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on the THE BABEL APOCALYPSE by Vyvyan Evans Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out
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About The Book:
Title: THE BABEL APOCALYPSE (Songs of the Sage
#1)
Author: Vyvyan
Evans
Pub. Date: May 2, 2023
Publisher: Nephilim
Publishing
Formats: Paperback, eBook
Pages: 388
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/THE-BABEL-APOCALYPSE
"They who control language
control everything."A dystopian, cyberpunk, sci-fi odyssey that will
make you think about language in a whole new way.
Language is no longer learned, but
streamed to neural implants regulated by lang-laws. Those who can't afford
language streaming services are feral, living on the fringes of society. Big
tech corporations control language, the world's most valuable commodity.
But when a massive cyberattack causes
a global language outage, catastrophe looms.
Europol detective Emyr Morgan is
assigned to the case. His prime suspect is Professor Ebba Black, the last
native speaker of language in the automated world, and leader of the Babel
cyberterrorist organization. But Emyr soon learns that in a world of corporate
power, where those who control language control everything, all is not as it
seems.
As he and Ebba collide, Emyr faces an
existential dilemma between loyalty and betrayal, when everything he once
believed in is called into question. To prevent the imminent collapse of
civilization and a global war between the great federations, he must figure out
friend from foe-his life depends on it. And with the odds stacked against him,
he must find a way to stop the Babel Apocalypse.
“A perfect fusion of SF, thriller,
and mystery—smart speculative fiction at its very best.”- Kirkus
"With a perfect blend of Sci-Fi,
mystery, and thriller, its unique method of crashing a near-future Earth
society had me hooked from start to finish."- Reedsy
Excerpt:
"They who control language control everything."
From the Babel Apocalypse Manifesto
by Professor Ebba Black
CHAPTER
1
My
mother's dying wish was to be buried in Wanstead earth. The place of her
birth. Near the end of her existence, her skin became veiny and
translucent and her memory as frail as her body. By then she had begun to
address me by my late father's name. I felt repulsion. I'm Emyr, I
had wanted to scream, I'm not him. I was nothing like him. I was tall, dark,
and had a strong moral compass. He was slight, with a ruddy complexion,
and lacked scruples. But at least I no longer harbored anger for my mother's
betrayal, for my boyhood trauma; that had gone. The solace of time. But I
hadn't forgiven her either. And as I hurried away from the cemetery once it
was done, I felt only ambivalence.
By
the time I reached Manor Park, twilight had become darkness. I walked
along the pedestrian corridor, heading back to where I had parked my Skyraider.
The cold air swirled around me, so I pulled up the collar of my Napa coat against the
chilly November evening. Soft grain leather. Italian design. I loved that
fur-lined coat. I hated this foreign city. I wanted to get back to my life,
and my job across the water; to get home.
The
networked system of LED streetlights slowly dimmed behind me before
slipping into darkness, while those ahead flickered on, transmitting my
location to one another and London's communication nerve center, hosted
on an aging server in space. The electric glow dappled the walls of the buildings,
making the windows appear to pucker in the shadowy light.
I
heard a group of drunken revelers behind me. “He always has a line for the
ladies," said one slurred voice. The boozy pitch contour wobbled toward
me, bouncing along the polycarbonate surface. Then came an eruption of cackling.
As
I was about to glance back at the voices, a light flickered in my
peripheral vision, drawing my gaze upward to the night sky. A soft white
glow, high up in the dark. At first it was indistinguishable from the
airway lights. But it persisted, the size of a small disk at first, before shifting
to red-orange, getting larger. At that point I realized it definitely couldn't
be a hover car. This was farther up, probably low Earth orbit,
which explained the initial white. But the shift in coloration—that meant
a detonation, producing nitrogen dioxide, which turned deep orange when
mixed with air. A gaseous cloud has reached the atmosphere, I
thought. I was witnessing a chemical explosion in space large enough to be visible
to the naked eye. But what was exploding?
As
I continued looking up, the orange grew in intensity until it flared across
the skyline, illuminating the entire landscape around me with an eerie red-orange.
It was only then that I became aware of the newly hushed silence of the drunken revelers
nearby. And the silhouettes of other people too, who had also stopped and
peppered the pedestrian corridor. We were all now strange red creatures, watching
transfixed in rapt silence as the night sky was on fire. And just as suddenly
as it had appeared, it was gone; the orange light faded back into a deep
well of pitch black.
I
was pulled out of my reverie by the sight of a hover car descending onto the
vertipad ahead of me. A three-wheeler autonomous hackney cab; mass-produced
model. I watched in idle distraction as the glass frontage descended level
with my eyeline, not twenty meters from me. Inside, I saw a woman,
illuminated by the interior safety lighting-late twenties, perhaps, with a small
child, a boy of about three or four. The red glow of the vertipad's perimeter
security lights bounced sharply off the polymer composite shell, which
advertised the taxi company in holographic lettering. The vehicle came to a standstill
on the vertipad.
