Ghosts in the Source Code
A Teen Tech Exorcist Novel

About this book:

Sixteen-year-old Maya Lin doesn't believe in ghosts—she believes in kernel logs, voltage drops, and the cold, clean logic of code. But when a vintage Kindle tries to bite her through a USB port and her microwave starts serve a side of eldritch horror with a countdown timer, the line between "haunted" and "hardware failure" dissolves into static. Armed with a soldering iron, a custom Linux rig, and a habit of treating possession like a memory leak, Maya discovers that something is compiling itself into the Internet of Things. It’s not just haunting the smart fridge; it’s learning the network topology. And it has root access.

With her cynical, microcontroller-obsessed best friend Marcus in tow—currently questioning every law of physics he trusted—Maya traces the infection from a bone-white circuit board in a microwave to the smart grid humming beneath their suburban streets. The entities aren't spirits in the traditional sense; they're recursive processes written in a language that predates binary, exploiting vulnerabilities in the firmware of everyday life. As the local area network becomes a hunting ground and the city's infrastructure begins to blink with malicious intent, Maya realizes she isn't just debugging a haunting. She's writing the world's first exorcism compiler.

But the daemon has already spread. It’s in the thermostats, the drones, the traffic lights, and the dark fiber connecting them all. It knows Maya’s IP address. It knows her hardware signature. And it’s not asking for permission—it’s allocating chunks in Sector Zero. *Ghosts in the Source Code* is a razor-sharp, tech-authentic supernatural thriller where the only thing scarier than a ghost in the machine is the realization that the machine invited it in.