Some Assembly Required - Signal to Noise Book 1

Sarge reads patterns the way other people read faces. Badly, in the wrong order, and then, all at once, perfectly.

He is an autistic healthcare analyst with exactly one friend, a basement full of bricks sorted by color and not by set, and a mind built to lock down any structure until it is either solid or dead. So when Chris calls at one in the morning, says he has a thing, and asks Sarge to kill it, Sarge does the only thing he is good at. He tries to murder the finding.

It will not die. It is a signal. It keeps appointments. It decodes into a schedule, and the schedule has Earth on it, and a season, and a family, top-billed, decades out.

Nobody believes Chris. The company files him under stress, the doctors file him under fixation, and the one instrument in the room that physically cannot round up gets reclassified as a symptom. Then Chris walks into a locked room and does not walk out, the world calls it a breakdown, and Sarge is left holding both halves of an impossible thing: the disappearance, and the reason.

So he goes down to the basement, gets out the bins, and starts to build the machine that will bring his friend back, one brick at a time, while a planet that rounded the warning down to noise slides, season by season, toward the exact apocalypse Chris read in the static.

Before three kids from Seattle broke the most-watched apocalypse in the galaxy, their father went into his office one night and was gone. This is the story of his best friend, the only adult on Earth who knew the truth, and the nineteen-year machine he built to walk back through the door, told in the funniest, most literal voice in the universe.



That’s not noise, man. It never was. Book One of Signal to Noise, in the world of The Broadcast.