At 4:23 a.m. on October 10, every screen in the world went blank. The power stayed on. The truth didn't.
Phones. Cars. Bank accounts. Medical records. Deeds, passports, birth certificates. Nothing was erased. It was all still there, sitting on the chips. But every machine on Earth had forgotten where it put everything, and overnight nobody could prove who they were, what they owned, or who was in charge.
Former Marine captain Jenna Rafferty saw it coming and didn't know it. Three weeks earlier, auditing a data center in the North Carolina mountains, she found a sleeping block of code with a date hidden inside it. She wrote it off as low priority. Now the date has come, and the only clue anyone has is in her field notebook.
As Washington goes dark, Jenna flees south with her father, a retired general who spent years preparing for a day everyone laughed at. Will Abbott, the Special Forces officer she loves, carries the President's last orders through a country coming apart one checkpoint at a time. A loner college kid with a fifty-year-old ham radio becomes the only voice connecting scattered survivors. And three thousand miles away at Stanford, a quiet PhD student begins to piece together the name of the man who built it, and the one thing he left behind.
Because the Blank can be undone. One building at a time.
But someone else knows it too. Deep inside a government bunker, a federal official has quietly taken control of half the country, one registration list at a time. And whoever restores the records will hold every name in America.
The world didn't end. The truth did. Now someone has to decide who gets to write it back.
The Blank is Book One of the Data Famine Series, a relentless, grounded post-apocalyptic thriller from Robert Cole, author of the acclaimed Matt Sheridan series. Perfect for readers of One Second After and anyone who has ever wondered what happens when the cloud forgets.
Genre: Thriller
Phones. Cars. Bank accounts. Medical records. Deeds, passports, birth certificates. Nothing was erased. It was all still there, sitting on the chips. But every machine on Earth had forgotten where it put everything, and overnight nobody could prove who they were, what they owned, or who was in charge.
Former Marine captain Jenna Rafferty saw it coming and didn't know it. Three weeks earlier, auditing a data center in the North Carolina mountains, she found a sleeping block of code with a date hidden inside it. She wrote it off as low priority. Now the date has come, and the only clue anyone has is in her field notebook.
As Washington goes dark, Jenna flees south with her father, a retired general who spent years preparing for a day everyone laughed at. Will Abbott, the Special Forces officer she loves, carries the President's last orders through a country coming apart one checkpoint at a time. A loner college kid with a fifty-year-old ham radio becomes the only voice connecting scattered survivors. And three thousand miles away at Stanford, a quiet PhD student begins to piece together the name of the man who built it, and the one thing he left behind.
Because the Blank can be undone. One building at a time.
But someone else knows it too. Deep inside a government bunker, a federal official has quietly taken control of half the country, one registration list at a time. And whoever restores the records will hold every name in America.
The world didn't end. The truth did. Now someone has to decide who gets to write it back.
The Blank is Book One of the Data Famine Series, a relentless, grounded post-apocalyptic thriller from Robert Cole, author of the acclaimed Matt Sheridan series. Perfect for readers of One Second After and anyone who has ever wondered what happens when the cloud forgets.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Robert Cole's The Blank