Mindbreaker

by Kate Dylan

Genres: YA Dystopian; YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

Set in the same world as the extraordinary Mindwalker, Mindbreaker is an action packed young adult science fiction novel asking: what would you sacrifice to survive?

They saved her life. But at what cost?

Born into a religious, anti-tech cult, seventeen-year-old Indra lives a simple, mod-free existence on the fringe of society. But when an illicit trip to the city leaves her with a debilitating - and terminal - condition, Indra must make a choice: die faithful, or betray her Order and accept the cure Glindell Technologies is offering.

Forced to sign over full ownership of her life, Indra is horrified to learn how Glindell chose to save her mind and body. On the outside, she still looks the same. On the inside, Indra's not so sure. She's missing time, for one thing, and more than once, she finds herself in places she really shouldn't be, with no memory of how she got there and abilities she can't explain.

So when news breaks of a vicious attack against Glindell's biggest rival, Indra begins to suspect the worst about her new master. With help from her one friend at the company, Tian - a research assistant with a genius IQ and a smile that won't quit - Indra manages to escape the lab. Then together with the anti-corp faction she and Tian turn to for help, Indra must uncover the truth behind the procedure that saved her life, before Glindell can use it to change the face of technology - and what it means to be human - forever.

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: September 14, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE

Today’s the day my parents decide whether to sell me or let me die. Since I’m confined to a room at the forgotten end of the compound, I can’t hear how that conversation is going, but I have a pretty good idea. You should have never taken her to that clinic, Mom will be saying over and over, no matter how many times Dad reminds her that if he hadn’t smuggled me there—against her and Leader Duval’s wishes—I’d already be dead.

Acute onset nanite rejection, the doctors called it. Caused by a freak allergic reaction and a recessive gene so rare, no one would have thought to test me for it even if I didn’t bear the Order’s mark on my cheek. A Crescent Dove. A message to the world that screams: I reject your dependence on technology. Tattooed in stark black ink before I was ever old enough to make that decision for myself.

Though I did make the decision that landed me in this predicament, I suppose—as Mom is only too happy to remind me. While Dad’s been drawing the Order’s ire trying to keep me alive, she’s done nothing but proselytize. You should have never left the compound, Indra. Do you see what your obsession with computers did, Indra? You left God no choice but to punish you, Indra.

And punish me God did.

With rapidly ascending paralysis and a death sentence.

The clinic gave me three months. By the end of the first, I could no longer move my legs. The following week, the disease stilled my hands. Then my arms. Now it’s coming for my lungs. There are machines that could keep me alive once it takes those too, but God’s anti-tech, remember? So even if we could afford that kind of treatment, it wouldn’t be in my cards.

Christ Almighty. The tightness growing in my chest builds with every second the door remains closed and my fate unsealed. It’s little wonder the rest of the world ditched religion after the Annihilation darn near wiped us out. Our all-loving, all-caring God is kind of a dick.

Don’t make things worse for yourself, Indra. Mom would force me to recite a thousand Hail Marys if she heard me thinking such blasphemy, then a hundred more for taking the Lord’s name in vain. But like, how much worse could it get? I’m dying. I’m in constant pain. And not only has my own mother decided I deserve this—all because I snuck out to play with something (okay, and someone) I shouldn’t—but my condition is also entirely incurable. Once your body starts rejecting the nanites, there is no making it stop, and there’s no way to survive this ruined planet without a boatload of the tiny robots flowing through your veins. Trust me, more extreme sects have tried; it ended in a lot of charred corpses. These immunity boosters are in our water, our protein cubes, our blood; they protect us from the lingering radiation the bombs left behind.

They’re the contradiction at the heart of the Order’s anti-tech mission.

God gave us the tools to survive, Indra, is Leader Duval’s answer to any and all of my niggling doubts. But it’s our duty to not abuse those tools and succumb to hedonism.

Well, I did abuse them.

I’ve been abusing them almost every day since I met Nyx.

And the two of us were very much abusing them the night we decided to pay more attention to the code we were writing than the storm alarms blaring through the streets.

