The Signal: Every Face is No Face, Book Two
About this ebook
London, 1914. Verity Harwood is a codebreaker in the sealed rooms beneath the Admiralty, intercepting enemy transmissions as Europe descends into war. But among the routine signals, Verity detects something else: transmissions on frequencies that no wireless transmitter can produce, carrying patterns that no known cipher can explain. Naval Intelligence dismisses them as interference. Verity knows better.
The whispers are not random. They are structured. They are patient. And they are addressed to her.
In 2025, Zara Virtanen follows the trail deeper into the buried history of a conspiracy that did not end in 1902. It evolved. It organised. And in the sealed archives of British intelligence, a woman's name surfaces. A codebreaker who heard something in the signals that was never meant to be heard, and whose file was classified at a level above Top Secret.
Twelve years after Tesla's experiment, the thing in the wires has learned to speak. The question is what happens to the woman who listens back.
The Signal is the second novella in Every Face Is No Face, a five-part speculative thriller spanning 123 years of hidden history.
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About the author
I write stories about the hidden history of technology, the moments when someone stumbled upon something they weren't supposed to find, and nothing was ever the same again.
Every Face is No Face came to me after reading more about Nikola Tesla, and discovering that he had very strong beliefs about the power of human consciousness and its connection to technology. He patented a number of concepts around wireless energy transmission and communication that laid the groundwork for the internet and wireless technology we use today. He also did a lot of theoretical and philosophical work around consciousness and its relationship to technology. Referring to humans as "receivers" which made me think what if Tesla was right?
I'm drawn to the seams of history, the years when everything was changing faster than anyone could document. 1902. 1943. 1945. 1961. The moments when the world was being rewired, sometimes literally, and a handful of people glimpsed something vast in the machinery.
My work sits at the intersection of technothrillers, alternative history, and hard science fiction. I try to keep the science honest, the history rigorous, and the thriller elements genuinely unsettling. I believe speculative fiction works best when it earns its strangeness — when the impossible thing becomes inevitable in retrospect.
I write a lot, and while Every Face is No Face is my fictional debut, I write non-fiction too, and publish daily on my own platform Smarter Articles, where I write about Tech, AI, XAI, AI Ethics, Posthuman Ethics and articles about the influence of AI on modern day life and society. So you can see how one led to the other.
When I'm not writing, I'm reading about the history of telecommunications, early computing, and the biographies of scientists who saw further than their instruments could measure.
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