Dawn Of The Past

In the year 2188, nearly one hundred years after a nuclear signal malfunction triggered the end of civilization, humanity survives underground. Eight billion people are gone. What remains are small communities carved into mountains, living by salvaged knowledge, having forgotten almost everything their ancestors built.

Carlisle is a self-taught physicist living in Fort Mountain Rock, Dakota Mountains. For fifteen years he has powered his community with a plant he built from his great-great-grandfather's books — the inherited library of a nuclear physicist who thought knowledge was worth carrying when everything else was lost. Quietly, covertly, Carlisle has been building something else. A time machine he calls Dawn of the Past.

He needs to go back to November 2002. A signal malfunction at a military early warning facility triggered the cascade that ended the world. Nobody launched deliberately. A machine was wrong and other machines believed it. Eight billion people died because of a technical error that one person with the right access could have corrected.

Carlisle intends to be that person.

But the timeline is already unstable. A neighboring community of three hundred and twelve people has vanished without a trace. A virus from 1993 is spreading through his mountain. Strange objects from the early 2000s are appearing and disappearing in the corridors of Fort Mountain Rock. And a man Carlisle once met briefly at a saloon — a man who paid with old world coins and said things are going to change ten times in one conversation — looks exactly like the photograph of his great-great-grandfather.

Someone has already been traveling.

Dawn of the Past is a novel about what one person can accomplish with the right books and the willingness to work. About the cost of fixing something that should never have been broken. And about a letter sealed in November 2002 and held for one hundred and eighty-six years, waiting for a specific address that did not yet exist, to be delivered on a specific birthday to a man who would need to know that someone was counting on him before he was born.