A Son of the Rock

Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, 309 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In the aftermath of a nuclear war Indra was brought up in the Order, a religious sect fanatically opposed to technology, whose members are marked out by a crescent moon branded on one cheek. Despite (or because of) this indoctrination she was fascinated by computers which led her to befriend Nyx, who calls her God Girl. One night they were caught in a radioactive storm and, because of her brand, refused shelter till it was too late, unless they had radical medical intervention. Her mother refused to countenance anything so ungodly as nanite repair therapy but her father okayed it, at the cost of rejection from the sect. Nyx was fine but Indra’s rare susceptibility to acute onsite nanite rejection meant the treatment did not work. The Glindell Corporation offered her a way out through Neural Transcendence, the process of uploading a human mind to an artificial drive, a MindDrive housed in a titanium shell.

Not long after the process but before Indra’s old body has been reconstituted in a layer of FleshMesh designed to allow her to experience all the normal senses along with the enhanced ones the new body brings, she began to have dreams and flashback memories which her conscious mind could not reconcile. Dreams of being underwater, of infiltrating a building, of entering the Order’s compound.

As readers we are ahead of Indra here. In a story such dreams are rarely just dreams. So it proves. This is perhaps a trope in which author Kate Dylan ought not to have indulged but her writing is vivid and Indra’s personality engaging – though she does have a tendency to act without considering the consequences. It is Indra’s wish to untangle the dreams and also find her true self in her new existence which propel the plot. Given she literally embodies hi-tech it is a bit of a stretch that she apparently cannot shrug off the thoughts and sayings of the Order’s Leader Duval, which continue to impinge on her along with memories of her mother and father. It is her consciousness that something is wrong, though, the blanks in her post-upload memories, the flashbacks to events she feels viscerally but cannot account for, the feeling she is being used, which lead to her attempt to break free from Glindell’s clutches, taking up with Nyx and an organisation styling itself the The Analogue Army which opposes corporations such as Glindell. In this she is accompanied by Tian, the Glindell researcher who had been assigned to her, but who has now come under her spell.

The backstreet removal of both Indra’s and Tain’s physically implanted NDAs, (the requirement for its employees to accept such devices is one of the indications that Glindell is not a benign outfit, another is that Indra’s MindDrive is legally questionable) is an indicator of the level of technology available in this post-apocalypse world. Indra of course can switch her senses off. Tian can’t, but the nanites in her blood can repair her tissue damage quickly.

There are plenty of plot twists and turns and not a little high-paced adventure still to come in Mindbreaker, yet despite Indra’s artificial body Dylan never lets us lose sight of Indra’s human origins. The novel could even be seen as an examination of whether uploading such as Indra has undergone would mean ceasing to be human.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian, so snuck for sneaked, lay for lie, etc, etc. Otherwise; “wackjobs” (usually spelled whackjobs,) “personal affects” (effects,) “from the face of the earth” (Earth,) “proof that the company’s been flaunting the laws of nature” (flouting the laws,) claxon (several times; klaxon,) “complimenting the shine of his many piercings” (complementing,) “but will only combust when exposed to extremely high heats” (extremely high heat.) “What a difference a few credits make” (what a difference “X” makes, where X = ‘a few credits’,) “that would have easily bankrupt my Order” (bankrupted.) “Her indignance rises to match mine” (indignation,) “my Orders’ deaths” (Order’s,) duffel (spelled duffle at one point,) “once and for good” (conflates two different phrases, ‘once and for all’ and ‘for good’,) “dispatched of them” (conflates two different phrases, ‘despatched them’ and ‘disposed of them’,) “a new crop of my missing memories rear up” (a new crop …. rears up,) “there are whole years’ worth of nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories, and sang mnemonics” (sung mnemonics.)