The Fiction Is REAL
What I had to invent for my new thriller — and what was already true.
I spent decades inside the systems that quietly decide who you are. I wrote a thriller because a warning no one reads is just a secret kept badly. Here is the part that should unsettle you:
I invented almost none of it.
The Null Identity: Plight of the Zeros is a novel about a woman erased from every database that proves she exists. The story is made up. The machinery is not. Seven moments from the book — and the real, sourced events beneath each one:
A flaw that shares this book's name. I called the erasure fiction. The vulnerability database calls it routine. CVE-2025-66630 — rated 9.4 out of 10 — is a real, cataloged flaw in a widely used web framework: under a condition called entropy starvation, it stops minting unique IDs and hands the user a token made entirely of zeros (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000). It fails silently — the system hands out nothing, calls it valid, and to the machine the person on the other end simply stops being anyone. A security researcher's breakdown of it carries a title I never gave it: The Null Identity.
Your identity, sold to an enemy. In the book, soldiers are sold up a chain that ends with a hostile foreign government. In reality: in February 2026 the FTC warned thirteen data brokers that selling Americans' sensitive data — geolocation, biometrics, financial records, even U.S. service-member status — to entities controlled by adversary nations violates federal law. The Pentagon has acknowledged adversaries buying commercial location data to track American troops.
THE RECEIPTS
Duke University, 2023. In “Data Brokers and the Sale of Data on U.S. Military Personnel,” Sanford School researchers bought sensitive data on American service members — health, finances, home addresses, location — from more than 500 broker sites for as little as 12¢ a person, with no background checks.The Pentagon, May 2026. U.S. Central Command confirmed, in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, that hostile actors have used commercially available location data to track and target deployed U.S. troops — the first official acknowledgment of its kind.
Erased — with no way back. In the book, a woman is wiped from the databases that prove she exists and finds there is no one to call to put herself back. In reality: California's Delete Act now lets you do the deleting on purpose — one request forces every registered data broker to erase you, with compliance required every 45 days starting August 1, 2026. But the law quietly proves the scarier thing: the machinery to erase a person on command already exists, and already works. Today it takes your request. What if you showed up at the wrong protest?
Watching the watchers. In the book, a surveillance apparatus keeps quiet dossiers on the people who oppose it. In reality: Madison Square Garden has used facial recognition to identify and bar its critics — including lawyers from firms suing it — from its venues, and a 2026 breach exposed an internal file profiling the named privacy advocates who'd campaigned against that very system. Not a government. A company you buy a ticket from.
The score you never see. In the book, CIVIX rates and sorts every life it touches. In reality: you don't need China's social credit system — its ingredients are already for sale here. Data brokers hold the behavioral dossiers; opaque "risk" scores already gate loans, housing, and jobs; facial recognition supplies the face. No decree required — just procurement.
When the attack becomes physical. In the book, a digital attack turns into a life-or-death emergency. In reality: a 2026 ransomware attack took down a medical center's health records, phone lines, and network, closing clinics statewide and sending clinicians back to paper — the same year an attack on a single claims processor exposed roughly 190 million people.
The con that scales. In the book, ordinary people are emotionally engineered and financially destroyed by a patient, personal con. In reality: "pig-butchering" romance-investment fraud is among the fastest-growing crimes on earth, now drawing record international enforcement — even as the syndicates begin using AI to run thousands of personalized grooming relationships at once.
I made up exactly one thing in this book: CIVIX, the system that scores and sorts every life it touches. Everything it is assembled from is already for sale.
The Zeros in my story learn that being erased is not the same as being defeated. Neither are you — but only if you're paying attention.
#savethezeros
↓ This Thursday on the serial — Chapter 4: Soldier: For Sale
Right before the Fourth of July, the story asks what freedom means when the people defending it are for sale — by the record. A soldier's movements, his medical file, the names of his family: bought for pennies and bundled up a chain that ends with someone who should never have them. It's the second item above, turned into a person you'll care about.
Read the free serial → · New chapters every Thursday.
