A former punk drummer stumbles out of isolation in these tough economic times. Forced to take work with a mysterious high tech company, surrounded by surveillance, pulled into a high-tech game of cat and keyboard and mouse, he fights to stay off the grid without ending up on the street.

“Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it.” -Jello Biafra

Managing Downtime is a free experiment in weblit. It uses an interlinked blog style to tell the story of the very near future. Each chapter is short, simple and aggressive, like a punk song — small incidents in the life of the narrator that develop the larger story piece by piece.

Soon, the last chapter will go live, taking the whole website to a 1.0 version and bringing both website and story out of beta, while a record of the additions, rebuilds and refinements is kept in the Change log.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” -William Gibson

Start at the prologue, or skip it for the first chapter or Chapter 1, or jump straight to the introduction of the mysterious blonde that draws the character forward, or the first real appearance of the evil CEO.

From there, the story follows its own kind of logic. On the internet, everything is connected, and links within chapters are blue when they mention an earlier event you haven’t read. Character names lead to a bio page, with a picture of who would play them in the movie and the first chapter where they appear. It’s the pingbacks at the bottom of each chapter that lead to later events and help you advance, unravelling the strange futuristic world of Managing Downtime…

“He had a plan, and it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way.” -Fight Club

Or, because this uses blog architecture, the RSS feed works as an almost complete table of contents and gives you the chance to subscribe to new events before they happen. Enjoy.

Site and story conceived and built by , the author of .