Zero Out

The desperate sister…

Computer programmer Iseul Kim works for Binary Systems, Inc., and is senior hacker Leland Yang-Joule’s protégé. Leland often takes her when she works on projects with VenomLabs, a government contractor that specializes in cybernetics, wearable implants, and artificial intelligence.

By all accounts, Iseul is working for the best computer consulting company in the world because Binary Systems often gets the top choice contracts for federal agencies. Her pay is in the six figures, her benefits are the best, and she is working in her dream job.

Yet, when she gets word that her Navy SEAL brother is trapped and slated to die in a closed country, Iseul immediately takes a “vacation” to join a private rescue team, not knowing whether she’ll make it home alive. She cashes out her savings and leaves her family home to find her one and only brother.

It is an impossible task because she is an untrained rescuer who wants to take a giant leap into the Himalayan Range to dig her brother out of a secret prison that may or may not exist.

Her designated protector…

CIA protective agent Dario de la Cruz isn’t originally assigned to Iseul, who is not even on the agency radar. His job has always been to keep the best hacker, Leland, safe. As such, he goes everywhere with her, including to the offices of Binary Systems, which Leland founded with his cousin, Cayson, whom we met in Zero Sum (Binary Systems Book 1).

There, at the Binary Systems headquarters in Atlanta, Dario meets Iseul, who mostly spends her time in the machine room doing systems programming for the previous system administrator, Kelvin Gallagher, who ran into personal trouble in Zero Day (Binary Systems Book 2). Occasionally, Leland takes Iseul off site, but not often.

Until now, Dario’s interaction with Iseul has been minimal. This time, Leland’s assignment intersects with Iseul’s personal mission, and the trio end up going on the quest together. Thus begins their flight to Nepal, which kicks off their great adventure with a perilous bus ride in the Himalayan mountain range.

Their dead-end journey of doom…

In the snow-encrusted country of fictitious Bitteria sandwiched between Nepal and Tibet, Iseul and Dario enter a secret hideaway in the forbidden Bitt Mountain, where Iseul’s brother is supposedly imprisoned along with his entire SEAL team.

Once inside Bitt Mountain, they are trapped in a mad world, where humans want to be machines and machines want to be humans. There is no way out of the experimental cyborg laboratory that no sane country would have sanctioned.

Against all odds, Iseul marches onward into the jaws of death, searching for her lost brother. She is armed only with what she carries in her head (her intellectual property and hacker training) and what she stores in her heart (her love for her brother and Bible verses that pop into her mind at critical times).

Dario supports her, all the while knowing that they might not escape the mountain alive in a search-and-rescue attempt so impossible that even the military dares not try.

Tropes & Themes

• Strong Woman
• Alpha Male
• Women of Faith
• Men of Faith
• Elite Hackers
• Software Programmer
• Computer Programmer
• CIA Officers
• Navy SEALs
• Learning on the Job
• Being Teachable
• Growth Mentality
• Captivity in Enemy Territory
• Himalaya Setting
• Fictitious Country
• Truth versus Lie
• Man versus Machine
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cyborgs, Drones, Robots
• Sibling Relationship
• Slow Burn Romance
• Friends to More
• Teamwork
• Loyalty
• Friendship
• Winter Adventure
• Cyberspace

A Note to Readers

Book 3 in Binary Hackers, USA Today bestselling author Jan Thompson’s series of near-future technothrillers with a side of Christian romance, Zero Out is a five-part 252,000-word epic romantic science fiction thriller.

• Part 1: The Quest: Iseul and Dario Go to Wonderland
• Part 2: The Quandary: In the Halls of the Dragon King
• Part 3: The Quarry: Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
• Part 4: The Quagmire: Tangled Webs We Weave
• Part 5: The Quick Draw: Showdown at Cyborg Corral

All five parts are in one ebook and available to buy on Amazon or borrow via Kindle Unlimited, but the Zero Out paperback edition will be in five volumes because the entire novel (at 1500 pages) is too big for print-on-demand paperback production.

Jan also created a fictitious country for this novel. Bitteria has its own capital city, Audelon, and the central focus of the novel is Bitt Mountain in the north. Her active imagination invented these places in the Himalayas to avoid incriminating real people in the cyborg experiments conducted in her fictitious story world. Therefore, she can safely say that no real countries, mountains, humans, dogs, or robots were harmed in the writing of this novel.

Originally, Zero Out was supposed to be the last novel in the Binary Hackers series, but thanks to a suspense anthology box set that Jan participated in prior to the completion of Book 3, she ended up adding a bonus novel, Zero Trust (Binary Hackers Book 4), a Christian  romantic thriller set in the North Georgia Mountains. That novel tells the extra story of Mira Proskouriakova and Briscoe Hall, the impetus for the rescue mission in Zero Out.

If you’re looking to read clean romantic suspense thrillers without compromising the Christian faith, these Binary Hackers books are for you.