But
something about the hover taxi held my gaze. I realized it was the
autogyro system. Something was wrong. Instead of self-stowing, it remained
deployed. And the vehicle stayed in place where it had landed, in the
middle of the vertipad. Strange, I thought. It should have taxied away
onto the transit corridor by now. Maybe the explosion had affected the landing
telemetry circuit. Stranger still, given the passengers were now stuck
inside, why hadn't they voice-activated the exit? The gull-wing doors remained
closed.
I
climbed over the thermoformed pedestrian barrier, ignoring the warning
sensors as they flickered on, blinking at me, and walked up the vertipad
incline toward the hover cab. The woman peeked out, panic etched on her face.
As she glimpsed me through the glass, she suddenly began banging as if in desperate
supplication. I mouthed that she should issue her door deactivation voice command
into the piloting VirDa. She didn't seem to understand me, so I spelled out
Virtual Digital Assistant with my forefinger on the window-VirDa; a crude attempt
to make her react.
She
stared out at me with wild eyes through the gull- wing window; a look of incomprehension.
I realized that her apparent lack of understanding could only mean one
thing: she was feral! Her language streaming service was out. She had no idea
what I was saying, nor could she communicate with her VirDa. And then she
screamed.
Helpless,
I watched the terror contained within the soundproofed confines of the
plastic hull. The little boy's upturned face shifted to fear and then distress
as he witnessed his mother's frenzied panic; the child began to cry. I watched
through the glass, witness to the sobs I couldn't hear.
Just
then, I heard the roar of VTOL thrust engines. I glanced up. Another hover
car was descending, way too fast, dropping directly onto the vertipad, destined
for the hackney cab that lay stationary beneath.
I
was trained to process details happening in real time with the precision
afforded by the slow dilation of protracted duration. With focus, I could
unpick the frenzy of multiple rapid events within a temporal landscape
perceived with an ethereal slow-motion calm. I observed that the descending hover
car was a private vehicle-it had four wheels with expensive alloys that glinted
in the marker lights of the VTOL corridor. And as it dropped, I saw that it had
air capture ducts underneath and a CO, cooling condenser, allowing supersonic flight
in international sky lanes. This was a beast of car with a truly global
range, an expensive piece of engineering.
There
was a man seated at the piloting console. I glimpsed him in the shimmering
red of the security lights. To my shock, I realized the descending car was
in manual flight mode, which was not permitted in class R airspace, above the
city. What was the guy thinking? A collision was now inevitable.
Just
before the two vehicles came together, I saw the woman following my gaze. She
glimpsed what was about to befall her, the edge of the other hover car
tumbling fast toward her. She made a sudden, startled move for the child.
An instinctive shielding gesture, perhaps.
To
protect myself, I ran back several meters from the vertipad as the falling
vehicle smashed into the roof of the stationary cab. Then came a deafening
bang. The impact severed the autogiro blades of the vehicle beneath,
which snapped off the roof bearing and spun across the adjacent taxi lane,
making a sickening scything sound on the hard plastic surface. I squinted through
the darkness as smoke rose from the wreckage. A hissing sound was coming
from the tangled mess of the upper vehicle. The hackney cab underneath had
somehow resisted the impact. Its reinforced plastic structure appeared
largely intact.
I
returned to the crash site and climbed onto the protruding front hull, from
where I was able to peer into the stricken car on top. The lighting on the piloting
console was dimmed, but I could make out splashes of blood on the inside of
the cracked windscreen. Some of the ceiling safety lights were still lit;
they dimly illuminated the twisted, seemingly lifeless body of the pilot,
lying across the front passenger seats where he had been tossed by the collision.
I
jumped back down onto the vertipad, searching for the woman and child in
the car underneath. My training dictated aiding the most vulnerable first.
I turned to a group of onlookers, and called for assistance with getting the
injured out.
It
was then that I became aware that they were strangely silent, especially given what
they had just witnessed-the first hover car crash in years. Each
individual was eyeing the others, attempting to mouth something. Only one man
seemed still able to speak. He began talking excitedly. But, to my surprise,
he was speaking in a non-Union official language. I recognized it as Mandarin.
Others nearby stared at him in startled bafflement. And as he heard the
strange sounds coming from his mouth, his words slowly lapsed into silence
as a look of darting fear flashed across his face.
I
resumed my rescue attempts on the vertipad, picking up a broken piece of
carbon-reinforced sidebar lying next to the wreckage. I used it to try and
prize open one of the gull-wing doors of the hackney cab, but the weight
of the upper vehicle prevented the door from deploying. I ran around to
the other side. This time I managed to apply enough pressure to gain leverage. The
door hissed as the hydraulic mechanism deployed and the gull-wing slowly opened
up and out. The woman and child lay crumpled and still on the floor of the vehicle
beneath the concave splintered roof.
