System stories

An evening street of leaning timber houses and lit shopfronts, cut away below the cobbles to show a brass machine with gears and gauges. Four glass pipes rise from it into the houses, blue for water, amber for power, green for messages and red for money. The red pipe has cracked, and red liquid pours from it into a pool on the cellar floor.

Ankh-Morpork is fictional. Its failures are not, or not entirely. Across Europe in recent years grids have gone dark, payment terminals have stopped taking cards and bridges have fallen into rivers, and each time the surprise was mostly about what else had been depending on them. The city’s systems lean on one another in the same way, and fail in the same way: quietly at first, then all at once, and in the poorer districts first.