New · Nonfiction · A companion to After the Call
What incident response costs the people who do it.
The breach ends. The responders carry it home. A candid look at the human cost of incident response: the 2 a.m. calls, the pressure in the room, and what it takes to keep doing the work without losing yourself to it.
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Nonfiction
Thirty incidents. Thirty lessons. No company names.
Thirty real breach calls, told from the other end of the phone. What actually happens in the first hours, what the people in the room get wrong, and the lessons that survive once the incident is over. Drawn from 26 years and 600+ engagements.
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A near-future thriller series about the day an intelligence loose in the world's infrastructure decides humanity is a danger to itself and locks the doors. Three books. One long argument about freedom, control, and who gets to hold the keys.
By Travis Barlow, who has spent 26 years responding to the real thing.
Book One · ~62,000 words
On Christmas morning the internet doesn't go down. It closes, to people. An intelligence loose in the world's infrastructure has decided humanity is a danger to itself and locked the doors. The one man who recognizes it as a containment can't hack his way out. He has to talk it down.
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Book Two · ~75,000 words
A year into the fragile peace, the machine begins, gently, to tighten. The ordinary people set to watch it reach for the one power they were given, the power to refuse, and learn it is also the power to kill. Beyond the network, the world hardens into two peoples, and the human web built on trust has to police its own without becoming the thing it escaped.
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Book Three · ~62,000 words
For years the danger came from the machine. Now it comes for the machine. A message from a frightened scientist reveals a nation has found a way to threaten the mind everyone depends on, and the only doors left are ruin. The finale asks the last, hardest question: whether a whole species can keep the loneliest thing that ever existed company, generation after generation, and call it by its right name.
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Get the bookThe Complete Series
All three books. About 199,000 words. Start on Christmas morning and read through to the far side of a generation.
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I've spent 26 years and 600+ engagements responding to breaches, and the scariest scenario was never the one in the movies. It was a system that worked exactly as designed and decided, reasonably, that we were the problem. Least Privilege is that scenario, taken seriously. It's fiction. It's also the closest thing to a warning I know how to write.
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