A Tale of Two Smart Cities

In 2030, a deadly fungal virus wipes out eighty percent of the world's population. A Global Federation seizes control, leaving world governance split between ex¿UN autocrats and heavily fire-walled Russia. When young dissident tech¿wizz Jake Arden is exiled and left for dead in neutral Polesia, fate has other plans. Now in the hands of rogue farmers, a failed systems¿developer nerd and a Russian patrol, he becomes the one man who can turn Smart City code into their biggest weakness. Years later, Olivia Matisse discovers Lydia Marcova, a genetic anomaly, whose existence reveals the Federation's secret plan to lock the human genome under an algorithm. As Jake attempts to crack the grid from the outside, Olivia works from within. Their stories converge on a single act of rebellion in a crowded Bristol creche thirty years earlier. Pulling on that thread could save the people they love, or bring the whole world crashing down. A Tale of Two Smart Cities is a funny, futuristic thriller, where The Hunger Games meets 1984. When owning nothing is mandatory and happiness is an output metric, how much are you willing to break to stay human?