As
my first aid training kicked in, I checked they were both breathing. Then I
lifted the child out, supporting his head, followed by the woman using a
shoulder pull. I quickly carried the boy down the vertipad incline, away
from the vehicle, then carefully pulled the woman along until they were
both a safe distance from the wreckage. The woman's nose looked
broken and blood oozed from her nostrils. She had been thrown forward
against the glass passenger cabin frontage. I suspected there may be
internal injuries, too.
Just
as I finished placing them both in the recovery position, a flicker of flame
began nibbling gently from somewhere beneath the plastic front of their
cab. I smelled the distinct odor of rotten eggs-the toxic combination of
sulfur at high temperature that had leaked from the ion-sulfur battery and reacted
with hydrocarbons in the taxi shell to create hydrogen sulfide. The flames
began spreading rapidly. Before I could act, they had engulfed the second vehicle.
The man, even if still alive, was now beyond my help.
I
felt the vibrations of an incoming alert in my ear implant-I tapped my
left wrist to activate my holotab. The chip in my wrist glowed briefly green
before projecting a holographic screen. There it was-a Europol alert
banner scrolling across the small translucent screen floating above my wrist.
A red alert status had been triggered.
"Global
language outage. Report to HQ." The hairs on the back of my neck
stood up. A language outage. What does that even mean?
I
knew I had to get help for the hackney cab passengers before responding to the alert.
That was the protocol: ensure no immediate danger to life before answering
another request.
I
scrolled through the menu on my holotab using the eye-tracking sensor tech,
selecting the London emergency services app with a blink command. Then I
issued an in-app voice command, placing a facecall.
The
connection should have been instantaneous. But instead, I heard the
distinctive shrill pitch of an unrecognized call attempt. I frowned and tried
again. This time I was patched through to a human dispatcher. An actual human!
But then again, the Old Kingdom was just a Tier Two state. Soc-ed classification
and the United Nations' job automation agenda didn't fully apply.
The
dispatcher was a young woman with her headset slightly skewed. She appeared
surprised to see me through her screen.
She
began speaking: "Toate serviciile de urgenţă sunt indisponibile." I
regarded her in surprise. As my auditory nerve activated, my language chip
began to auto-parse. I recognized her words as the state official language
of Romania. What the hell .....
"All
emergency services are down?" I asked. She looked at me, both
confused and alarmed. It was clear she had no clue what I had just said. I
blink activated the language app on my holotab before issuing my voice command.
"Switch
to Romanian as default,” I said. The single vibration in my ear implant
indicated that my language setting had been changed. I addressed the woman
again. "Toate serviciile de urgenţă sunt indisponibile?"
I repeated, this time in Union Standard Romanian.
"Da."
She nodded.
“Eşti româncă?" I asked. She
shook her head. If she's not a Romanian national, then why does
she have her language set to Romanian? I thought. Especially working
in the London emergency services center, where the VirDas operated solely
on the local state official standard. Last time I'd checked, there was only
one state official language in the Old Kingdom. And since Unilanguage's decision
to stop supporting King's English at the beginning of the year, all
official VirDas in London now only ran on the North American Standard
variety.
"Nu
mai pot vorbi engleza, nu înţeleg ce
s-a întâmplat," she replied with a small shrug, tears welling
in her eyes. And abruptly, she pulled off her headset and ended the call. She
seemed equally shocked at her inability to speak English anymore.
“Dezactivează
limba română. Setează
limba engleză ca implicită,” I said, issuing my voice command
into my holotab to deactivate Romanian and return to English. "Facecall
Europol SOS."
I
was patched through to the Europol virtual emergency response center. The
standard, flaccid face of the dispatcher VirDa appeared on the holographic
screen, which projected from my wrist like an ethereal membrane in the dark of
the autumnal evening.
"Commander
Emyr Morgan," the VirDa said, addressing me in the Europol default, North
American Standard English.
"I've
received a code red alert. And I have civilians down. The London emergency
center is no longer operational."
"Yes,
a catastrophic language outage has been reported," the VirDa confirmed.
"What do you need, Commander?"
"An
air ambulance, a paramedic, and direct access to a local ER."
After
a slight pause, the VirDa responded. "I have placed an emergency request. A
Union crew is assigned, traveling across the Old Kingdom channel via the South
Holland airway.”
"Copy,
thanks. End call," I said. Catastrophic language outage? What the hell's
going on?
About Vyvyan Evans:
Dr. Vyvyan Evans is a native of Chester, England. He
holds a PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and is
a Professor of Linguistics. He has published numerous acclaimed popular science
and technical books on language and linguistics. His popular science essays and
articles have appeared in numerous venues including 'The Guardian', 'Psychology
Today', 'New York Post', 'New Scientist', 'Newsweek' and 'The New Republic'.
His award-winning writing focuses, in one way or another, on the nature of
language and mind, the impact of technology on language, and the future of
communication. His science fiction work explores the status of language and
digital communication technology as potential weapons of mass destruction.
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Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a finished copy of THE BABEL APOCALYPSE, US Only.
Ends May 9th,
midnight EST.
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