A 1990s sci-fi mystery thriller trilogy following Sam Hadley, a 21-year-old satellite monitoring tech who hears a memory of her own face on a Cold War satellite that has been silent for five years.
Cold War satellites still in orbit, mostly forgotten.
Dial-up bulletin boards. Phone-line latency. Dead drops.
December 31. Three stories beneath the National Mall.
Grounded fiction. Before always-on internet. Before the phones knew where you were.
Read in order. Each book is the next year and the next escalation.
The signal came back. So did she.
The dead are still listening.
At midnight, ninety-three voices wake.
Three novels. The 1990s. The signals that came back. Dead Signal is a sci-fi mystery thriller trilogy following Sam Hadley, a 21-year-old satellite monitoring tech who hears a memory of her own face on a Cold War satellite that has been silent for five years. By the time she traces the signal to its source, she is the only one who can stop it from broadcasting at midnight on December 31, 1999.
In the autumn of 1996, Sam Hadley monitors satellites for a paycheck. Twenty-one years old, electrician's kid, Haddon Heights, New Jersey. She built ham radios in her bedroom and answered an ad in the back of Popular Science. The job is dull. The pay is fine. The signal she catches at 3:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in October is not.
It is her own voice. Coming back from a satellite that should not be talking.
What Sam takes for a glitch is a doorway, and the doorway opens onto a Cold War program that has been running since the year she was born. A satellite that has been listening too long. Ninety-three voices stored where no voice should live. And underneath all of it, a question Sam cannot stop hearing: who put her in front of this console, and why does the signal know her name.
Dead Signal is a trilogy in three frequencies. Static (1996, science conspiracy). Resonance (1997, noir detective). Silence (1999, countdown to Y2K midnight). Three books. One woman. A signal she was born to receive, broadcasting from a satellite she was built to hear.
By midnight on December 31, 1999, Sam will know what she is. And she will have to decide what to do about it.
Each book moves north, then south. Each escalates the signal.
I spent twenty-six years inside federal communications systems. You learn what they sound like when they work. You also learn what they sound like when they go quiet, and what it might mean if one of them came back.
The late 1990s were the last window you could sit inside that quiet. CRT screens, dial-up bulletin boards, dead-drop hand-offs, satellites the Cold War left running. By 2000 the analog world was gone. In 1996 it was still listening.
Sam Hadley is twenty-one and works the graveyard shift at a monitoring station east of Albuquerque. She is not a veteran or a spy. She is the one who hears something the system was never supposed to broadcast, on a satellite no one has thought about since the wall came down.
The trilogy starts there.
By day, federal capture strategy from inside the work. By night, the 1990s, satellites that should be silent, and the twenty-one-year-old technician who hears something the system was never built to broadcast.
Pre-order notice, early-reader copies, occasional dispatch from inside the trilogy. No marketing theater.
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