Genre: Science Fiction
Setting: In the future, on earth, after a disastrous planet wide civil war.
First Sentence: In 2153 the lottery didn't just change lives it ended them.
This novel is the first in Barnes's Code Breakers series which currently runs to four books.
It is the twenty-second century. Earth has been blasted by a catastrophic civil war. Orbiting Earth is a space station where technologists experiment with improving the human race. On Earth there is the domed City Earth where citizens believe that they are the only survivors of the war. Outside the dome are humans who struggle to survive on the blasted, radioactive surface of the planet.
At each level humans exist in various combinations of biology and technology.
In City Earth, population control is an algorithm that decides who gets to live, and who must die. Our main character, Gerry Cardle, is the author of the algorithm. So it comes as a surprise to him when the algorithm selects him for elimination.
When his number comes up, Gerry escapes from the dome and heads into the wilder parts of the planet. There he joins a group of part-human, part-computer survivors. They are trying to defeat a malicious malware code which endangers City Earth as well as the survivors themselves .
Along the way Gerry discovers that there is something different about his brain and his coding abilities.
For me this was an OK book. Lots of action. Physical battles and cyber attacks. If you are into hard scifi, you might enjoy this novel.
