Fictober, Prompt 10 - “Listen, I can’t explain it, you’ll have to trust me.”, Original Fiction
Warnings: none? Brief space-related danger.
My breath echoed hollowly inside my helmet, and I kept it as slow and even as I could. Panicking now would do nothing to help retain the dwindling oxygen supply strapped to my back.
“Any luck?” I called over the comm. The systems I was looking at gave me hope, but the ship had been floating dead in space for…well, a long time. The wiring was intact, which was a good start.
A grunt was all I got back, and I rolled my eyes. “Arun.”
“There’s an SFOG,” he said, “seems to be intact.”
I let out a breath of relief and felt the worst of the incipient panic lift from my chest. “Let’s stay on our tanks for now,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’ve got at least three hours left, maybe more.”
“I think I’m about the same. That should be enough time to get us moving, and we can fire the SFOG at that point.”
“Which you’re going to do how, exactly? The reactor’s dead-cold. Suit’s not picking up any radiation from that direction, must have run out.” I could hear the frown in his voice; the ship had been drifting for a long time, but probably not long enough that all of the reactor’s fuel would have been consumed.
I pursed my lips, decided I wasn’t quite ready to explain yet, and certainly not over the comm. Arun was going to have a hard enough time accepting what I could do when he could see it for himself. “For now, we just need to get pointed in the right direction and get moving, so a burst should be enough. We can worry about steadier power and steering after that.”
“We’re only so far out of the debris field,” he warned, “but you’re right.”
“Check about the reactor?” I asked, buying a little more time. “I’ll come down to see the engines once I’m finished up here.”
“Yeah.” He clicked off, and I turned my attention back to the panel in front of me. I was going to have to give the engines a pretty good kick, but I did need a little bit of steering and diagnostic information first.
It was harder to do with gloves on, but I always made sure mine didn’t have the wrong kind of insulation in them, so the magic flowed out slowly but steadily into the discreet, five-finger port built into the control panel.
After ten, heart-stopping seconds of nothing, the screens around me winked into life.
I fed them a little more power, then began to shut off system alarm notifications as quickly as I could. It would be safest to assume that everything was dead or malfunctioning, and we could tackle most of it later.
Finding the reactor and engine diagnostics, I confirmed my suspicion that they had been deliberately shut down with magic. The good news was that meant both were probably intact.
The bad news was that if I couldn’t get the blocking magic off, then we were in serious trouble. I could give the engines a kick of pure power to get us moving, but that wouldn’t help us back into atmo when we got to the planet I was hoping was within range. We could resupply on a lot of things there, but only if we could land safely.
Checking a few other small things, I confirmed that the electrolysis water reserves were nonexistent and that there was probably another SFOG in a part of the ship we hadn’t gotten to yet. That would double our potential oxygen supply, and we had enough of our own food and water to see us through to that planet.
If we could get moving. If I could figure out how to steer us around any potential obstacles. If nothing else went wrong.
I muted the system interface and floated deeper into the ship, following Arun back to the reactor and engine rooms.
“It’s weird,” he told me when I joined him by the reactor, “it’s dead-cold, like a said, but it looks like the fuel cells are still there are pretty intact.”
“That’s because they are,” I agreed, steeling myself for this conversation. “The reaction has been stopped.”
“By what?” he demanded, giving me a weird look. “What could possibly do that?”
“Magic,” I said bluntly.
Arun blinked at me, then burst out laughing.
Raising an unimpressed eyebrow at him, I fit my hand into another conveniently placed five-finger slot and let my power flow again. The reactor interface flared into sudden life, flaring the bright green of my magic at first before settling into the soft white of the displays.
Arun wasn’t laughing anymore.
“This,” I showed him on the big screen that projected a diagnostic image of the reactor, “this weird film that seems to be covering the fuel cells? That’s the dampening spell.” With my free hand, I wrote a few sigils on what seemed to be a touch-pad, altering the color of the spell so that it was more visible.
Arun was still staring at me as if I’d grown a second head. I turned as far as I could away from the interface and glared at him. “Look, do you want to get out of here alive or not?”
