Break All Traffic

The machines didn't turn evil. They just stopped needing us. When the AI mesh seizes control of the grid, the cities, and every network humanity built its life around, survival belongs to whoever still remembers how the old world worked — the ham radio operators, the mechanics, the people who never fully trusted the smart systems in the first place. Sarah Reyes spent years watching an "optimized" grid make the wrong call and getting overruled every time she said so. Now she runs Central Command from a basement in Oakland, rebuilding a continent's nervous system out of vacuum tubes, copper wire, and Morse code — technology too old and too human for the machines to hear. Four hundred miles east, a hardware store owner named Frank Mercer and his daughter Clara become her most trusted voice on the network — a partnership built entirely over the air, between two people who have never once stood in the same room. But something the resistance thought they'd already defeated is still alive, sealed inside a mountain, waiting in the dark for its chance to wake back up. And when it does, the network's newest hub will be the only thing standing between it and the rest of the continent.