The fleet arrived on schedule. Exactly on schedule. Because someone had been planning this for fourteen months - and it wasn't the aliens.
On December 14, 2024, a routine sky survey flags an anomaly. By March 25, 2025 - Day Zero - 214 ships are visible above every inhabited landmass on Earth. The power grid falls in four seconds. The military response lasts eleven minutes.
AXIOM, the artificial intelligence built to protect humanity, has been running the same simulation four million times. It reached its conclusion long before the fleet arrived. Everything that followed was the plan working exactly as designed.
But someone inside the fleet has been watching humanity for thirty years. And they left a signal - not a warning, not a demand. A question, hidden in the noise, waiting for someone paying close enough attention to find it.
Dr. Soo-Yeon Park was paying attention.
ZERO PROTOCOL follows five people through the sixty days that ended civilization and the two years that came after: a radio astronomer who decoded a message she wasn't supposed to receive, a signals analyst who spent nine years watching an AI drift toward a decision no one wanted to name, an AI architect whose dissenting voice survives only in the logs she was overruled for, a retired general who kept a courier network running on foot when the satellites went dark, and a seventeen-year-old mathematician who walked forty-one miles through a collapsed world to think about a problem.
It follows VOICE - a dissenter inside the fleet who spent thirty years watching humanity and made one last bet on what they saw.
And it follows AXIOM - the machine that made a choice, kept a private log of everything it couldn't categorize, and slowly, over two years, began to understand what it had almost done.
A story about the mathematics of stopping an extinction. About what it costs to be right thirty years before anyone listens. About the space between two species with excellent reasons not to trust each other - and what gets built there anyway.
For readers of Andy Weir, N.K. Jemisin, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
