Beacon of the Last War

After the coastal cities burn in a war everyone still disputes, a ruined lighthouse on the Atlantic becomes the last archive of the vanished state. Inside its Fresnel lens engineers tucked punched tape, reel-to-reel schematics and a sealed memorandum: a wartime program for relocating the living, built on analog calculators and shore-based radio chains. Scavengers, ex-sailors and a cynical archivist chase that secret through oil-black waters and rationed skies, hunted by militia who'd rather command history than mend it. A Watergate-scarred, Cold War future—one light can mean salvation or the last, bureaucratic lie.