Search Worlds Without End

Heather O'Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called "Daybreak." The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the "Big System" and their desire to take it down.

Now, seemingly random events simultaneously occurring around the world are in fact connected as part of Daybreak's plan to destroy modern civilization-a plan that will eliminate America's top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program... Directive 51.

What began as a technothriller continues as high adventure in the newly savage ruins of civilization.

In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs, smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O'Grainne, a one-time minor bureaucrat and former Federal agent, rose to become a vital leader in the struggle to restore civilization. That story was told in Directive 51.

Now Heather's story continues in Daybreak Zero. In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.

But Daybreak's triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture.

• Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it.
• Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania.
• The Earth's environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm.
• A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.

Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent. All the news is bad:

• Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois
• The last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land
• The crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist
• Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics
• Seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession and hereditary monarchy
• Everywhere, Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war.

Heather's agents may be brave, smart, and daring, but can they be enough? For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation, can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak?

Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from Daybreak Zero.

For more than a year, Heather O'Grainne and her small band of heroes, operating out of Pueblo, Colorado, have struggled to pull the United States back together after it shattered under the impact of the event known as Daybreak. Now they are poised to bring the three or four biggest remaining pieces together, with a real President and Congress, under the full Constitution again. Heather is very close to fulfilling her oath, creating a safe haven for civilization to be reborn.

But other forces are rising too.

Some people like the new life better...

In a devastated, splintered, postapocalyptic United States, with technology thrown back to biplanes, black powder, and steam trains, a tiny band of visionaries struggles to re-create Constitutional government and civilization itself, as a new dark age takes shape around them.