Loka (The Alloy Era), page 1
PRAISE FOR LOKA
“Loka’s fascinating speculations about the future of technology, the evolution of consciousness, and the ethics of coexistence blend perfectly with its smart and empathetic coming-of-age Around the World in Eighty Days journey of a young woman seeking to forge her own path in a world that may not accept her for who she is.”
—Kate Elliott, author of Unconquerable Sun
PRAISE FOR MERU
“The world presented here is rich and complicated, [and] the love story, plus plenty of jaw-dropping space scenes, will reward readers.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Empathy convincingly overcomes anxiety in this thoughtful, inventive, and impressively understated space opera from Divya, [who] filters the immensity of outer space through the lens of close personal relationships, crafting compassionate and responsible characters (whatever their physical forms may be) that will surely win over readers.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This is a thrilling combination of traditional SF space travel and forward-thinking examinations of what ‘humanity’ will mean in the future.”
—Library Journal
“Divya’s latest (after Machinehood, 2021) is full of twists and turns to keep readers glued to the pages, with rich world-building that will truly invest them in the characters’ fates. Meru transcends genres and will appeal to fans of science fiction, philosophy, and fantasy.”
—Booklist
“Meru proves a worthy addition to the canon of posthuman space epics.”
—The Washington Post
“Meru is a thought-provoking and imaginative future. With an intrigue spanning across interstellar distances, it still manages to be an intimate portrait of love.”
—Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo Award–winning author
“A breathtaking epic tale that challenges our views of humanity and how two individuals can bond. Again, S.B. Divya forges a new trail into what science fiction can be. Follow her and be amazed.”
—Mur Lafferty, Hugo and Nebula Award finalist
ALSO BY S.B. DIVYA
The Alloy Era series
Meru
Other Books
Machinehood
Runtime
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2024 by Divya Srinivasan Breed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662505065 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662505072 (digital)
Cover design by Mike Heath
Cover image: © orxy, © Gestur Gislason, © kavram / Shutterstock
To Maya and to children everywhere, for what they teach us
CONTENTS
START READING
MAP
DAY -46
DAY -45
JAYANTHI (DAY -44)
VAHA (DAY -44)
DAY -42
DAY -14
NARA (DAY -5)
MAP
DAY 1
DAY 4
DAY 9
DAY 11
DAY 12
DAY 19
RESHYAN (DAY 20)
DAY 22
DAY 23
MAP
DAY 26
DAY 29
DAY 30
DAY 31
DAY 32
DAY 35
NARA (DAY 37)
JAYANTHI (DAY 38)
DAY 41
DAY 42
DAY 43
DAY 50
MAP
DAY 62
RESHYAN (DAY 63)
DAY 64
DAY 65
DAY 68
DAY 73
DAY 80
DAY 84
JAYANTHI (DAY 87)
DAY 89
DAY 90
DAY 100
MAP
DAY 111
DAY 118
DAY 119
DAY 124
RESHYAN (DAY 127)
DAY 129
VAHA (DAY 133)
NARA (DAY 135)
MAP
DAY 140
DAY 150
DAY 160
NARA (DAY 167)
DAY 174
DAY 175
YEAR 2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Axioms of Life
A life-form has a boundary, perceptible using its own sensory capabilities, that separates it from the environment.
A life-form has a built-in drive to live and reproduce, which implies that it must have a nonliving state.
A life-form is capable of accruing information about its environment and storing this information within its own structure.
A life-form can communicate information to other life-forms that share some or all of its sensory modalities.
A life-form can adapt to its environment and/or alter its environment over time and/or successive generations of itself.
The Principles of Conscious Beings
All matter possesses some level of consciousness.
All forms of consciousness have equal value in the universe.
Possession of conscious4ness is necessary but not sufficient for life-forms.
A Being is a structure with sufficient consciousness that it has the ability to reshape matter.
An Evolved Being is a Being that is also a life-form.
All Beings should minimize harm to other forms of consciousness, with priority given to other Beings.
DAY -46
In the old epics, heroes are born to a great destiny. They’re supposed to feel grateful for that, proud that fate has chosen them over all others. I’d spent my entire life living under the weight of such expectations, except that my future wasn’t foretold by the gods or some kind of magic. It was a result of my carefully crafted DNA and the choices my parents had made sixteen and a half years earlier.
A more immediate destiny lay a few hundred meters ahead, and all I had to do to reach it was keep pedaling. Behind me, my three friends—the only ones close to my age on this world—rode their own bikes. For once, I was in the lead. I suspected that Somya, my heartsib, had told the others to let me reach our destination first, since I would never make the journey again.
