Manual Override: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (Manual Override Book 1)

By Nolan Reese

The water drops an inch every day.
We have forty-two inches left.

When a cascading AI infrastructure failure kills every automated system in the country, small-town water engineer Sam Keeler keeps the taps running on manual bypasses and mechanical ingenuity. But the dam upstream is draining through open spillway gates, and the manual overrides that could close them have been deliberately removed.

A post-apocalyptic infrastructure thriller with a ticking clock you can count on every page.

Forty-two days. Two hundred people in a mountain valley with one road in and one road out. A reservoir dropping an inch a day toward the intake pipe that feeds every faucet in town. Sam has the engineering knowledge to close the dam, but the parts are thirty miles south, behind a fence, guarded by a security contractor following the last order he will ever receive. To save the valley's water, Sam must build a hand wheel from scrap steel, scavenge cable from an abandoned ski lift, negotiate with armed men who answer to a dead company, and install everything on a concrete walkway thirty feet above a spillway that has been roaring for five weeks straight.

The clock is on every page. The math is real. And underneath the survival, a question nobody can answer yet: the manual overrides were removed on purpose. By professionals. With the right tools. Someone wanted this dam open. The answer is in a server room that still has power, in a building nobody is coming back to.

You'll love this book if you enjoy:

Grounded post-apocalyptic survival fiction with real engineering detailTicking-clock infrastructure thrillers where the countdown drives every chapterCivilian protagonists who lead through knowledge, not combatCommunity rebuilding with named characters, real tradeoffs, and earned hopeA mystery engine underneath the survival that deepens with every book

The water holds. The questions don't.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZDH11WV
• ISBN13: 9798195267308
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"