The Relay Age

About this book

Thirty years after 'The Burn' stripped Earth of its digital infrastructure, humanity survives in a quiet, analog twilight. The world is a graveyard of microchips and silent screens, where steam power and mechanical ingenuity have replaced the automated age. In the Port Archive, a coastal city constructed from rusted ship hulls and library stacks, seventeen-year-old Mara Ibarra thrives as a salvage apprentice. Deaf and brilliant, Mara perceives the world through vibration and tactile signals, possessing a unique talent for repairing the heavy, pre-transistor machinery that keeps her community alive. The Archive is governed by strict laws to merely preserve history, not revive it. However, Mara’s unauthorized experiments with a scavenged vibration receiver pick up a rhythmic, impossible anomaly: a coherent signal pulsing from deep within the continental wasteland. Convinced it is a distress beacon from a functioning 'Relay'—a massive analog transmitter from the pre-Burn era—Mara recruits a ragtag crew, including Sombath Sao, a renegade steam-mechanic, and Tenzin Thondup, an exiled cartographer. Together, they venture into the dangerous interior, pursued by Kiri Kahu, a zealous enforcer of the Archive who believes waking the old machines will invite a second apocalypse. As Mara traces the signal to a mountain stronghold, she discovers the Burn was not just a solar event, but a deliberate silence—one that is about to be broken.