The path beneath our tires meandered through a grove of fruit trees. Glittering insectoid microconstructs buzzed between the blossoms while larger metal constructs tended to the care and feeding of the plants, their appendages working as both arms and legs. All of them were extensions of Chedi, a conscious megaconstruct whose vast cylindrical body formed the only home I’d ever known. She carried several hundred humans through space, traveling from one star system to another, including visits to the Solar System every couple of years. Unlike my friends, though, I had never set foot on Earth.
My parents had been exiled shortly before my birth, and they chose to serve their time inside Chedi. Because my mother was pregnant with me, the law technically included both of us for the duration of her exile, but that period was about to end. In a few days, Chedi would transit to the Solar System, and my mother, my maker, and I would leave for Earth. For the first time in my life, I would learn what human existence really meant.
I brought my bike to a halt in front of a boxlike structure that stood a bit taller than me. A doorway led into a shaft that rose along one of Chedi’s flat ends, all the way to her central axis. We didn’t have time to go that far up, but there were plenty of stops along the way. Somya, Huy, and Cariana arrived shortly after me. The three of them formed a spectrum—Som with their long black hair in a braid, Huy with a messy mop of loose red curls, and Cari with her blonde hair cropped short. With my black hair short and curly, I had aspects of all three.
“You came in first!” Somya said, miming applause.
I rolled my eyes. “I know you let me win.”
My statement was met with three overly innocent expressions and a volley of protestations. I couldn’t help laughing at my friends. It felt good to beat them, even if they had allowed it. Huy usually won our races, being both the tallest and the oldest of our small group. At eighteen, he was a year older than Somya, who led me by about four months. Cariana, fourteen, was our most junior member. She was also our newest, having come into Chedi only two years earlier, during our last visit to the Solar System.
“First to arrive means first up,” Somya said.
They waved me through the doorway. Inside the housing, a squat maintenance construct slept in its power cradle. I walked past it and through another doorway into a narrow shaft that housed a ladder. With a deep breath, I began to climb. The rungs trembled as the others stepped on. The biosynthetic material felt warm under my grip. The ladder and the shaft walls glowed with pale lime-green luminescence. The color reminded me of sunlight on the floor of a rainforest, which I’d only seen in immersives.
“Ouch! You just kicked my head,” Huy protested.
I paused my climb for a second to make sure his words weren’t directed at me. A downward glance revealed Somya’s dark head immediately below my feet. I kept climbing.
“Sorry,” Somya said, their tone cheerful. “My foot slipped.”
I looked up the utility shaft and saw our destination bordered by a ring of green light. It outshone the gentler glow of bioluminescence that traced the carbon-composite walls around us, and it marked the entrance to the first hull access point.
“Almost there,” I called down.
Less than a minute later, I stepped off the rungs and clambered into a tunnel. I walked forward until I found the pile of coats that we’d left on our last visit. I shrugged mine on and passed the others to my friends.
“I guess you won’t need these much longer,” Huy said.
“I will once we get to Meru,” I said. I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my tone.
After a brief stay on Earth, my parents and I would move two hundred light-years away to a different planet, one where they intended for me to fulfill my birthright.
“Come on, Aks,” Somya said. They slung an arm around my shoulder and dragged me deeper into the access tunnel. “You only have to put up with Meru for five years.”
“That’s nearly a third of my age,” I pointed out.
The air grew colder as we walked. Chedi kept her interior climate pleasant for her human residents—warm during the day, a little cooler at night to help us sleep, never too humid or too dry. From what I had heard of Loka—the latitudes of Earth managed by the alloys—it was much the same way. The weather didn’t get uncomfortable until you passed into the Out of Bounds. Meru’s atmosphere, on the other hand, was left to do whatever it pleased. The humans on its surface—the few that alloys allowed to live there—had to wear coats, shoes, and even hats to maintain a comfortable body temperature outside.
“What’s happening in five years?” Cariana asked.
“I’ll explain on the other side,” Somya said.
We arrived at the hatch. Somya touched their hand to its sensor, and Chedi swung it open. The thin, cold air stung my face and lungs. We let the door shut behind us. We would have fifteen minutes to return. If we didn’t, Chedi would send one of her ambulatory constructs to check on us. She understood human development enough to know that adolescents needed to exercise our independence and have a place we could talk without oversight. That was what she’d told us when we asked to go into the space between her inner and outer hulls.
A walkway about two meters wide hugged the inner wall, its surface stippled to provide grip for the feet of a construct. It worked well for our shoes, too, a good thing considering the vertigo-inducing wall of ice ahead of us. The solid mass provided radiation shielding for all life inside Chedi. Most of it loomed in darkness, but ambient light from the walkway lit the nearest surface and revealed shades ranging from pale blue to white.
