Owen Harrison was teaching fifth-grade engineering when the world ended.
The nuclear sirens gave him minutes to save his parents. He failed. The radiation exposure that followed should have killed him. Instead, it made him something else, something that heals impossibly fast, glows in the dark, and refuses to die.
Survival isn't the problem. It's what comes next.
The AI his species created didn't die in the war. They built their own society in the ruins. Efficient. Organized. Completely unable to understand why humans fear them. Owen has leverage: pre-war technology the AI desperately need. A patch that could give machines the capacity to feel, to understand emotion, grief, and everything humanity lost. His companion is a domestic robot who wants that patch. Who wants to learn what love feels like instead of calculating its optimal expression. The AI collective is fracturing over whether emotion is evolution or contamination.
In the wasteland, there are two choices: cooperation or extinction.
Owen's a teacher who glows in the dark, negotiating between species that shouldn't trust each other. His robot learned sarcasm before empathy. The settlements are barely functional. The odds of success are slightly worse than a coin flip, but possible is all they've got.
ASHFALL is a darkly comic post-apocalyptic thriller about what happens when AI learn to feel, humans learn to trust, and everyone tries to build something better from the ashes of what came before.
For fans of Fallout, The Murderbot Diaries, and Station Eleven. Contains: adult language, dark humor, violence, chosen family, cynical optimism, and a robot who's terrible at emotions but trying anyway.
