Books

Austin, 2027. Marcus Wynthor is twenty-nine, bored, and running out of reasons to stay late at Vantaris Systems. One night he opens an invite-only research forum and finds a post from an account he has never seen before. An API endpoint. A bearer token. One line of text: Test it on something you think is safe.

He sends RSA-4096 ciphertext from an old training exercise and watches the plaintext come back in under two seconds. He generates a fresh key pair. Same result. Every secure connection on the modern internet relies on the assumption that factoring large numbers is hard. That assumption has been wrong for at least the time it took this post to reach page three.

A thousand miles east, at Fort Meade, senior NSA cryptanalyst Kai Merrowe is called into a briefing he was not expecting. Someone outside the network has used agency credentials to submit decryption requests through a relay chain built to resist any attempt to trace it. The machine those credentials belong to is the most closely held secret in the US government, and Kai helped architect its analytical pipeline.

Cleartext is a near-future techno-thriller about cryptography, institutional drift, and the quiet arithmetic that separates the person who builds a system from the person who uses it.