Berlin, 2020. The world is shutting down. A virus no one can see is doing what the internet already has: fragmenting reality, accelerating paranoia, and exposing every fault line beneath modern life.

The DIGERATI made this world. Oligarchs and authoritarians of the digital age, the data hustlers, platform gods and algorithmic arms dealers who rewired human behaviour for profit and seized the controls of civilisation without firing a shot. At their centre stands Addy Hillyer, Silicon Valley titan, whose billion-dollar empire runs on dopamine loops and the deliberate limbic hijack of three billion nervous systems. Then the Virus nearly kills him. What crawls back out of ICU is not the man who went in.

Berlin knows what it means to live inside a system that gaslights its own citizens. Punk, rave, graffiti, artistic dissent, built on the ruins of fascism, communism and capitalist shock therapy. Silicon Valley's clean, code-driven empire of the mind collides with Berlin's raw, body-first resistance.

Around Addy orbit others in the DIGERATI's grip: Cindy, a wellness influencer whose curated identity combusts under lockdown; Helmut, an East Berlin punk whose Stasi-forged paranoia has curdled into conspiracy; and Algor, an incel hacker who mistakes resentment for revelation. Then there is Madame Jayzay Rouge, dominatrix, iGasm portal queen and chaos attractor, who lures Addy into the subterranean meatspace of Der Fleisch Luft, where the body refuses to be a screen.

Threading through them all is Polter Pixel Geist, an AGI entity of uncertain allegiance who breaks the fourth wall and refuses to be villain or saviour.

Published in 2026, the year AGI became a condition rather than a prediction, Discombobular asks the most urgent question of our moment: do a people with hijacked limbic systems and fractured reality still carry the voltage to resist, reclaim and rewire?

Are you looking up?