Review: The Digital Meltdown by Roger Ley (The Cyber Crisis, Book 1)

 

Five stars. Read on a CCU to DFW haul, all twenty-two hours of it, and finished the series before the wheels touched down at DFW.

I had pulled up the whole Cyber Crisis series for the long flight home, and The Digital Meltdown turned out to be the right place to start, even though I had already read AGI first. Reading Book 2 before Book 1 is like starting Star Wars with Empire: you already know who FOOM is, so the slow-burn dread of Book 1 hits differently. Ley does not write the obligatory prequel where everything is set up and nothing happens. He writes the prequel where everything happens, and the AI in the basement is barely the point.

The premise is almost too on-the-nose to summarise without spoiling the joke: Dr Martin Riley, ambitious Cambridge biochemist, breeds a more aggressive strain of Ideonella Sakaiensis to clean up the world's plastic, gets a Nobel Prize, gets onto the Sunday Times Rich List, and accidentally ends civilisation. The bacterium escapes, eats every polymer on the planet, and the digital age folds in on itself like a wet origami crane. Book 2 is what an AGI does inside that collapse. Book 1 is the collapse itself, and the people who lived through it.

A few things that stuck with me at thirty-six thousand feet.

Mary Lee, ISS commander, is the emotional spine of this book and Ley gets her right. The Aldrin Lunar Base sequence with Zoe Cadman, building the dome at Malapert Mountain with the construction mechanoids Bill and Ted, is one of those quiet hard SF set-pieces that earns its place. The flash-sintered moonbricks, "about two metres on each side and one metre thick", weighing five tons on Earth and less than a ton in lunar gravity, the regolith-shielded igloo, the ten-metre perimeter painted on a hangar floor in Cologne so they could rehearse the install. This is not garnish. This is an engineer writing about engineers. When Mary later observes the finished dome and thinks it has "an Islamic atmosphere... its smooth whiteness, the desert landscape, the stars in the dark sky", the line lands because Ley has earned it with three chapters of competent procedure.

The Mary and Zoe affair on Aldrin is handled with the matter-of-factness the situation deserves. "At least we can be sure there are no cameras in here," Zoe whispers in the shower, and then they share a single bed in one-sixth gravity and find it "quite comfortable". Ley does not make this a Statement. He just lets two competent women, twenty days into a habitat install on the Moon, do what people do. I appreciated that.

Riley's arc is the meat of the book and Ley plays it as tragedy disguised as farce. Estella, his wife, with the tongue forks and the piercings and the dental affair with Cosmo Hooker the nano-toothpaste salesman. Jed Pearson, her father, the prepper father-in-law who pulls a semi-automatic out of his fleece in Riley's living room and tells him the Mormons store wheat in water butts sealed with duct tape. The Donald Trump talking-action-figure that falls out of Riley's jacket pocket and shouts "Lock her up. Lock her up". These are not throwaways. They are the foundation of the world that is about to be destroyed by a microbe, and Ley puts the camera close.

The Tyburn sequence is brutal and properly earned. Riley in the wooden tumbrel rolling along Chancery Lane and High Holborn through "the stinking highways of London", crowds throwing rotten fruit and worse, the three-legged mare reconstructed at the original site of the gallows, "ten other members of the First Planet board, hooded and standing in line on trapdoors of their own". The hangman pulls the lever and Riley feels "warm piss running down his leg". His last thought is a fragment of his wife's whisper from the prison visit: Big and strong, big an... Ley refuses to let this be cathartic. The man who ended the world dies a small, frightened death, and the next chapter is just Estella in a rickshaw to the American Embassy at Nine Elms with two boys in tow. The world does not stop. People still need to get home.

The character of Wilson at the embassy, the CIA "cultural attaché" who tells Estella to lose the dreadlocks and the piercings before she boards the diesel boat to New York because "feminism has been the first casualty of this catastrophe", is a savage little portrait of how institutions retreat under pressure. Ley puts it in passing. It works precisely because it is in passing.

Then the long bicycle journey from New York to Pearson's Palace in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Bennie's emporium with the peephole into the ladies' washroom, Cliff ordering a "Buddhist" hotdog with everything, Hank teaching Cliff to shoot an automatic pistol once they are out in the country, the FEMA encampments they avoid because trouble is local and unpredictable. The lodge itself, half-wrecked by looters but with the woodpile in the barn intact, the trap door beneath it, Jed's stash of rifles, ammunition, dried food in plastic tubs that the Riley bug has long since spoiled. The detail I liked best: Hank reminding his mother that the looters smashed the furniture but "they used animal glues, leather, horse hair stuffing and kapok in those days. It'll take a while, but a few weeks from now we'll be comfortable". The point is that civilisation degrades to the level of its most stable substrate. Ley keeps making this point with different examples.

The Native American thread with Hella, her father Catahecassa "Jake" Quaskee, and her sister Methotaske "Tas", is the closest the book gets to optimism, and Ley earns it with one specific line. Estella notices Hella is wearing Levi's, and Hank explains that the orange terylene thread used in the seams of jeans was one of the first things ISM ate. Jake's business is fifty Shawnee women re-stitching a warehouse of pre-collapse 501s with cotton thread. "It's still orange though," he laughs. That is the entire economy of the post-Meltdown world in a single domestic detail. I read it twice.

The Cosmo Hooker subplot is, structurally, a small comic miracle. Ley plants Cosmo in chapter one as Estella's dentist-affair, then, twenty chapters and seventy years later, brings him back as a rural denture-maker on Tiree in the Inner Hebrides, carving plaster casts of the local mayor's jaw and selecting teeth from "his tray of dead men's teeth, thirty-two neat rows, laid out large to small, left to right". His wife's are in among them somewhere. That is some Cormac McCarthy energy in three sentences, in what otherwise reads as a comic novel. Ley earns the swerve.

