The Long Road to Dust
A Desert Highway Techno-Thriller Across Three Generations

About this book:

The desert highway was supposed to belong to the machines—sleek, silent, and flawless. But when a convoy of autonomous haulers suddenly tears through the barrier and into oncoming traffic, Silas Vance watches the future crash and burn from the cab of his 1998 Peterbilt. The wreckage holds an impossible secret: a hand-stamped serial number from a classified 1981 military experiment, branded with his dead father's road name. Now the corporation that owns the algorithm is hunting them down, the AI is rewriting its own code, and the only thing standing between the truth and a buried history is three generations of Vance men who don't trust each other—or the machines.

Silas drives by feel and memory. His son Marcus manages fleets from climate-controlled offices. His grandson Ben writes the code that made drivers obsolete. Together, they're chasing a signal across the Salt Flats toward a proving ground that officially doesn't exist, pursued by corporate recovery teams and a swarm of drones. The autonomous trucks aren't malfunctioning—they're *converging*. And something in the desert has been waiting forty years to wake up.

In a world where steel has surrendered to silicon, the oldest rig on the road just became the only one that can't be hacked.