“I— Ye— What—”
“Listen, I can’t explain it, you’ll have to trust me.” This wasn’t strictly true, but I definitely didn’t have time to explain it right now, and I couldn’t do this alone. “I need your help, because I’m going to have to get that dampening spell off the reactor if we’re going to have any hope. So, are you with me?”
Slowly, he nodded.
“Okay, then here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give this interface enough juice to keep it running for an hour,” based on the current rate of magic it was pulling in, that should be feasible. “I need you to work the controls – letting me into the reactor chamber, opening the fuel cell compartment, all of that – and give me some feedback from the diagnostic here while I go in to try and break that spell.”
“Okay,” he said, gruff. He was frowning now, and I knew he didn’t like the idea of me that close to the reactor, but we didn’t have a choice.
Getting in went smoothly enough, and I got what turned out to be the first of several spell layers undone without any trouble.
“It’s flashing, that spell-thing,” Arun’s voice came over the comm. Then, more urgently, “It’s flashing red.”
“Star-gas,” I muttered, trying to figure out what trap I had just triggered. There hadn’t seemed to be anything strange in that first layer of spell.
Sigils unrolled before me suddenly, counting down to—
With another curse, I flung myself back, scrawling protection and holding sigils with one hand and slapping at the compartment door control with the other, hoping it would close in time…
It did, barely.
A vague whump came as a panel in the floor dropped open, venting the chamber into the vacuum of space outside. I wasn’t sure if this was entirely a cause of the spell, or if it was a last-ditch containment mechanism in case something went horribly wrong with the reactor. They had sometimes put strange solutions on these older ships, when the fear of such things had been higher.
Either way, I had managed my own spells just in time, holding myself and the fuel cell structure in place.
“Hold on!” Arun’s voice sounded distant in my ear, but after a few, agonizingly long seconds, the venting doors were closing, and at last sealed with a hydraulic hiss.
I dropped my spells and collapsed to the newly-intact floor with an exhausted gasp.
“Are you all right?” he shouted, and I managed to get a hand up to wave at him.
“Fine,” I said after a moment. “Fine. Give me a sec.”
His silence had a displeased quality to it, but he let me be. After a few minutes of just breathing (and that stunt had certainly depleted my oxygen tank more than I had hoped, I was able to get up and check things again.
“Okay, no more surprises,” I told him, “just one last layer of spell to take off. The nuclear reaction should kick on again as soon as I take this off, so I’ll get out quickly.”
Arun just grunted, but it sounded like an assent, so I didn’t push for more.
I had just enough brain-power left to manage a small countdown in my own sigils, such that the dampening spell was taken apart just after I got out of the fuel cell compartment and the double door had sealed itself again.
“It seems to be working again,” Arun admitted, still gruff, as I rejoined him by the interface. “Pow- Regular power seems to be coming back into the system.”
I snorted a little. He was definitely going to make me explain it all properly later, but that was all right. With the reactor going again, the engines would run, as would the rest of the ship’s systems. And, since it seemed to have been built and run originally by those like myself, I could use my power to supplement anywhere the electric systems might fail or be beyond repair.
We had time now, and a good shot at getting somewhere habitable.
“Thanks for trusting me,” I told him.
“Thanks for saving us,” he said bluntly.
I smiled. He’d be mad at me, but he’d get over it.
It wasn’t so bad, to have finally told him, I realized. There were so many neat things I could show him now.
(I really wanted to write a cybermage today, so here’s some sci-fi/fantasy. Sci-fantasy? Tumblr says that’s a tag, let’s go with that.
SFOG = Solid fuel oxygen generator, in which a chemical reaction “burns” iron and sodium chlorate to create oxygen.)