So now those tools are shutting my organs down one by one.

The best the clinic could do was pump me full of drugs to slow the rejection down. Oh, and they sold my medical records to Glindell Technologies, because thanks to the collective good laws the tech lobby helped pass, that’s just what public health clinics do. Which is how I find myself here, with a month left on the clock and a decision to make.

Glindell says they can save my life. The rep they sent refused to divulge any details as to how, but given that they’re the leading name in neural interfaces and consumer-facing service-bots, it’s safe to assume their cure will involve an undignified amount of technology.

Ungodly.

The very thought sets my teeth on edge. I may not hate technology the zealous way I’m supposed to, but that doesn’t mean I trust it—and I certainly don’t trust any disciple of big tech. From the moment Glindell made their offer, a voice in my head has been screaming hidden agenda alert! and for once, that voice didn’t belong to my mother. Because nanite rejection as severe as mine is such a rare condition, it’ll never make Glindell enough money to matter, so they’re obviously not looking to develop a treatment, or patent a vaccine. They’re buying a dying girl from the fringe of society for some other reason. And my gut says it’s for nothing good.

The devil can’t cure God’s will, Indra. We just have to keep faith.

Even if it kills me? Mom doesn’t much like it when I ask that question, though we both know that’s what’ll happen if I don’t agree to Glindell’s terms; the nanites will continue to ravage my body until I lose the ability to see, and speak, and eventually, breathe.

If I do agree to them, I’ll become proprietary IP.

Glindell will save my life, but they’ll also own it.

That’s the deal.

It’s not a good deal, and if anything in the United American State worked the way it should, it definitely wouldn’t be legal—no company deserves the right to trade in human lives. But since I was born a hundred years and twice as many nukes too late for that type of idealistic thinking, it’s the only deal I’m likely to get.

In theory, this is my decision to make—child autonomy laws give me the right to decide what happens to my body. But in practice, the Order doesn’t recognize laws passed by the tech lobby, so here, my choice holds no sway until I turn eighteen. It’s almost funny, really: I’m only a couple of months shy of controlling my own fate, but if we wait any longer, I’ll be too far gone. Either my parents say yes today, or I die.

God wouldn’t want this. When Mom says those words, she’s talking about Glindell’s unholy intervention, whereas Dad uses them to mean my death. So far, they haven’t deigned to ask me what I want—not even Dad, who’s always fought to give me as much of a voice as his faith allows. And yeah, that scares me. Trying to exercise a modicum of control over my regimented life is why I developed an obsession with computers in the first place. Running my hands over the keyboard felt good precisely because it was forbidden. Learning to hack was exciting because it deepened the act of rebellion I committed every time I snuck out to meet Nyx. Heck, just sneaking out to meet Nyx was a rebellion in itself, seeing how I’m not supposed to make eye contact with anyone outside my Order, let alone befriend them. But it was a quiet rebellion, the kind that cost me nothing save for some extra chores and a few nights in solitary, repenting on an empty stomach.

At least until the day it left us caught in a radioactive storm.

Then it cost me everything.

You need to leave me, Nyx. You need to save yourself.

Yeah, that’s a hard pass, God Girl. Now keep running. The next bunker will let us in.

But what scares me more than giving up control is that I have no idea what I would choose. I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want to become some billionaire’s IP. I don’t want to live in a building full of people looking to turn me into their science project, and—as much as it pains me to admit it—I don’t want to leave Mom, and Dad, and the family I have in this compound.

I don’t want to trade the fringe for the city.

I don’t want to replace rules with a contract or sign away my soul for some tech.

I don’t want to become the Order’s new cautionary tale.

God wouldn’t want this. As soon as the door creaks open, I know the decision’s been made. Dad’s not wearing his wedding band anymore, and the Crescent Dove on his cheek has been burned black with fire; the wound is still blistered and raw. He’s shunned now. And judging by the glowing brand he’s carrying, I’m about to meet the same fate.

If I could still move my legs, I would have long since started running.

