MIR.EXE

In Dillenback’s future-set cyberpunk-thriller, a logistics specialist is forced into a rebel conspiracy to sabotage a corporate state.

It’s 2096 in an independent nation called the Federated States of Alaska. Decades earlier, a breakthrough development involving a superconductor exclusively controlled by local firm Cryosaga boosted the state into a business colossus. An epilogue chronicles the chain of 21st-century geopolitical spasms and conflicts preceding Alaska’s independence from the USA. The new nation is no haven of freedom, but rather a thuggish corporatocracy characterized by vast wealth inequality, runaway technology, ubiquitous brain implants, and murderous surveillance that quashes any resistance. Orphaned in the wars, Echo Kinyata comes from the destitute lower classes. His wife, Lyra, joined the active anti-Cryosaga movement but was punished through her data port with permanent paralysis. Echo was pressured to work for Cryosaga as a shipping/logistics expert (a “CrateGhost,” a virtual-reality upgrade of a stevedore). Lyra’s continued association with the rebels compels Echo to allow a contraband data chip to enter the FSA’s borders; what it contains could cripple or destroy Cryosaga. Impulsively, Echo steals the chip himself rather than passing it on. He quickly becomes a fugitive in a dystopic megapolitan landscape of post-humans, betrayals, e-waste, and cables plugged into the backs of skulls. Fans of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson should be transfixed, even considering the occasional narrative firewalls of flashbacks, bad guys who unaccountably let the good guys escape, and thick tech jargon. (One character “searched for the memory access ports and removed the cap from his expansion port. The DDR9 cartridge was the length of his pinky, with three minuscule rows of thousands of metal tines.”) Devoted readers of similar dark and complicated SF may struggle to suspend their disbelief and accept that an outfit like Cryosaga would knowingly hire Echo, a person with the access and motivation to do the company serious damage. On the other hand, this narrative fuzziness contributes to the Philip K. Dick–like sense of paranoia, unease, and uncertainty about whose side anybody is on.

Bracingly cynical and provocative future-shock cyber-SF.