in abundance - the one thing they never imagined a species could learn to aim.They came for what we felt. We gave them more than they could hold.A story about power, scarcity, compassion, and what it costs to rebuild from the floor - Dead Signal asks whether the thing that makes us worth saving is also the thing that makes us prey.

Pages: 88, Paperback, Independently published