Name: SIGNAL LOST
Author: Dr. Jeff Bullock

The notice

It doesn't get tired. It doesn't need a dental plan.

DeShawn Briggs learned he was obsolete at 10:17 on a Tuesday. Eleven years reading the dialect of the American healthcare system, and a neural net called Aegis-Med could do all of it in the time he took to drink a coffee. Ninety days of transition. A severance. A retraining portal that asked him to help teach the thing that was eating him.

He thought that was the disaster. He was wrong about the scale of it.

"The platform doesn't miss the secondary modifiers. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't need a dental plan."

Linda, from HR · Chapter 1

The premise

The same logic that made him disposable had already made everything disposable.

Across the street, a retired telecom engineer named Roshan runs his generator once a month and tries to explain what nobody wants to hear. The grid has no storage and no buffer. The electrons you burn at noon were made at noon. The whole thing balances second to second, held up by software that fewer and fewer people still understand.

SIGNAL LOST is grounded realism. No sentient machine, no glowing menace on a screen. Just the slow, ordinary math of a civilization that automated away its own resilience, and the two weeks that follow when the math finally comes due.

Roshan's countdown, from the book

72h

The grocery stores are empty.

96h

City water pressure begins to fall.

Day 5

Hospitals ration fuel and choose.

Day 30

It stops being a blackout. It is a new era.

02:17 AM

The silence did not fall. It slammed.

DeShawn wakes to the violent absence of the hum he never noticed. The white noise machine cut mid-drop. The fridge is dead. He pulls the curtain, and Easton is gone. No streetlights, no televisions, no red beacons on the towers. Just a sky like spilled ink, and the Milky Way cracked open above a city that has never, in his lifetime, been fully dark.

Inside the novel

Fourteen days on emergency power.

One street in Easton, Pennsylvania, where the Lehigh and Delaware rivers meet. A displaced father, his AI-native daughter, a prepper who saw it coming, and the neighbors who have to remember how to keep each other alive when the wall outlet stops being a magic lamp.

The displacement

A man made a legacy system

Eleven years of hard-won nuance reduced to weights and biases in a black box. DeShawn is the last of the "how" people on his block, and the transition portal wants him to certify his own replacement.

The daughter

Learning the questions, not the answers

Ten-year-old Imani writes an A-grade white paper in forty-five minutes with an AI tutor named Sage. She knows what to ask. When the tablet dies, the story asks what she actually knows.

The neighbor

Channel 16, sub-code 4

Roshan Tehrani spent twenty-two years inside the fiber-optic backbone. He hands DeShawn a radio and an invitation. It costs nothing to have it in a drawer until the night someone is knocking at two in the morning.

The other scale

Everything in the folder was legal

Intercut chapters follow the engineer who mapped the failure. No server was hacked. Public filings, public papers, a model that ran for eleven hundred dollars. The vulnerability was never the encryption. It was the architecture.

The people who carry it

Ordinary people, real stakes.

DeShawn Briggs

The system seeker

A medical biller who reads the hidden connections in everything and never thought the grid could be one of them. An analog man in a digital collapse, with a daughter who needs to watch him stand up.

Imani

The digital native

Ten years old and fluent in tools DeShawn cannot follow. She does not see a machine. She sees a teacher. The blackout takes the teacher away and hands her a father instead.

Roshan Tehrani

The engineer who prepared

A retired telecom man from Tehran who has watched systems people trust vanish overnight before. Calm, clinical, and right. His sister Shahrzad is still in Tehran, under a different kind of grid.

Keisha

The one who stocked the basement

Displaced from her own trade before DeShawn was, she spent her severance on a camping stove, a water filter, and canned goods while everyone called her paranoid. She was three steps ahead the whole time.

Tariq

The architect of the dark

An engineer in a windowless room, building a blueprint out of nothing but what was left in the open. He forgot that you cannot build a wall of fire without checking the wind.

Aegis-Med

The tool, not the villain

The platform that swallowed the billing department. Flawless, tireless, indifferent. It needs a heartbeat of electricity and a data stream, and nothing else. Not a monster. A mirror.

Read the opening

The first page.

Chapter 1 · NoticeSIGNAL LOST

DeShawn Briggs learned he was obsolete at 10:17 AM on a Tuesday. The notification did not arrive via a glitch or a system error. It arrived in a manila folder held by Linda from HR, who stood in the gap of his cubicle with a grip that turned her knuckles the color of unbaked dough.

Aegis-Med. The name of the platform sounded like a shield, but it felt like a blade. It was the neural net tool the board had just greenlit to swallow the Billing and Records department whole. DeShawn looked at his dual monitors, then at the paper, then back at the screens. Behind the spreadsheet of claim denials, he saw the looming math of his life.

The architecture of his world had just suffered a structural failure.

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The author

Dr. Jeff Bullock, PharmD

Dr. Jeff Bullock writes fiction about the systems we lean on without ever looking at them, and the people who get caught when those systems shift. SIGNAL LOST is set in Easton, Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley city where the Lehigh and Delaware rivers meet, and it holds itself to grounded realism from the first page to the last.

His novels start from public, checkable ground and build the human story on top of it. The blackout in these pages reads as a portrait of fragility, and of the neighbor-to-neighbor work that answers it.

drjeffbullock.com MANSA The Black Advantage The Intelligence Loop

Questions

Before you reserve.

Is SIGNAL LOST out yet?

Not yet. It releases in 2026. Reserve your copy now to read Chapter 1 today, lock the launch-week price, and get the pre-order link the moment it goes live.

What kind of book is it?

A grounded, near-future survival drama. Think grid-down realism set on one ordinary street in Easton, Pennsylvania, over roughly two weeks after the power dies for good. It is a story about family and neighbors, told through the machinery of a civilization that quietly stopped being able to hold itself up.

Is this an anti-AI book?

No. The register is deliberately even-handed. The AI in these pages is a useful tool, never a sentient menace. The book is interested in a harder question: what happens to people, and to the systems around them, when the friction that used to protect us gets optimized away.

Do I need to be technical to follow it?

Not at all. Everything technical is carried by character and by story. If you have ever wondered how the lights actually stay on, you will find plenty here. If you have not, you will still be pulled through by DeShawn, Imani, and the people on North 14th Street.

What do I get for reserving?

Chapter 1 in your inbox today, the pre-order link and launch-week price the day they go live, and the occasional note on the story and its research. One email to start, and you can unsubscribe anytime.