It's 2032, and the world just changed.

VisionAiREs — augmented reality glasses that seamlessly blend digital information with the physical world — have made the Overlay a necessary part of everyday life. They’re elegant. They’re intuitive. And they’re killing people.

CDC data scientist Claire Donegal is the first to see it: a quiet, persistent rise in accidental deaths that doesn't fit any known pattern. Her sister Aislin, an investigative journalist for the Washington Post, has stumbled on the same signal from a different direction — accident after accident involving VisionAiREs. At first, nobody will listen to the alarms raised by these tenacious sisters.

Eventually as the death counts rise to a level that cannot be ignored, Apple begins to suspect the Chinese who now control the most sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world. The very facility where the chips powering VisionAiREs are made. Getting proof falls on a humble test engineer named Mark Waller who must risk everything to smuggle out three slivers of raw silicon — the only evidence that could prove what Apple suspects – their chips have been tampered with.

As the body count climbs toward the unthinkable, the people who know the truth face a different kind of threat: a government slow to act, a media unwilling to publish, and a geopolitical confrontation that makes the body count the least of anyone's problems.

The only question is whether the truth will come out in time — or whether the people raising the alarm will become just another statistic.

"Too often, we consider novels as flights of the imagination and escapism from the brutal realities of life. The novels that ring and stay are those that act as oracles, revealing who will serve as a trajectory of who we are. In Overlay, Brooklin Gore has taken his professional expertise in the world of technology and penned a story of great relevance and urgency. The story burns like a top-shelf thriller, enlightens like a philosophical tome, and challenges its reader to peer through the goggles of literature and see the dire future before it arrives. An excellent debut from an exciting new voice in letters”

-- Alan Heathcock, author of Volt and 40