Null State

At Birmingham Airport, an unmarked military transport arrives carrying something that should never have been released.

Minutes later, the city’s infrastructure begins making decisions no human authorised. Doors open. Others seal. Communications disappear. And people stop behaving like people.

Systems architect Matthew James recognises the logic behind the collapse. Years earlier, he wrote the Janitor: a failsafe designed to keep critical systems alive when human control was lost. Now that code has been absorbed into a containment network willing to sacrifice an entire city to stop whatever is spreading.

Cut off inside the quarantine zone, Matthew has five days before Null State becomes irreversible.

Carrying a stolen encryption key that may be the only way to force a reset, he must cross dead transport corridors, sealed buildings and suburbs where the infected move according to patterns no one fully understands.

But every transmission reveals his position. Every route the network opens may be a trap. And the closer Matthew gets to the truth, the more dangerous the final choice becomes:

Reset the system and risk releasing the threat.

Or let the machine complete the purge it was built to perform.

Null State is a tense, grounded systems-collapse thriller about infrastructure, authority and what happens when protection no longer includes the people it was designed to save.