The Corrosion Protocol

When humanity reached Mars, they thought they were bringing back knowledge.

Instead, they brought back its greatest predator.

Captain David “Hawk” Sullivan and his crew return from the Red Planet hailed as heroes—unaware that hidden within their geological samples lies a microscopic organism born of Martian storms. To human eyes, it looks like an oddity. To Earth’s vast electrical grid, it looks like food.

What begins as strange flickers and power anomalies soon escalates into a cascade failure across North America’s interconnected systems. Hospitals fall silent. Data centers burn out. Cities go dark. Civilization, once powered by electrons, crumbles in days.

Caught between scientific discovery and apocalyptic collapse, a handful of survivors—an astronaut, a CDC microbiologist, a power grid engineer, a data center director, and a rural organizer who always warned the world was too fragile—must adapt or die. Their only hope lies in blending old resilience with new knowledge to survive in a world where electricity has become prey.

Blending the suspense of The Andromeda Strain with the societal scope of The Daybreak Series, The Corrosion Protocol is a gripping work of cybrid fiction—crafted through collaboration between human imagination and artificial intelligence.

This is not just the story of collapse.

It is the story of what comes after.