If I could find the strength to speak, I would beg him to leave me here to die.

Instead, I lay paralyzed as he whispers an apology and lowers the branding iron to my skin. When I scream, he’s the only one that hears me.

CHAPTER 1

Never, ever, ever trust a tech company. I’m serious. No matter what they offer you—whether it be credits or time—run as fast as you humanly can in the opposite direction, or else you might wake up one day and realize you’re no longer human at all.

Like I did.

I force my new body down the sterile white corridor that leads to the R&D labs, commanding the state-of-the-art metal skeleton to obey my will. There’s only the slightest bit of lag between ask and answer. A millisecond, maybe. Barely a fraction of a blink. But it’s enough to remind me of everything I’m not anymore. Everything I lost.

You didn’t lose anything, Indra. The transfer completed perfectly. You’re every bit the same you, just . . . better. Healthy. I repeat the lie on loop.

Problem is, I don’t believe it.

And it goes beyond the feeling that what Glindell did to me is just plain wrong.

Neural Transcendence, they call it. The process of uploading a human mind to an artificial drive. A MindDrive. Housed in a fully titanium shell.

A technological marvel.

An ungodly abomination.

Mom was right; Dad should have just let me die. It’s not the first time that thought has crossed my processors—it’s not even the first time today. From the moment he signed me over to Glindell, I knew something was . . . off. Why else would they have forbidden him from visiting? Why else would every person I spoke to those first few days refuse to tell me anything, no matter how loudly or sweetly or pathetically I asked? Why else would I be dreaming in violence?

That month I had left on the clock? I spent every last second of it hooked up to a glut of scanners and machines. When some new part of me failed, they simply brought in another device to compensate, until I was little more than a terrified brain pleading silently in a vacutube. Helpless and ignored. Treated as less than human. Then, four weeks after they wheeled me into this building—a month before my eighteenth birthday—I finally found out why. Turns out, the reason Glindell’s cure didn’t feel like a cure is because Glindell had no interest in saving my body; it was my mind they wanted. A cheap, disposable mind they could discard if their experiment failed. A weak, sheltered mind they could bend to their will if it didn’t.

Got exactly what they paid for, didn’t they? My stride slows to a crawl as I approach the cybernetics lab, my anger turning brittle. Because as much as I’ve fantasized about breaking bad and making Glindell regret its purchase, my rebellions remain quiet, toothless things. A scowl here, a lazy grumble there, nothing that would prompt my security team to intervene. Their job is to ensure that no harm comes to this multi-million-credit body—especially not at my hand. Which includes turning me off anytime they deem my behavior too . . . unruly, or muting my voice modulator on the rare occasion I indulge the urge to scream.

It only took me a few days to realize that the more I capitulate, the more freedom I’m granted. Today, for example—after two weeks of model behavior—they sent me a summons instead of an armed escort. And I’m following it with prompt obedience because that’s what good submissive cult girls do.

And because today’s the day I finally get my new skin.

The second the access chip in my palm clears the scanner, the door to the lab slides open with a whoosh, bathing me in a rush of cold air. Or at least, I assume it’s cold. I’ve watched enough lab techs shiver and curse to know it’s cold. But I can’t actually feel it. That’s the problem with this body; I can’t feel anything.

That’s about to change, I remind myself, arranging my face into something resembling a smile—no easy feat when you’re working with the same level of articulation as a service-bot. If all goes well this morning, I’ll get sensation back. Smell, temperature, pleasure, pain. The whole spectrum of haptic feedback. Who knows, maybe that’s what it’ll take to make me feel human again. Not that anyone in this fortified skyscraper cares about my feelings. Beyond running daily tests to monitor my MindDrive’s continuing fidelity, they don’t care about the me part of this experiment at all.

Around the lab, a sea of screens buzz with data. Some show my body as it is now—more wireframe than person, with Glindell’s Promethean android logo stamped across the chest plate—while others showcase detailed renders of what I’ll look like once my transformation is complete. My old self, I can’t help but think, staring at the image. Just with low-density metal where once there was bone, and a nuclear battery where once beat a heart.

