I am so excited that THE BABEL
APOCALYPSE by Vyvyan Evans is available now and that I get to share the news!
If you haven’t yet heard about this
wonderful book, be sure to check out all the details below.
This blitz also includes a giveaway for a finished copy of the book courtesy of Vyvyan & Rockstar Book Tours. So if you’d like a chance to win, check out the giveaway info below.
About The Book:
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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