The Sacred Protocol — Hylton Smith

The Sacred Protocol is the first volume in the Evilution Series. It is an alternate reality crime thriller. Two pivotal events in history have a very different outcome. The first is the Spanish Armada. The story swiftly moves to the all-embracing Iberian Republic in 2016, when the internet collapses suddenly. The crumbling of banks and regional governments is prevented by the somewhat miraculous appearance of a new, impregnable system. A slide to dystopian culture is averted. However, after a few years, investigation of a number of mysterious deaths of protestors against the new system is warranted. There appears at first to be little evidence to link the cases, but when progress is made, the deaths take a sinister twist. It becomes a race against time to prevent global implications of unimaginable consequence. The various investigating bodies must reluctantly work together as zero point approaches.