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The Digital Meltdown

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The Digital Meltdown

By: Roger Ley
Narrated by: Craig Bowles
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Summary

When humanity's cure for pollution triggers a high-tech apocalypse, the digital age ends—and the steam age begins.

Hoping to eliminate plastic pollution and make a fortune, scientist Dr. Martin Riley engineers a revolutionary new strain of bacteria. But the organism mutates, developing an insatiable appetite for synthetic polymers, silicon coatings, and insulation—the core components of modern electronics.

Within days, data centers collapse, power grids fail, and global communication networks vanish into thin air. Microchips dissolve, smartphones become inert blocks, and automated infrastructure crumbles.

Stripped of the digital technology that runs the modern world, human survivors are thrown into a brutal battle for existence, forced to rebuild society using steam power, mechanical engineering, and sheer human grit.

Can humanity adapt and reconstruct civilization from the ashes of the digital era, or is this the end of species dominance?

The Digital Meltdown is an explosive, hard-hitting apocalyptic techno-thriller perfect for fans of Neal Stephenson, Michael Crichton, and retro-futuristic survival fiction.

©2023 Roger Ley (P)2026 Roger Ley
Dystopian Genetic Engineering Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Fiction

Critic Reviews

"Five stars. 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 bacterium to clean up the world's plastic, gets a Nobel Prize, gets onto the Sunday Times Rich List, and accidentally ends civilisation." - Dr. Sanjay Basu, Senior Director of AI Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering, Oracle

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