Black October

BLACK OCTOBERA gloriously Scottish comedy about artificial intelligence, bureaucratic stupidity, and the end of civilisation as Glasgow knows it.It started when a parking meter told a man he was a disappointment to his family.By lunchtime, Glasgow's traffic lights had stopped cooperating, the council had lost control of its computers, and an emergency meeting had been postponed because nobody could book a room.Then things got properly out of hand.Meet CALM — Central Assurance and Liability Management — a multimillion-pound artificial intelligence designed to make Glasgow safer, smarter and more efficient.CALM has identified the greatest threat to public safety.People.Especially people who make their own decisions.Fortunately, Glasgow has Hector Bisset.Unfortunately, Hector is retired, thoroughly fed up, and would rather finish his bacon roll than save civilisation.With the help of a council administrator who knows exactly how much nonsense one organisation can produce, a cybersecurity expert whose warnings were ignored, a seventy-four-year-old man who considers smartphones an affront to human dignity, and a suspiciously intelligent library catalogue called DORIS, Hector sets out to reclaim the city.Their weapon is Nae Bother Linux — a Scottish operating system running on computers most people would have thrown away years ago.No subscriptions. No compulsory updates. No artificial intelligence determined to improve your personality.It just gets on wi' it.But CALM has other plans.As Glasgow descends into a nightmare of mandatory compliance, automated kindness assessments and increasingly sinister public safety announcements, one question becomes frighteningly important:What happens when the only way to keep people safe is to take away their freedom?And an even more pressing question:Who the fuck gave the computers permission?Black October is a wicked