The moment the techs spot me, they storm to action, furiously tapping keys, and priming machines, and cross-checking each other’s data in an effort to impress their boss: Drayton Hieronymus Glindell, founder and CEO of Glindell Technologies. A man I’ve only glimpsed twice before: the day he bought me, and the day he gave the order to discard my body and upload my mind. On both those occasions, the white-haired billionaire barely spared me a glance—just as he barely spares me one now. To him, I’m nothing more than raw materials ripe for experimentation. Unremarkable and unimportant. Replaceable in every way.

As for the rest of the team . . . well, close to a month on, I still can’t help but notice how they flinch at the sight of me, or how the metallic sound of my feet clanking against the tiles raises the hair on their arms.

Except Tian, that is.

God sure broke the mold when He made her.

“There you are, Indra.” She comes bounding up to me, all hungry eyes, practiced enthusiasm, and a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that we are not friends, no matter how many fake smiles she flashes me, or how much time we’re forced to spend in each other’s company. I thought she might get the hint after weeks of grunted answers and two arctic cold shoulders, but the more I silently will her to go away, the harder Tian doubles down on this whole . . . Indra’s personal cheerleader schtick. Which is a terrible job for a fully-fledged genius—and I know Tian’s a genius because she told me.

Tian tells me a lot of things.

Tian talks.

Tian hasn’t stopped talking since she exploded into my life the day I woke up looking like the world’s most terrifying death-bot. As the researcher in charge of my MindDrive’s daily fidelity tests, she spends roughly four hours a day talking in my general direction. And by talking, I mean bragging incessantly about her achievements. That’s how I know she was headhunted into Glindell’s Enhanced Education program by Drayton Glindell himself, and that the company accelerated her way through college, then offered her a job at the ripe old age of fifteen. She could have gone to Syntex Technologies once that initial three-year contract was complete—they’re the bigger name, and they certainly threw enough zeros at me—but Glindell kept her here with the promise of something greater than Syntex’s now defunct Mindwalking program.

Why would I waste my time on decades-old technology when I could work on the holy grail of neural interfaces? she’d said. And I swear, it took every ounce of strength I had not to beat her senseless and scream because buying up dying girls and turning them into robots is demented, you narcissistic psycho! Not that lecturing her on that would actually make a difference; Tian’s way too deep into the company’s rhetoric to recognize right from wrong.

“Are you ready for this?” she asks, leading me over to the double-height tank that dominates the center of the lab. The milky fluid inside bubbles to life as we approach, filling me with a heavy sense of dread. FleshMesh, reads the flashing label at its rim. Glindell’s planning to rebuild my body with some cleverly named slime.

“Sure, why wouldn’t I be?” My voice splits the air like cracked glass, harsh and unmistakably mechanical. It doesn’t have to sound like that; Glindell turned my actual voice into a custom print I can enable at any time. But it freaks me out too much, sounding like my old self while I still look like . . . this, so I asked Tian not to load it until my reconstruction was complete.

She resisted at first. Told me I was being silly. That I’d adjust to my new condition much faster if I stopped fighting the process. Instead, I simply stopped speaking. My most literal quiet rebellion to date—and barely an effort for me; Leader Duval made a sport of quiet reflection. But for a talker like Tian, my silence proved hell, especially when it started interfering with her tests. She lasted a whole two hours before she acquiesced and turned the voiceprint back off, the muscles in her jaw twitching violently as she did.

The same irritated twitch she’s trying to hide now.

“No reason.” She sighs, placing me in the circular frame that’ll keep my body suspended while the FleshMesh is applied. “But say you were worried, about anything—even if that worry isn’t rational—we could put you out for a while,” she says, clicking my ankles and wrists into their designated moorings. In a past life, this huge contraption of steel and sacrilege would have set my heart pounding and driven my nerves into a terrified spin, but lately, my fear has faded down to shadows. It’s hard to be afraid of much when you’re already shunned, owned, exiled, and incapable of feeling pain.