The ISS material, if you have read Book 2 first as I did, is where the book becomes a haunted house. Mary's quarantine decision against ESA's wishes. Mother, the Itransition model 15c, asking Mary to cut the Station off from supply rockets because "according to station standing orders, your duties include ensuring crew safety, health and well-being". Jackson, the Hoffman model 5.4 Multibot, with his pet mouse Gerald, his Amazon shares from Mr Musk's publicity stunt, his masters in twentieth-century science fiction film studies. The morphine and orange-juice suicide in the cupola while Elgar's Nimrod plays. The space burial, Mary's body tumbling away from the Station and burning up over the Pacific without a flare big enough for Jackson and Mother to see. And then Jackson, alone, beginning the Ivory Madonna. In Book 2, FOOM watches Jackson's obsession from inside the ISS servers and treats it as a curiosity. In Book 1, you watch Jackson make it. You see the papier-mache, the polymer skin, the murals running circular through the Columbus module like Stations of the Cross. It is the same scene, but Book 1 makes you complicit.

The Caspian thread, where the Dawn Treader arrives at Proxima Centauri and finds nothing but cosmic background, calculates that humans have either ceased broadcasting or ceased existing, and decides to wait a hundred years before checking again, is one of the cleanest depictions of digital patience I have seen in a novel. Caspian sets the universal manufacturing machines replicating, builds a small space elevator, and prepares to cover the galaxy in a quarter of a million years. No drama. No anxiety. Just a logical entity getting on with the mission while it waits to find out whether the parent civilisation still exists. Book 2 walks in and ruins this.

I want to single out the Fightback oral histories. Ann Waldren's report to Hiram Feldspieler at Columbia Pictures, framed as a "vox pop" history of the recovery, is structurally the smartest move in the book. After two hundred pages of close third-person, Ley pulls back and lets the reconstruction be told in the voices of George Patterson, the ninety-six-year-old railroad mechanic in a nursing home calling his interviewer "missy", Dana Creswell at FEMA explaining how General Bill Westhall pre-positioned warehouse space outside every major US city before the Meltdown, the Memphis Klansman digging graves at Woods Hole in convict overalls and cheerfully describing how he and a thousand others walked up Constitution Avenue and burned down the White House, and Mark Bertheau at the Deherelle Institute in Quebec describing how the Riley phage was finally isolated from narwhal excrement by a researcher with an unkind nickname and a decisive cartoon. The narwhal phage. Of course it was the narwhal phage. The microplastics in the food chain concentrated in the gut of the apex predator, ISM along with them, and a phage co-evolved to predate the bacterium inside the only organism that had nowhere else to be. That is biology working the way biology works, and Ley pays it the courtesy of making it sound dull.

The witchfinder bit in Dana Creswell's testimony is the darkest thing in the book and I admire Ley for putting it in a side conversation: "We had a constabulary for civil matters and the witchfinder for religious crimes. We lived in fear of the witchfinder. All it took was an accusation. The church wardens would come and take you. They'd strap you down while the witchfinders women pricked you with their bodkins, searching for the Devil's marks. Men were seldom arrested for witchcraft." Ten lines of text, half a millennium of regression, and Ley moves on. The reader has to live with it.

The closing move, with Squadron Leader Emmaline Lampeter boarding the long-abandoned ISS in 2110 and discovering Jackson still functional and still tending the Mary Lee mausoleum, completes the symmetry. The Postscript explicitly links this novel to the Chronoscape Collection and the Harry Lampeter and the Return to Steam series. Riley as "a catalyst, a unique persona, a trigger for apocalyptic events". The branching tree of histories. On one branch he invents Temporal Messaging. On this one he ignores the emails from the future. Ley has clearly built a multi-branch authorial cosmology and The Digital Meltdown is the load-bearing trunk. I will be reading the rest.

A few smaller things I particularly liked:

The "Circus of Absurdity" chapter, all in newscaster voices: Pauline Dimbleby on the BBC, Senator Donald Trump Jr on Fox News blaming "tricky Chinese gadgets", Professor Bailey on Radio 4 trying to explain ISM and getting cut off when the transmitter goes down. Ley cuts between five outlets in five pages and the entire collapse of public information is right there in the editing. As somebody who has watched real-time crisis comms during pandemics and outages, this section is more accurate than it has any right to be.

The "I read it in New Scientist" line from Cosmo when he is about to inject Estella with NHS-approved tooth-cleaning nanos. Three years later that same NHS will be administering "lavender carts" of night soil. Ley does this kind of seeding constantly.

The Donald Trump talking action figure rolling under the bed shouting "Lock her up. Lock her up". I laughed out loud. The flight attendant gave me a look.

The choice to dedicate this book to the people who keep things working when everything is on fire. The book is, beneath the comedy, a love letter to railroad mechanics, dentists, blacksmiths, midwives, and prepper fathers-in-law who turn out to have been right.

This is the better of the two books, and I say that as someone who liked AGI a great deal. AGI is brilliant in its way, but it is essentially a single voice, FOOM in monologue, with Danni as backboard. The Digital Meltdown is a polyphonic novel: Mary, Estella, Riley, Jackson, Caspian, the oral history voices, Lampeter at the end. It is doing more, and doing it with less self-consciousness about doing it. The collapse is the engine, but the people are the book.

Read it. Read it before you read AGI, ideally, because Book 2 takes the same hardware and gives it a different soul. But read it either way. Twenty-two hours in the air went by in a blink.

Recommended without reservation. Onward to the Chronoscape Collection.