Here's the plot, in a nutshell:

It's the age of the home-made virus, and humanity is dying. It just doesn't know it yet.

In Prague, a young woman named Eva returns home to escape the plagues, only to find her mother missing and the police blaming her for the worst outbreaks in recent memory. Events are complicated by the appearance of a Healer - a merciless Chinese agent - sent to neutralize a new strain that may bring Prague to its knees.

With only days until the launch of a super-virus, Eva must navigate a hostile city and escape to safety before she becomes another faceless victim in this global, slow apocalypse.

What this blurb doesn't capture is the creepy, dark feel to the prose in this well-crafted novel.

Author MCM is also the creator of cool Canadian kids' show RollBots, coming out this fall. And if you are an anti-authoritarian geek, you may remember his story "The Pig and the Box," which free software crusader Richard Stallman praised as a great way to teach kids about why DRM is bad.

You can access Vector here, for computer or phone.

Here's a great scene where Ong talks to his editor, who is upset because our hero refuses to write about celebrities and "news you can use." Instead, he focuses entirely on environmental issues:

I try to protest. “But you hired me to write the important stories. The stories about politics and the government, to continue the traditions of the old newspapers. I remember what you said when you hired me.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks away. “I was thinking more about a good scandal.”

“The checkerspot is a scandal. That butterfly is now gone.”

She sighs. “No, it’s not a scandal. It’s just a depressing story. No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once. And no one subscribes to a depressing byline feed.”

“A thousand people do.”

“A thousand people.” She laughs. “We aren’t some Laotian community weblog, we’re Milestone, and we’re competing for clicks with them.” She waves outside, indicating the maelstrom. “Your stories don’t last longer than half a day; they never get social-poked by anyone except a fringe.” She shakes her head. “Christ, I don’t even know who your demographic is. Centenarian hippies? Some federal bureaucrats? The numbers just don’t justify the amount of time you spend on stories.”

“What stories do you wish me to write?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Product reviews. News you can use. Just not any more of this ‘we regret to inform you of bad news’ stuff. If there isn’t something a reader can do about the damn butterfly, then there’s no point in telling them about it. It just depresses people, and it depresses your numbers.”

There's a lot of good stuff in Bacigalupi's story, and he offers a pretty accurate sense of how it feels to try to write good stories while tracking audience attention at a micro-level. Interestingly he doesn't take the easy route and set up the Gawker-esque new media companies as the bad guys. The celebrity stalkers and gadget hounds aren't craven idiots - they're good reporters, too, in their own way. One even tries to help Ong get his numbers back up.

But Ong only wants to focus on stories that are beloved by scientists and policy wonks, and they don't represent a demographic the advertisers care about. Interwoven throughout Ong's tale of his struggle to stay competitive in the newsroom are his memories of his father, kidnapped by the secret police during a future Laotian revolution that puts a conservative monarchy in power. Ong's past and political interests are about to propel him into the biggest celebrity gossip news story to hit the feeds in hours . . .

You can now read "The Gambler" for free online here, or pick up a copy of the awesome anthology Fast Forward 2 where it first appeared in print.

In the 1960s, Milgram conducted an infamous set of experiments where he said he was running pain tests. He asked Yale locals to come to his lab to participate in an experiment, and when they arrived they were told they'd "assist" him by using a machine (a prop) to shock his "test subjects" (the actors) until they screamed and in some cases pretended to die. Of course the real test subjects were the people running the fake shock machine, and he was really studying authoritarianism.

Milgram wanted to find out how easy it would be for a regular person to torture somebody else if ordered to do it by an authority figure. What he discovered horrified him — and his unwitting test subjects. Nearly every single person who came into Milgram's lab was willing to torture or kill a person when ordered to do it by Milgram. Only a very few people refused. Many of them protested, but did it when Milgram insisted he was a doctor and knew what he was doing.

Many of his test subjects claimed they'd been traumatized, while for others it became a life-changing experience that inspired them to go into human rights work. Milgram's research is partly what inspired U.S. universities to create committees devoted to oversight of research done on human subjects. Now BoingBoing points us to a new radio documentary where ABC Radio International's Gina Perry tracked down some of Milgram's research subjects/victims and talked to them about their experiences. It's free online!

Stanley Milgram Radio Documentary [via BoingBoing]

Here's an excerpt from her weird tale, which is as much about prison social networking websites as it is about zombies. Link's main character, an ex-con named Soap, is infatuated with zombies, and here he explains why:

Zombies weren’t complicated. It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts or vampires. Vampires, for example, were the middle/upper-middle management of the supernatural world. Some people thought of vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had to look good. Zombies weren’t like that. You couldn’t exorcise zombies. You didn’t need luxury items like silver bullets or crucifixes or holy water. You just shot zombies in the head, or set fire to them, or hit them over the head really hard . . .

Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had to be slow.

Read the rest today at lunch.

Some Zombie Contingency Plans [via Living Dead]

From the story:

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.

I've heard many webbish futurists speculate that A.I. is going to come from search algorithms and user-generated content, but this is the first time I've ever seen anybody explain it in a plausible way. Excellent read. Image via Modern Life is Rubbish.

Engineers' Dreams [Edge via BoingBoing]