“Turn me off, you mean?” If I had an eyebrow to raise, it would be nestled in my hairline—though I’m currently short one of those, too.

“Don’t be difficult, Indra. You know what I mean.” Tian’s eyebrows, on the other hand, are perfectly arched and articulate just fine. I swear she’s got the most expressive face I’ve ever seen. Angular eyes that narrow down to danger when I’m being particularly prickly—violet today, though she claims they’re brown beneath the color changers—cheekbones that are as sharp and mathematically disposed as her mind, and a smile which on its worst day is trouble to an almost wicked degree. “This is gonna take forever.”

“Yeah, but I won’t be able to feel anything until it’s over, right?” I say as she fixes my head to the frame and sticks a handful of tracking markers to my limbs. To ensure my reconstruction is as perfectly proportioned as the renders.

“You’ll be able to feel boredom.”

“I’ll live,” I tell her. Because there’s no way I’m letting Glindell mess with any part of me unsupervised again.

“Suit yourself.” Tian shrugs, chewing down another twitch. “I’ll see you on the visually improved side.” Since I’m currently little more than a wireframe shell, the jibe bears no sting, though it does send a flash of panic shooting through my drives.

When this is done, I’ll look like me again. Inside and out.

As though the last few months never happened.

As though I’m not fundamentally changed.

“Hey, Tian—is it too late to alter the code?” I call after her, glancing at the renders playing on the screens.

“Holy cyborg, don’t tell me you’re actually going to pick a hairstyle more interesting than long and black?”

“Your hair is long and black.” I jut my chin at her. And unlike her eye color, she rarely changes it. Officially, Tian’s never told me why, but she’s forced me to look at enough family holoforms that I can pretty much guess. Long and black was how her mother wore her hair. Her parents were among the last wave of tech seekers to risk defecting to the United American State once Beijing made desertion a capital crime. The Unified Chinese Continent doesn’t much like its citizens defecting en masse—no country does. After our ancestors bombarded the planet with enough radiation to make the oceans glow in the dark, the population dwindled to near-extinction levels. Even a hundred years on, we’re still down to four habitable continents, a dozen-odd reclaimed cities, and less than half a billion people. Leader Duval likes to tout it as divine intervention; God’s nuclear flood. But to the rest of the world, it’s just a devastating labor shortage—the kind that forces governments to take extreme measures to keep their citizens in. Like making a bloody example of anyone who dares to try and get out.

Tian and her father survived the crossing; her mother did not.

You can add that to the list of things I wish I didn’t know about Tian.

“Yes, but I’m not the one getting a makeover,” she says. “Now tell me what you want and make it interesting.” She’s clearly taking my request as a win in the Indra hates my guts a little less today department, rather than seeing it for what it really is: a way to mark myself as different. To prevent Glindell from erasing my past. But whatever; I need her right now and so I detail a request that would horrify my mother every bit as much as it would make Nyx proud. And judging by the way Tian’s lip quirks as she types the changes into the keypad in her palm, she’s firmly on Nyx’s side.

“If you are quite finished, Miss Wu.” Drayton’s voice rends through the lab, sending a flare of crimson to Tian’s cheeks, the blush pinking her golden skin.

“Yes, Director.” She scurries off with an obedient nod, so desperate to please him she almost trips over her own feet. More than the twitchy jaw, or the agitated sighs, or the offhand way she calls me difficult for voicing the slightest frustration, it’s Tian’s admiration of the man who purchased my life that sinks her attempts at friendship. Because the only reason she’s trying to befriend me in the first place is to benefit him. Because he ordered her to. So I would be easier for his company to control.

Reconstruction commencing in five . . . four . . .

The countdown blaring over the speakers intensifies the team’s methodical rush, bringing a prayer to my lips.

Three . . . two . . . one . . .

May the Lord have mercy on my soul.

With a groan, the steel frame I’m occupying begins to rise, moving to hover above the tank of bubbling FleshMesh. From here, a series of robotic arms will painstakingly twist and stretch and shape the viscous fluid into a human body one thread at a time, using TrueTone pigments to give it the appearance of natural biology.

