The Rig

An astounding SF thriller for fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky, Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds and David Mitchell.Humanity has spread across many planets, connected by the Song, the information superhighway, and held together by AfterLife. All humans have neurids – organic chips that record your entire life – implanted in their brains at birth, and at the moment of death, one may be lucky enough to discover that your neurid is active. That means you are placed in a sarc and held in suspended animation in the seas of the planet of Bleak, until a cure for your illness has been discovered and you are put up in a public vote. Billions of people from across the system will read your life story, taken from your neurid, and vote on whether you deserve to be cured. Who needs god when moral behaviour is encouraged by social media?On the planet of Gehenna, the only planet that still worships a god, a hyper-intelligent but socially challenged boy named Alef meets Pellon Hoq, the son of a crime boss whose empire spans the system. Over the course of two decades the friends become the worst of enemies, as Pellon Hoq is driven mad by his own mortality, and Alef seeks to find an answer that will prevent a terrible tragedy.On the planet of Bleak where the sarcs bob in the endless sea amidst the great rigs that extract the planet's core, Raisa is working on a story. She is a writer for TruTales, a Song site that sends her all over the system in search of lives to write down. When a lawman she has been interviewing is drawn into a string of murders, Raisa begins to suspect that her AI handler for the site has a plan for her.At its core, RIG is an SF thriller with two alternating narrative strands that ultimately draw perfectly together. One strand traces the story of two boys bound terribly together, who in time control a vast criminal organisation, while the other explores an apparently insignificant murder that opens into something far greater.