'Cyberside: Second Simulation', by Aleksey Savchenko & Bert Jennings

The body is obsolete. Memory is currency. And reality can be rewritten. James Reynolds was one of the engineers who built the Cyberside—a vast digital refuge created after the collapse of the physical world. Now he lives off-grid as a Taciturn, a hired gun with no identity, no allegiance, and no past he’s willing to revisit. Sent to a dying frontier town to eliminate a dangerous digital predator, James expects a routine kill. What he finds is Matilda—a Scry who doesn’t behave like any he’s hunted before, and who knows far too much about the world he helped create. As systems fail and disappearances mount, James and Matilda are drawn into a deeper conspiracy—one that traces back to Fall Water Lake, the origin point of the Cyberside itself. Cyberside: Second Simulation is a sharp, character-driven cyberpunk thriller from two veteran narrative designers.

Years ago, I picked up a book called ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson. It was a bit confusing at first, blurring the line between a techno-reality and this one, but I quickly grew to love how original, sharp and somehow grounded it was.

Reading ‘Cyberside’ gave me a similar feeling - just if it was set in the Wild West.

We follow the journey of James, a former programmer-turned Taciturn (think a Clint Eastwood wanderer meets Neo from ‘The Matrix’) and Matilda, a techno-vampire Scry who feeds on your data, as they traverse the Cyberside. This is a reality that humanity has been forced to retreat to because the world as we know it is no longer liveable. And the Cyberside is not a friendly place.

This is clearly written by guys who know their tech - but they understand that not everyone is quite as au fait with code as they are. Fortunately they’re able to describe virtual worlds as skilfully as bringing them to life on a PC (or VR) screen, and I never felt lost as I walked these bizarre roads.

While ‘Matrix’ analogies are perhaps inevitable, I found the closest to be the recent ‘Matrix: Resurrections’, particularly the despondency of James as a programmer who crunched hard to create something wonderful but succeeded only in losing his life and family. Now he’s a lone gunman seeking to do good within a broken system.

His unlikely companion Matilda is a fantastic badass fighter, seeking her long-lost past and with her unique powers, trying to become more than a villain to be feared.

There’s clever satire here, poking mostly at corporations who don’t understand technology and simply seek to monetise it. Also we encounter adults who choose to live as children in a warped nostalgic playground, literal climbers of the working-world ladder… this is ultimately a tale about how we can actively use virtual space to create a better world or allow ourselves to be controlled by it.

‘Cyberside’ feels like a more grounded and wild version of ‘Ready Player One’, acknowledging the attraction of essentially living in VR versus the darker reality of what that might look like. The core of the story primarily feels like a western (which techie friends tell me is how the old DOS and BASIC days felt), but with a plot that (appropriately) fits many computer games: various parts to a key need to be found in order to set the system to rights.

There are morals here, gently reminding us to hold on to our own power and step up to fight for what we know to be right - even if you’re ‘just’ a code-monkey, you create your own reality.

A smart adventure that rewards those who choose to step into its world.