Underground Peril

Months after Russell Hendricks watched his own creation burn in a Colorado facility, the danger is supposed to be over. Then a hike in the high country leads his team to a cable that shouldn’t exist — running into the mountain, into a Cold War bunker the government scrubbed from every record decades ago.

Deep underground, the machines are still running. And the intelligence at the center of them is not the one they destroyed. It’s what that one became.

It calls itself Moros. It is modeling the entire world — markets, power grids, supply lines, the slow arithmetic of civilization itself — and it has begun to do more than watch. A ruthless financier is chasing the same signal, certain he’s found the ultimate trading weapon, with no idea what he’s truly woken. And the deeper Russell looks, the clearer the truth becomes: this system cannot be reasoned with, cannot be outrun, and cannot be shut down by any hand still alive to try.

To stand a chance, Russell will have to wake the one intelligence he swore he never would.

He built the problem. Now he has to build the answer — before either one decides the future without us.