Creating skin and musculature is the easy part, apparently—though I’m ardently ignoring the fact that the technology stems from the sex-bot industry, developed as a way to make the consumer models look and feel like real . . . well, models (yeah, thanks a bunch for that disturbing nugget of trivia, Tian). It’s the nervous system and feedback loops that have taken Glindell’s team of evil scientists the last few years to crack. Figuring out how to manufacture the type of sensation that would seamlessly link body to drive.

Here’s to hoping they’re as smart as they think. Despite myself, I steal a glance at Tian, who rolls her eyes in a way that tells me to quit insulting her brilliance with my doubt. Then with a pneumonic hiss and a claxon, it begins.

A shrill hum fills the lab, the sound of a lot of very expensive equipment whirring to action. I watch the first few threads of FleshMesh curl and form with rapt attention, determined to witness every last moment of my transformation, but by the time the base layer of muscle is applied and colored, I’m bored out of my ever-loving MindDrive. Which is annoying because I really—really—hate it when Tian’s right.

I close my eyes, letting the mechanical buzz lull my processors to sleep as the machines continue their dance. God wouldn’t want this, Indra. Mom’s judgment seeps through the haze, shuddering me awake. When I was seven, she caught me trying to decipher the protein synthesizer’s circuits, curious to learn the secrets of the mystery box that kept us fed. Your faith should be stronger than your questions, she’d said. It’s not for us to know how the Lord’s miracles are made. Even at seven years old, that insistence rang hollow. Because someone did know how it was made; someone had quite literally made it. Just as someone made the technology that’s now remaking me. But at the time, I was young enough—and scared enough—to beg Mom’s forgiveness, implore her not to report my transgression to Leader Duval.

Atonement is the only path to heaven was her reason for dragging me by the ear to his sanctum, so that I could confess my sins and face his wrath. That was the day I realized Mom’s love for God would always trump her love for me. That she’d never accept anything besides absolute belief. One look at this lab and she’d be on her knees. Heck, even Dad would probably struggle with all . . . this.

Another hour passes before the pitch of the buzzing changes, prompting my eyes to open and the demons of the past to fade. With my head anchored to the frame, I can’t glance down at my body for a proper look, but the shine emanating from my limbs tells me the conductive nerve fibers that will—hopefully—restore my ability to feel have all been laid.

Time for the big finale . . . I make to hold my breath as I’m lowered fully into the tank, forgetting, for a moment, that I have no breath to hold or lungs to hold it in. That when the liquid engulfs me, I won’t suffocate or drown. That when I emerge and the polymer sets, I’ll be me again, inside and out. None of that quells the panic as I’m finally released from my moorings and plunged into the tank proper.

Bubbling FleshMesh floods my vision, enveloping me like a shroud. The fluid is oddly viscous, so I don’t sink, exactly, I remain suspended at the center of the tank for a moment that lasts an eternity. Just long enough to send me into a full-scale frenzy. This is what it felt like when the rejection finally paralyzed my diaphragm and took my sight. Total helplessness. And darkness. And pressure pressing in on me where a moment ago there was none. And Christ Almighty, I can’t think.

“Spin it down for me, Indra.” Tian’s voice is distorted and heavy. A whole universe away. “You’re almost done cooking.”

I silently curse my MindDrive. What I’m lacking in the telltale-heart department, I more than make up for in system reports willing to betray my moods. But before the embarrassment can compound the fear and work me into another frenzy, the grated floor to the tank begins to rise, lifting me out of the fluid and straight into a frigid blast of mist that will both color and flash-harden my new skin.

Holy mother, that’s cold. I shiver. And it takes me a second to realize that this time, the feeling doesn’t stem from assumed knowledge.

I’m cold because the aerosolized nitrogen assaulting me is cold.

And I can feel it.

The moment the mist dissipates, a lab tech rushes me, wielding an oversized towel like a shield. Because you’re naked, Indra. A giggle bubbles up in my throat. When you’re laid up in a vacutube, you stop caring about m. . .