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Human Software
A Novel
This book is 100% completeLast updated on 2026-08-17
Beth is an overworked engineer keeping the lights on. Chrissie is the executive sent to turn them off. Can two women on opposite sides of the system come together before it’s too late?
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About
About the Book
When corporate wants you gone, who does the dirty work?
Beth Walters has kept Gerbach's crumbling IT systems alive through skill, stubbornness and too many sleepless nights. She knows where the bodies are buried — technically speaking.
Then Christine Hegarty flies in from New York with a mandate, a deadline, and no patience for sentiment. She's done this before. She thinks she knows how it ends.
When a fatal data breach rocks the declining port town of Sandport, Beth's name is on the wrong piece of code. What follows is a fight for her job, her team, and her reputation against a company that has already decided who it's going to sacrifice.
Set in a decaying corner of coastal Kent, Human Software is a novel about corporate rot, institutional failure, and the people the system is designed to grind down. A wry, quietly unsettling read about AI, community and what it costs to be human at work.
"Freaked me out more than any Stephen King novel" JEREMY MARKEY — Rands Slack Book Reviewer
"Vivid world-building and well-rounded characters. I found myself completely hooked." RUSSELL MCLEAN — Emmy and BAFTA Award-Winning Producer
"A proper page turner, part thriller, part whodunnit and a fine dystopian parable" CHARLES HUMBLE — Tech Consultant & Journalist
“A proper page turner, part thriller, part whodunnit and a fine dystopian parable” - CHARLES HUMBLE, Tech Consultant & JournalistProducer Black Mirror
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Author
About the Author
Richard Bown
I'm a writer and software engineer who has worked in corporate technology for over thirty years. I've helped build and run plenty of elaborate technical systems, but I slowly came to realise that the real art of building systems, and the part I enjoyed most, was understanding the people who built them.
Alongside my work, I've taken regular breaks to write, record music, develop open-source software and build software products. I've written and spoken extensively about the human side of working in technology, including case studies for the second edition of Team Topologies and talks at conferences on socio-technical systems and what it means to be a human working in tech.
Human Software was my debut novel, published in 2025. It grew out of what it actually feels like to work inside corporate systems, alongside a growing disquiet about data centres and AI, and the thin line executives tread between ambition and greed.
I'm currently writing the follow-up, One More Island, as well as Back on the Tools, a non-fiction book about navigating a late-career life in engineering in the 2020s.
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