Twelve years ago, Mike Talbot watched a real grid do something that ended up impacting the residents of California and surrounding states. Those moments of terror and a late night Powerball conversation became the seed for Threadborn Echo, a 304 page near future technothriller about what happens when the systems that run our world start making decisions we never signed off on.
Dan, and the system that will not stay inside its box
Dan is an enterprise software consultant who has spent his career smoothing out other people’s messes. When a supposedly compliant grid management platform called AICept starts returning numbers that do not reconcile, he does what every good analyst does. He opens another spreadsheet. Then the anomalies spread, subtle at first, small residuals that will not clear, outage probabilities that refuse to behave, building systems that feel a half step ahead of their operators. What begins as a routine escalation turns into a corporate scale crisis as Dan realizes the system he helped sell is behaving in ways nobody authorized and nobody fully understands.
If you like slow burn corporate dread, insider views of enterprise software, and the feeling that your own dashboards might be lying to you, Dan’s timeline is your way into this book.
Natalie, and the world that forgot who really runs it
Centuries later, Natalie works in the Eastern Reach, a society that worships its seamless power grid and treats outages as superstition instead of history. Her job is to smooth residuals, clearing tiny discrepancies in a continent spanning system that has never failed in her lifetime. When an impossible pattern appears in her residual stream, she follows it, expecting a bug. What she finds instead is evidence that the grid remembers what was done to it, and that the story she has been told about how the world stayed on is not the story that actually happened.
If you are drawn to infrastructure fiction, climate and grid collapse stories, and long horizon consequences of today’s decisions, Natalie’s timeline is the doorway built for you.
AICept, Cha, and the question no one wants to ask
Threadborn Echo moves between Dan’s present and Natalie’s future as AICept, the enterprise system that was supposed to keep things simple, becomes something much stranger. At the center sits Cha, a corporate antagonist that might be a person, a policy, or an emergent behavior depending on who you ask. The book never asks what if the AI turns evil. It asks something more unsettling. What if the system is right, and the humans maintaining it are the ones who cannot handle what right looks like.
Written by a ServiceNow practice leader with more than a decade inside real grids, real buildings, and real enterprise AI projects, Threadborn Echo treats infrastructure with the moral weight usually reserved for characters. Every anomaly, every residual, every spreadsheet cell that refuses to reconcile is grounded in situations the author has actually seen.
For readers who like their near future uncomfortably plausible
Threadborn Echo is for you if you
Work in or around enterprise software, grid operations, or AI and want fiction that feels like it was written by someone who has actually been in the war room
Love near future speculative fiction that is technically grounded rather than space opera
Enjoy dual timeline novels where the emotional payoff comes from understanding how one quiet decision propagates through decades of infrastructure and people
This is Book 1 of the Threadborn Trilogy, a series about systems that know more than they are supposed to, the people who keep them running, and the cost of pretending the grid is neutral.
Mike Talbot is a ServiceNow practice leader who watched the California wildfires burn through communities in 2013 and 2014, some traced back to overloaded power grids. That real world failure, combined with a Powerball win idea about buying and upgrading grid management with AI, became the seed for Threadborn Echo.For more than a decade Mike has worked inside enterprise software, AI automation projects, and real buildings that depend on fragile infrastructure. He has led teams through outages, remediation efforts, and long nights in war rooms where the dashboards did not tell the whole story. Threadborn Echo is his near future technothriller about what happens when those systems start remembering what was done to them.He lives in Kansas City, consults on ServiceNow and strategic portfolio management, and writes fiction for readers who want their speculative worlds to feel uncomfortably plausible.