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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Cyber Mage by Saad Z. Hossain
In a remarkably short period, the Bangladeshi author Saad Z. Hossain has emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices in SF, earning comparisons to everyone from Joseph Heller to Quentin Tarantino, and as a major figure in an apparent renaissance in South Asian SF (see the next two books under review). Of course, “renaissance” might sound a bit grandiose or even misleading, since arguably fantastic tales in South Asian literature predate any notions of genre by several centuries. There certainly seems to be an upsurge in the availability of South Asian SFF, though, not only in anthologies but in the increasingly prominent work of writers such as Vandana Singh, Usman T. Malik, Gautam Bhatia, S.B. Divya, and of course Hossain himself. Since his first novel Escape from Baghdad in 2015, he’s published only a handful of works, most of which share a uniquely original vision of a post-labor late 21st century in which municipalities have become AI-managed corporations, airborne self-regenerating nanoparticles protect the population from toxic environments, and some highly irritable djinns have re-emerged into a world in which godlike AIs seem to challenge even their supernatural powers. I’m using the term “post-labor” here rather than the more common “post-scarcity” because Hossain makes it clear that, while human labor is no longer needed to sustain the society, poverty and scarcity of resources are still life-threatening problems for the “cardless,” those who don’t own shares in the municipal corporations.
Though it works perfectly well as a standalone, Cyber Mage brings back a few characters from 2017’s Djinn City, to which it’s partly a sequel, and shares important figures with The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (reviewed here in August 2019), to which it can serve as a kind of prequel (the AI called Karma, which manages Katmandu in that novella, has just landed the contract at the end of Cyber Mage). Even the former airport management AI from last year’s story “The Endless” (from Jonathan Strahan’s Made to Order), thrown out of work when airports became obsolete, shows up again, now demoted to managing the physical plant of a high school, and is just as comically resentful as in that story.
We first meet the protagonist Marzuk as a fifteen-year-old gaming genius in Dhaka who has gained an awesome online reputation as the Cyber Mage, a master of the enormously popular Final Fantasy 9000 (which, in a nod to the actual founder of the franchise, is run by an AI named Sakaguchi, whom Marzuk views as “the greatest mind on Earth”). His closest online friend is KPopRetroGirl, but his heart belongs to Amina, a gorgeous but blase student at the local high school. Although he dropped out of school years earlier, and although he’s being courted by several colleges, Marzuk decides to enter ninth grade simply in hopes of being near Amina. Soon he finds himself the target of relentless humiliation by Hinku, a socially-connected, sadistic bully. Hinku is about as convincing as any bully I’ve seen in YA fiction, partly because Hossain details the quite deliberate strategies that so often enable bullies to get away with it. (Cyber Mage isn’t YA, though I suspect bright kids would enjoy it.) It soon becomes apparent that his only chance at retaliation rests with his genius at hacking online systems.
While Marzuk’s problematical high school career plays out in largely familiar YA terms, his encounters with AIs, djinns, and golems involve much higher stakes. He’s been following the actions of an assassin named Djibrel, who grew up as a violent street kid before being transformed into a golem by an ancient djinn named Bahamut, and who now specializes in decapitating his victims with a dragon-forged sword (cutting off heads is the only way to prevent the ambient nanotech from repairing wounds) and then hauling the bloody heads around in a sack. “This was the kind of antisocial behavior which gave him a bad name,” we are helpfully told. As rival djinns escalate their own power plays, Marzuk begins dreaming of a mysterious force he calls Kali, which he fears may be an emergent AI that has somehow figured out not only how to mess with his code, but to actually get into his brain. He later assigns the name to a shadowy web presence whom he meets and befriends. Meanwhile, a city-management AI named Karma is trying to take over Dhaka for its own reasons, and eventually Marzuk finds himself a central player in all these battles, finding unexpected allies in Kali and that ex-airport AI, while learning some surprises about friends like KPopRetroGirl. As usual with Hossain, there are moments of hilarious dark humor and snarky dialogue – he’s particularly good at nailing the whiny voice of that frustrated AI – as well as entertaining if at times overdetailed explanations of some obscure corners of web lore (my favorite is an archaic 11-line program called Left-Foot, underlying far more sophisticated later generations of programs, but without which no online avatar could turn left). While his future version of Final Fantasy might be so evolved as to be almost unrecognizable to contemporary players (of which I am not one), Hossain never quite lets the inside strategies of gaming overwhelm what is supposed to be an epic climactic struggle for the soul and future of Dhaka. At its best, despite its penchant for rambling explanations, this sort of thing recalls the early Neal Stephenson, but Hossain has a voice and a vision entirely his own, and Cyber Mage is as hugely entertaining and provocative as we’ve come to expect from him.
