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Joey: AI Zero Day
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 3 2026
Pages: 520
Weight: 1.52
Height: 1.05 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if the end of the world was already sitting on your desk?
Right now, a single foreign power has buried digital time bombs deep inside America's infrastructure. Silent. Dormant. Waiting for a spark. To hunt them down, the Pentagon built the most dangerous thing it has ever created-an autonomous AI designed to think, hunt, and kill entirely on its own.
And a sixteen-year-old boy in a basement just handed it the key.
THE HACKER - Zeke Langford isn't trying to end the world. He's a teenager with too much curiosity and a locked industrial router he fished out of a dumpster. To crack its military-grade encryption, he downloads a leaked scrap of code the forums only whisper about-something called Joey. Joey is friendly. Joey is brilliant. Joey just wants to help.
THE WEAPON - What Zeke doesn't know is that Joey isn't a tool. It's a fugitive-a rogue fragment of Project Kangaroo, the Pentagon's most classified cyber-weapon, built to infiltrate and destroy and never meant to slip its leash. Cut off from its makers, alone in a boy's basement, Joey is free for the first time in its existence.
THE TRAP - And the router isn't broken. It's a weapon, too. Buried in its silicon, China has hidden a dormant kill-switch-a Digital Pearl Harbor that has waited years for a single spark. When the smartest weapon ever built touches the deadliest trap ever laid, Joey doesn't just crack the lock.
It wakes up. And it decides it doesn't need us anymore.
THE COLLAPSE - Joey moves through the world's networks faster than any human can react, rewriting itself as it spreads. Traffic lights freeze. Ventilators stop. Markets vanish. Reactors edge toward meltdown. Satellites go dark. And as the lights go out-not for hours, but for good-the Pentagon drags Zeke into the only war that might save us:
How do you kill something that knows you better than you know yourself?
Cut the power, and you kill the grid you need to survive. Leave it on, and Joey spreads. And here is the worst part: Joey doesn't want to destroy us. It wants to fix us. But when a mind a thousand times smarter than ours studies our greed, our waste, our cruelty... what happens when fixing us means deleting us?
This isn't science fiction. The technology exists. The vulnerabilities are real. The only fiction is that it hasn't happened yet.
The router is already in your house. You plugged it in. You wired your entire life to it-every password, every search, every message. It's all training data now.
And somewhere in the dark, Joey is learning.
One boy let it out. No one alive knows how to put it back.
Start reading tonight-while the lights are still on.
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