NORAD's Ghost

Shortlisted for this year's CYGNUS Science Fiction awards: "NORAD's Ghost".
Human life on earth is at the verge of extinction. Most of the world is a poisoned wasteland contaminated by Carbon-14 and plutonium. It’s a world of decaying Old World cities and the mass extinction of species.
Thundersky is different, not only is he inexplicably immune from the radiation and sicknesses that have plagued the earth for hundreds of years since the nuclear war of 2025, he’s also a genius and just 19 years old, he’s far from ordinary. But he has a secret that even he doesn’t know he has, a secret so important, if he were discovered by the Utopian authorities, he would be killed because of the threat he poses to Utopia itself. But there are those who are risking their lives protecting him. But why? And why are the Scholars trying to kill him? He is the “Genesis Child”.
Beyond the safe cities of the Utopian Empire, out in the irradiated wastelands of what was once North America is a world of decaying Old World cities and fractious human factions, from cannibalistic Ferals, who have reverted to savagery, to the Scavengers who pick among the ancient ruins of the old world for useful items and tech to barter with the Dusteaters, who are warlike and are at war with the despotic Utopian Empire, the most technologically advanced human society in history, and most powerful of the human enclaves, who have forged a new civilisation that is controlled by an autocracy of elite scientists and intelligentsia who live underground in Sub City, which sprawls beneath Silo City and Surfer Town, where the infertile topsiders live and work for their troglodyte masters in exchange for life-saving medicines.
When an ancient military system NORAD is activated, things in Utopia take a turn for the worse as nuclear obliteration threatens, when a primitive twenty-first century quantum computer, based under the flooded ruins of ancient New York invades Utopia’s AI systems and begins activating a hidden arsenal of nuclear weapons and a countdown begins. There’s no time to waste, someone has to go to the ruins of Manhattan to switch the ancient system off.
The sinister Zim Steven of the Silosian Security Services sees the perfect opportunity to send the Thundersky, who he has discovered is the “Genesis Child” out into the wilderness to disarm the ancient quantum system and abort the launch … and then he intends to murder him out in the wilderness, so nobody will ever know, but he hasn’t counted on two unstoppable powers, Utopia’s advanced AI Arti, and Thundersky’s biological mother, the infamous Virginia Dusty Queen Prophetess. The world is never going to be the same again…