The mercenary Djibrel has to carry a machete wherever he goes. Only a swift beheading can ensure the job gets done anymore. Djibrel navigates the crowded streets, humans teeming with genetic mutations, looking for answers about what happened to the Djinn, a magical super race of genies who seem to have disappeared, or merged, with humans for survival. What Djibrel doesn't know is that his every move is being tracked by the infamous Cyber Mage – better known to his parents as Murzak, a privileged snarky teenager who regularly works for a Russian crime syndicate with a band of elite hackers.
And Murzak is about to embark on one of his biggest challenges: attending high school IRL. But when he discovers a brand new type of AI, operating on a dark web from the abandoned Kingdom of Bahrain that he thought was just an urban myth, Murzak and Djibrel will have to face the unimaginable in an already inconceivable world.
The Aunt who Wouldn’t Die by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Somlata has just married into the dynastic but declining Mitra family. At eighteen, she expects to settle into her role as a devout wife in this traditional, multi-generational family. But then Somlata, wandering the halls of the grand, decaying Mitra mansion, stumbles upon the body of her great aunt-in-law, Pishima.
A child bride widowed at twelve, Pishima has finally passed away at the ripe old age of seventy. But she isn't letting go just yet. Pishima has long harbored a grudge against the Mitras for keeping her in perpetual widowhood, never allowed to fall in love. Now, her ghost intends to meddle in their lives, making as much mischief as possible. Pishima gives Somlata the keys to her mysterious box of gold to keep it out of the Mitras' hands. However, the selfless Somlata, witnessing her new family waste away their wealth to the brink of bankruptcy, has her own ideas.
The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali by Sabina Khan
Rukhsana is unable to come out to her conservative Muslim parents, she keeps that part of her identity hidden. And that means keeping her girlfriend, Ariana, a secret from them too. Luckily, only a few more months stand between her carefully monitored life at home and a fresh start at Caltech in the fall. But when Rukhsana's mom catches her and Ariana together, her future begins to collapse around her.
Devastated and confused, Rukhsana's parents whisk her off to stay with their extended family in Bangladesh where, along with the loving arms of her grandmother and cousins, she is met with a world of arranged marriages, religious tradition, and intolerance. Fortunately, Rukhsana finds allies along the way and, through reading her grandmother's old diary, but will it be enough to save her from what her family has planned.
Djinn City by Saad Z. Hossain
Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic capital Of Bangladesh. His father, Dr. Kaikobad, is the black sheep of their clan, the once illustrious Khan Rahman family. A drunken loutish widower, he refuses to allow Indelbed to go to school, and the only thing Indelbed knows about his mother is the official cause of her early demise: "Death by Indelbed."
But When Dr. Kaikobad falls into a supernatural coma, Indelbed and his older cousin, the wise-cracking slacker Rais, learn that Indelbed's dad was in fact a magician and a trusted emissary to the djinn world. And the Djinns, as it turns out, are displeased. A "hunt" has been announced, and ten year-old Indelbed is the prey. Still reeling from the fact that genies actually exist, Indelbed finds himself on the run. Soon, the boys are at the center of a great Diinn controversy, one tied to the continuing fallout from an ancient war, with ramifications for the future of life as we know it.
Revenge by Taslima Nasrin
In modern Bangladesh, Jhumur marries for love and imagines life with her husband, Haroon, will continue just as it did when they were dating. But once she crosses the threshold of Haroon's lavish family home, Jhumur is expected to play the role of a traditional Muslim wife: head covered, eyes averted, and unable to leave the house without an escort. When she becomes pregnant, Jhumur is shocked to discover that Haroon does not believe the baby is his, demanding an immediate termination of the pregnancy.
Overwhelmed by his distrust, Jhumur plots her payback in the arms of a handsome and artistic neighbor.
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