The Firmware of Oakhaven

About this book

In the desolate rust belt town of Oakhaven, the shuttered steel mills cast long shadows over a dwindling population. For thirteen-year-old Ashkii Yazzie and his friends, summer promises nothing but boredom until the town's residents begin to exhibit unsettling behaviors—repeating phrases like scratched records and freezing mid-step. The horror escalates when Ashkii witnesses a neighbor's skin ripple and reform into organic circuitry, revealing a terrifying truth: Oakhaven has become a testing ground for an extraterrestrial biological software update. As the 'Firmware' spreads, rewriting human biology into alien hardware, the adults of the town are systematically 'upgraded' into a hive-minded collective. Isolated from the outside world and unable to trust their own families, Ashkii, Rozenn, and Django must navigate a nightmare landscape of body horror and psychological paranoia. They retreat to the abandoned industrial sector, racing to decode the alien signal broadcast from the old radio tower before they, too, are flagged as obsolete hardware scheduled for deletion.