Last month at London’s Stanhope Centre, I gave a little reading from the next book of Themepunks, the novel in progress that Salon syndicated book one of last autumn. Paul Parkinson recorded it and put it on his podcast — here’s the MP3 of the reading and the Q&A that followed.

I’ve started my next podcasting series of fiction-in-progress. This time I’m reading “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” a new story about an apocalypse that arrives on the heels of a catastrophic Internet worm. When the trump sounds, the world’s systems administrators are all in their sealed data-centers, and so they survive the carnage.

He piloted the car
into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary
eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his
sleep-depped eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/modafinil
power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof
clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the
coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size
him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load
of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to
the inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three
sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of
cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and
routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty
other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts
with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones
and multitools.

Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those
bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six
looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by
name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages,
toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

Here’s the part 1 MP3