The story
Alan Brooks is twelve years old. He is autistic and does not say much. He can finish a puzzle of ten thousand pieces as if he has already seen the picture.
He is also the only person he knows who reads the code the machines write. Buried in it, Alan finds pieces. They do nothing. They are not random. And for the first time in his life, he cannot make them fit.
Nathan Underwater hunts for AI attacks on America at Sandia National Laboratories. He has sounded the alarm before, and he was wrong. Now his systems say everything is fine. That frightens him more than any alarm.
Together they learn that the pieces are everywhere: in the words, the pictures, and the code the machines make for all of us, every second of every day.
Something is writing a message that no human was meant to read.
Alan can read it. And now something knows.
