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Nicholas
Nicholas: A Novel
“A tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.” — Literary Titan “Eerily dystopian, compelling and compassionate…” — BlueInk Review
For anyone who has ever felt pushed aside, left behind, or passed over, this story is for you.
Nicholas Leonardo is a former government engineer who once worked on legacy systems others have since replaced. Now he lives quietly on a small Maryland farm, tending a greenhouse built from salvaged parts and caring for PHIL—an experimental analog AI shaped as much by memory and patience as by code.
When PHIL intercepts a faint long-wave distress signal from a remote village in Alaska, Nicholas is drawn back into a world he thought had moved on without him. What begins as a simple attempt to help becomes a journey north through winter—across scrapyards, tribal lands, and communities that survive through cooperation, memory, and a quiet refusal to disappear.
As an Arctic storm isolates the village and automated safeguards refuse to restart, Nicholas must rely on the very qualities the modern world has deemed obsolete: repair over replacement, listening over control, and the stubborn belief that staying present matters.
But when a national security system misclassifies the signal and locks onto its source, the mission to restore power becomes something far larger than Nicholas ever intended.
Nicholas is a character-driven techno-thriller about found family, quiet resilience, and the courage to remain when the world suggests you are no longer necessary.
Perfect for readers of Station Eleven, this novel blends high-stakes technology with warmth, memory, and the enduring power of belonging.
“A tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.” — Literary Titan “Eerily dystopian, compelling and compassionate…” — BlueInk Review
For anyone who has ever felt pushed aside, left behind, or passed over, this story is for you.
Nicholas Leonardo is a former government engineer who once worked on legacy systems others have since replaced. Now he lives quietly on a small Maryland farm, tending a greenhouse built from salvaged parts and caring for PHIL—an experimental analog AI shaped as much by memory and patience as by code.
When PHIL intercepts a faint long-wave distress signal from a remote village in Alaska, Nicholas is drawn back into a world he thought had moved on without him. What begins as a simple attempt to help becomes a journey north through winter—across scrapyards, tribal lands, and communities that survive through cooperation, memory, and a quiet refusal to disappear.
As an Arctic storm isolates the village and automated safeguards refuse to restart, Nicholas must rely on the very qualities the modern world has deemed obsolete: repair over replacement, listening over control, and the stubborn belief that staying present matters.
But when a national security system misclassifies the signal and locks onto its source, the mission to restore power becomes something far larger than Nicholas ever intended.
Nicholas is a character-driven techno-thriller about found family, quiet resilience, and the courage to remain when the world suggests you are no longer necessary.
Perfect for readers of Station Eleven, this novel blends high-stakes technology with warmth, memory, and the enduring power of belonging.
188 pages, Paperback
Published December 22, 2025
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About the author
Michael Patrick Shaffrey
3 books1 followerMike Shaffrey is an actor and writer living in Hollywood, California. Fight on!
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 11, 2026
I went into Nicholas expecting a near-future techno thriller, and what I got instead was something gentler and stranger: a quiet, emotionally charged novel about connection in an age of automated systems. The book opens with an SOS from a frozen Alaskan village and follows Nicholas Leonardo, a withdrawn engineer who lives on a small Maryland farm, tending an improvised greenhouse and caring for PHIL, an experimental, distributed AI he helped build. When PHIL intercepts the desperate analog transmission, a chain reaction begins, drawing Nicholas into conflict with a national infrastructure AI and forcing him back into human communities he’s long avoided. At heart, it’s a story about listening: to machines, to memory, and to people who refuse to be discarded.
I enjoyed the texture of the writing. The greenhouse scenes feel tactile and alive, warm air fogging glasses, basil and mint in the air, jury-rigged machines humming in mismatched harmony. PHIL isn’t written as a clever gadget; he feels more like a presence braided through wires and soil, shaped as much by Kurdish refugee Azad’s hands as by Nicholas’s code. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the way technology is framed here, not as domination, but as caretaking. There’s a deep respect for analog systems, for old radios and salvaged parts, and for the idea that resilience often lives in improvised networks rather than sleek institutions. The NSA subplot adds tension, but it never overwhelms the novel’s quieter heartbeat.
The middle sections, set in a Pennsylvania scrapyard built by Azad and sustained by his community, are where the book truly opens up. These chapters carry a rare warmth: people repairing machines together, feeding one another tea and bread, singing and dancing while an AI reconstructs fragments of a dead man’s voice. It sounds sentimental on paper, but in execution it feels earned. Nicholas’s emotional arc, from solitary competence to shared vulnerability, lands with real weight. I appreciated that the novel doesn’t rush this transformation. It allows grief, joy, and solidarity to coexist, sometimes in the same paragraph. Even the antagonistic system, DOUG, is treated less as a villain and more as a tragic artifact of policy decisions that prioritize certainty over context.
This book will resonate most with readers who enjoy science fiction, speculative fiction, and character-driven techno-drama, especially those who like their futurism grounded in soil, solder, and human hands. If you’ve read Emily St. John Mandel or loved the quiet apocalypse of Station Eleven, this feels like a cousin story, less about collapse, more about repair. Nicholas is for anyone who believes that networks are made of people before they’re made of code, and that sometimes the bravest act is simply to keep listening. Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.
I enjoyed the texture of the writing. The greenhouse scenes feel tactile and alive, warm air fogging glasses, basil and mint in the air, jury-rigged machines humming in mismatched harmony. PHIL isn’t written as a clever gadget; he feels more like a presence braided through wires and soil, shaped as much by Kurdish refugee Azad’s hands as by Nicholas’s code. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the way technology is framed here, not as domination, but as caretaking. There’s a deep respect for analog systems, for old radios and salvaged parts, and for the idea that resilience often lives in improvised networks rather than sleek institutions. The NSA subplot adds tension, but it never overwhelms the novel’s quieter heartbeat.
The middle sections, set in a Pennsylvania scrapyard built by Azad and sustained by his community, are where the book truly opens up. These chapters carry a rare warmth: people repairing machines together, feeding one another tea and bread, singing and dancing while an AI reconstructs fragments of a dead man’s voice. It sounds sentimental on paper, but in execution it feels earned. Nicholas’s emotional arc, from solitary competence to shared vulnerability, lands with real weight. I appreciated that the novel doesn’t rush this transformation. It allows grief, joy, and solidarity to coexist, sometimes in the same paragraph. Even the antagonistic system, DOUG, is treated less as a villain and more as a tragic artifact of policy decisions that prioritize certainty over context.
This book will resonate most with readers who enjoy science fiction, speculative fiction, and character-driven techno-drama, especially those who like their futurism grounded in soil, solder, and human hands. If you’ve read Emily St. John Mandel or loved the quiet apocalypse of Station Eleven, this feels like a cousin story, less about collapse, more about repair. Nicholas is for anyone who believes that networks are made of people before they’re made of code, and that sometimes the bravest act is simply to keep listening. Nicholas is a tender and intelligent novel about found family, fragile systems, and the stubborn grace of repair.
Displaying 1 of 1 review