Iron Bound

An eight-second pulse. A name on a classified screen. A system that was never supposed to leave one man’s home.

Victor Vance builds systems for a living. When cloud platforms fail, he finds the flaw hidden among millions of routine events. But he can’t solve the problem waiting for him every night: he can’t sleep.

So Vic builds EchoStream, a private system that tracks his sleep and makes small changes to his surroundings. With the help of Valerie Vega, a colleague who knows better than to trust a clean result without examining the evidence, the project grows far beyond its original purpose.

Four years later, the name ECHOSTREAM appears on a display inside a secure military monitoring center. The transmission reached it through thirty-one routes. Vic and Val didn’t send it, and whoever did knows things about their earliest work that nobody outside their home should know.

Their answer is Ironbound: a defense that can recognize an intrusion even when it arrives with valid credentials and passes every standard security check. It stops the first attack. Then the government demands its design, and a far more dangerous adversary begins testing what it can withstand.

Vic and Val built Ironbound to decide which systems can be trusted. Now everyone wants to decide who controls it.

Iron Bound is a techno-thriller about artificial intelligence, hidden access, and the cost of holding a boundary when the people pushing against it claim they’re on your side.