I don’t know if this even counts – it might be a short story. But then again, it might be a novella (I read it online and wasn’t paying attention to its length).
So, I’m both a great and terrible audience for this – I won’t pretend to have understood most of their sysadmin stuff. But I do love an apocalyptic situation. So…here we go.
An extremely short and oversimplified synopsis might be Computer Geeks Save Us All. An extremely fast-acting virus has more or less ended civilization and we’re with some survivors, who are, as you may have guessed, a bunch of sysadmins, who are holed up in a data center. They pretty quickly come to understand that they’re likely some of the few people left. The outside world has become all but unresponsive, and that includes, of course, spouses and children. So the CGs have some decisions to make, and/or some work to do. Oh, the humanity. What’s worth saving? What is the true best use of the internet? Is work intrinsically valuable? How do you rebuild the world?
There’s not enough time to properly address all of these concepts but I liked that this made me think about them. And I did feel their stress caused by, among other things, the need to compartmentalize in order to keep from going mad.
Character development is seriously lacking, close to caricature in some cases. And there were some pretty interesting ideas examined for about a paragraph and then just abandoned. A friend who’s tech-savvier than I am said it was distractingly dated. I can’t speak to that, but did feel unsatisfied by some of the rushed-past potential plot points. But, short story/novella length didn’t really allow for much depth.