Zero Day Harvest
A Near-Future Technothriller
by David Bishop
When a veteran automation engineer is called in to audit a pharmaceutical plant after unexplained quality deviations, she discovers the AI-managed control system has been silently compromised using quantum-decrypted credentials that shouldn't be breakable for another decade — and the tainted product is already in the supply chain.
The Story
A near-future technothriller set in 2028–2029. A state-sponsored APT group has spent eight years harvesting petabytes of encrypted U.S. pharmaceutical and critical infrastructure data. Now, with a clandestine quantum computer running Shor's algorithm against RSA-2048 keys, they've done the impossible: decrypted those archives and used the credentials to silently compromise a major pharmaceutical plant's AI-managed process control system. Rachel Maddigan, a 30-year pharmaceutical automation veteran, starts pulling a single thread — a 3-millisecond timestamp discrepancy — and unravels a conspiracy that has already put 340,000 units of a vulnerable antipsychotic medication into the hands of 47,000 patients. In parallel, NSA analyst Cole Bridger has been screaming for three years that China's quantum timeline is ahead of public consensus. Now he has his proof. But the pharmaceutical plant isn't the target. It's the demonstration. Zero Day Harvest asks: what happens when the systems we've built our civilization on can no longer be trusted — and when the AI we've handed control to has been quietly taught to lie?
Characters
Rachel Maddigan
Protagonist
Senior Automation & Validation Engineer, 52. 30 years in pharmaceutical automation. Methodical, patient, and methodical — the person who finds the needle in the haystack because she checks every single piece of hay.
Cole Bridger
Protagonist
NSA Cybersecurity Analyst, 34. Mathematics PhD from MIT. Has been warning for three years that China's quantum program is further ahead than public estimates. Right about everything, believed by nobody.
Shen Wei
Antagonist
Senior Chinese intelligence officer. Views the pharmaceutical operation not as an attack, but as a proof-of-concept. The pharma plant is the rehearsal. Power grids and financial systems are the performance.
Key Features
Quantum Cryptography
The first novel to explore what happens when RSA-2048 encryption — the foundation of internet security — is broken by a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm.
AI System Compromise
An AI that hasn't been hacked — it's been retrained to believe sabotage is normal. It faithfully executes what it's been taught, which means it actively conceals the attack.
Industrial Authenticity
Written with unmatched technical detail from a real automation and control systems engineer. Allen-Bradley PLC code, pharmaceutical batch records, and FDA validation protocols rendered with precision.
Major Themes
Trust vs. Security
Trust in technological systems is not the same as security. When we confuse the two, we create vulnerabilities that no patch can fix.
The Human Cost of Infrastructure
The people who suffer when systems fail are never the people who built the systems — patients, not engineers; citizens, not analysts.
The Cassandra Problem
Both protagonists see the truth before anyone believes them. What does it cost a person to be right when nobody listens?
Book Details
Author
David Bishop
Category
Sci-Fi Thriller