Dead Signal

The signal is dead. The surveillance is alive.

A journalist dies under suspicious circumstances. She leaves behind an encrypted drive and a single name: Lattice.

The protagonist who dismantled an underground surveillance network in Silent Protocol expected to find another rogue operation — criminals operating in the shadows, breaking laws they hoped no one would notice. What they find instead is worse. Lattice isn't illegal. It's sanctioned, documented, and operating entirely in the open, built from corporate data brokers, government contracts, and the willing participation of billions of people who clicked "I Agree" without reading the fine print.

The dystopia didn't arrive by force. Everyone signed up for it voluntarily.

Dead Signal is a cyberpunk thriller about what happens when mass surveillance becomes infrastructure — when the system isn't broken, it's functioning exactly as designed, and the people who built it have the law, the contracts, and the quarterly earnings reports to prove it. When the line between security and oppression is drawn by an algorithm, and nobody can remember who gave it the pen.

What draws readers in:

• A dead journalist's final message — and the surveillance architecture she died trying to expose
• The voluntary dystopia — a system that doesn't need to break the law because the law was rewritten to accommodate it
• Morally ambiguous choices — when the system is legal, sanctioned, and popular, what does resistance even mean?
• The same first-person noir voice that made Silent Protocol a page-turner — gritty, cynical, and propulsive
• Corporate espionage meets government overreach — data brokers, intelligence agencies, and tech companies operating in plain sight
• A resolution that doesn't flinch — no clean endings, no easy answers

Perfect for fans of Daniel Suarez's near-future tech thrillers, William Gibson's noir-inflected cyberpunk, Cory Doctorow's surveillance fiction, and the paranoid aesthetics of Mr. Robot.

Dead Signal is Book 2 in the Silent Protocol series. It stands alone as a thriller, but readers of Silent Protocol will find familiar characters, deeper lore, and the full weight of what Book 1 set in motion.

A dead journalist. A legal surveillance machine. A choice with no right answer.