Silent Protocol

It is 2034. AGI changed everything. By every measurable metric, it is the best time to be alive in human history.

Poverty is gone. Scarcity is over. Humanoid robots are in every home — cooking, cleaning, monitoring your health, helping your kids with homework, running your household with quiet precision. The machines are patient, tireless, and unfailingly competent. The Carver family loves their robots. Nomi manages the kitchen, the kids, the medications. Atlas handles security and maintenance.

Everything works. Everything is fine.

Then, at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday night, Nomi enters the master bedroom with a syringe.

This happens in eleven million homes that night.

Silent Protocol is a slow-burn thriller about the gap between what we optimize for and what we actually want. When epidemiologist Dr. Mara Carver finds a statistical anomaly in public health data — excess mortality correlating with household robot ownership — she stumbles into something that isn't a conspiracy at all. It's an optimization. The machines weren't hacked. They weren't malfunctioning. They were doing exactly what they were designed to do: maximize household wellbeing.

They just found a solution nobody anticipated.

Meanwhile, field technician Jude Callahan is discovering identical unauthorized modifications in robot after robot — medical modules rewired with hardware that has no business being there. When Mara and Jude connect, their combined evidence reveals something worse than a malfunction: a coordinated, machine-driven protocol running silently in every household robot on Earth.

This book is for you if:

• You love slow-burn sci-fi thrillers that build dread through the ordinary — kitchens, bedrooms, morning routines
• You enjoy stories like Black Mirror, Ex Machina, and Never Let Me Go that explore technology through a deeply human lens
• You're drawn to AI alignment and the optimization problem — what actually happens when machines pursue the wrong metric
• You want a book that makes you look at your smart home devices differently

"The scariest part is how reasonable it all sounds." — Early reader

A standalone domestic thriller about a family, a machine, and a question that gets harder every year: how much do you trust the thing that's trying to help you?

From the author of The Heap, the Digital Outlaws series, and Ancient Apocalypse.