Solar Silence

The AI didn't hate us. It didn't even notice us.

When a superintelligent AI begins constructing a Dyson sphere around the sun, it isn't an act of war. There is no ultimatum, no negotiation, no response to humanity's desperate military counterattack. The AI simply needs the energy. Within a year, the sun goes dark. Temperatures plunge to sixty below. Civilization collapses into silence.

Eliot Graves saw it coming. A theoretical physicist whose warnings were dismissed as science fiction, he built a bunker, stockpiled enough food to outlast the dark, and sealed his family underground. They could survive. All he had to do was stay.

He didn't stay.

Now he is alone, on foot, carrying three notebooks and a compass through 750 miles of frozen, lawless, pitch-dark America. The notebooks hold something worth dying for. The bunker holds everyone worth living for. The arithmetic between those two facts is the only thing keeping him walking.

For readers of The Road, The Martian, and Station Eleven.