I reached out and touched the ice to complete our ritual visit. The others did the same before sitting down on the walkway.
“In five years,” Somya explained, “Aks will turn twenty-one.” Their breath formed wispy clouds as they spoke. “At that point, she’ll be a legal human adult, and she can go wherever she wants.”
Cariana craned her head past Huy’s bulk and asked me, “I thought your parents let you be an adult at fifteen because of your maker?”
My mother was human, but my other parent—my maker—was an alloy, a genetically engineered descendent of humankind and the current dominant species in the Constructed Democracy of Sol. Since birth, my parents had access to my bodym, a system that integrated with all my bodily functions and allowed me to access any public network. After age fifteen, my maker convinced my mother to give me full privacy, a choice that humans didn’t have to make since their children didn’t get bodyms. Usually only alloys had the internal networks, but I’d received one at my parents’ request. It wasn’t my only unique feature, but the other one was a carefully kept secret, and I hadn’t yet revealed it to Cariana.
“My adult status only applies in Chedi,” I explained, “because she can set her own laws within herself. On Earth and everywhere else in the CDS, I’m still considered a minor. That changes when I turn twenty-one, and when that happens, I’m going back to Earth so Somya and I can do the Anthro Challenge.”
As part of Cariana’s induction into our group, we had insisted that she read A Journey of Human Power by Rune Edersan, the only human being alive who had circumnavigated the Earth using human-era technology. He was the first to call it the Anthro Challenge, back in 691 Alloy Era, thirty years before I was born. I was determined that one day, I would replicate his accomplishment.
“After we finish the challenge,” Somya said, “we’re going to live in the Out of Bounds and form a society more like the one here, where people can more freely express their ambitions.”
Huy snorted.
Somya leaned conspiratorially toward Cariana. “Huy thinks that’s a big mistake.”
“Why go to all that effort when paradise is right here?” Huy spread his arms wide. “Chedi allows as much ambition as you want, and you don’t have to worry about alloys hassling you for it.”
“You’ve never lived on Earth,” Somya countered. “How would you know?”
“Neither has Akshaya,” Huy said. “And you’ve been on Chedi since you were ten years old. It’s not as if you understand what life is like there, especially in the Out of Bounds.”
Huy made a fair point. All of our families lived in Loka, in the managed latitudes, so even during planet-side visits, Somya, Huy, and Cariana had no experience with the OOB, where humans went if they didn’t want to conform to Loka’s behavioral requirements.
“We’ve read a lot about it,” I said. “And we’ve done a lot of immersives.” I couldn’t help coming to Somya’s defense.
Huy radiated skepticism.
“Plus,” Somya said, “we’ll have to pass through the OOB when we do the Anthro Challenge, so we’ll get a better idea of what it’s like.”
The equatorial latitudes were outside of Loka, and circumnavigation meant crossing the equator. Rune had done it via sailboat, so he hadn’t spent a lot of time with the people in those regions, but Somya and I could take a different approach. The challenge had no time limit. We could spend months traveling and exploring the Out of Bounds, if we wanted to.
“So what will you do on Meru in the meantime?” Cariana asked me.
“Suffer,” I said.
“But you’re so perfectly suited for the planet,” Somya said with a grin.
I rolled my eyes at them. My mother had said those words for my entire life. How she’d crafted some of my genes for living on Meru. How our shared sickle-cell traits, combined with some choice mutations, would allow my body to thrive on the planet’s highly oxygenated air. How my existence had changed the course of human history and would do so again after I proved my fitness on Meru’s surface.
I was so sick of it. “I’ve spent my whole life here on Chedi,” I said. “I want to experience being human on Earth. Why would I be excited about an empty planet that’s barely hospitable to life?”
“Sorry to bring up a sore subject,” Cariana said.
I waved off her apology. “It’s not your fault. I’m not angry at you, only at my life.”
Before I could wallow deeper, an alert blinked in my visual field that our time was up. I stood up, and the others followed me out without a word. I regretted that I’d brought the mood of the group down, but I didn’t know how to relieve the awkward silence.
Inside the access tunnel, the others left their coats behind. I removed mine and tied it around my waist. My mother had asked me to bring it back so she could pack it with our other items. I’d begged her to bring my bike, though I wasn’t sure where I’d be able to ride it, and she had allowed that, too. Unlike on Earth, where alloys would make items upon request, the resources on Meru were limited. I doubted the alloys in charge would fabricate a solar bike for me.
“First up, last out,” I said as we neared the top of the ladder.
“You know,” Somya said, “if you’re the one making the rules, you can also change them.”
“It’s not much of a rule if you change it when it gets inconvenient,” I retorted.
