NORAD's Ghost

The Human race is facing extinction due to radioactive sterility. It's been centuries since WWIII in old Earth Year 2025, and the world remains poisoned by the silent killers Carbon-14 and plutonium. The human race is fragmented and much of the old world is a nuclear wastelands inhabited by different survivor factions. The cannibalistic Ferals; the nomadic Scavengers who traverse the wastelands picking among the ruins of the old world for useful items to barter for medicines. The Dusteaters, who are at war with the technologically advanced and despotic Utopians, the most powerful of the human enclaves, who have forged a new civilisation that is controlled by an elite of fertile scientists who live underground in Sub City from where they keep the topsiders "Mudsurfers" in perpetual surfdom. Thundersky Reece is such a "Mudsurfer", but he's different and he knows it. So do others... Thundersky often wonders why he doesn't get sick? All the topsiders get sick from the radiation and the cancers. So sick, that living to 35 is considered a grand old age. Only the Scholars live for longer. Not only is he immune from the radiation and cancers that have plagued the earth for hundreds of years, he's also a genius and just 19. Not all the Scholars are tyrants; some believe the exploitation of topsiders is cruel and wrong. Grand High Scholar Blackstone Washington and High Scholar Blossom Flora, have for the past twenty years, been protecting the "Genesis Child" (Thundersky Reece) from the Grand High Council who would kill him because he threatens their power and authority. People are getting suspicious and asking questions about the topsider who never gets sick, they must act quickly before his true identity is discovered and they contrive to bring Thundersky into Sub City. Utopia's systems are controlled by a central artificial intelligence, the ARTI-QS-602. "Arti" which seems to be involving itself in the conspiracy to hide Thundersky from the Silosian Secret Service "SSS". It seems that the AI has its own personal reasons to protect the "Genesis Child". Zim Steven, the sinister and ambitious head of the SSS discovers that Thundersky Reece is the Genesis Child, but before he can act to have him murdered, an ancient 21st Century quantum system is accidentally activated at a secret location beneath the flooded ruins of Manhattan, and a countdown begins to unleash another thermonuclear holocaust upon our dying world and a race against time begins. Thundersky is selected to go to New York with an elite team of military tacticals to locate the NORAD system and deactivate it. Meanwhile, Zim Steven lays his plans to make certain that Thundersky and his companions never return to Silo City alive. While in the wilderness, the four survivors make an unlikely ally, the Prophetess, and Thundersky falls in love with a handsome young Dusteater fighter, Reaper Bloodbuck. The Prophetess will reveal things to Thundersky's that will unravel his life and everything he believes in, and soon, it's realizes that the humble Mudsurfer is far more powerful than even the Scholars could have imagined…