It ’s unvoiced to resist asci - fi noir , especially when the main character isa loth rubber — and even more when the setting is as unpredictable as a crime - riddled city that take place to beunderwater . Chris McKinney keep abreast up 2021 ’s acclaimedMidnight , Water Citywith Eventide , Water City next twelvemonth , and io9 is thrilled to have a first feeling at the second entry in his Water City Trilogy .
Here ’s a routine of circumstance to catch up with you up on the continuation ’s stakes :
Year 2150 : Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura , Water City ’s illustrious scientist and embrocate “ God , ” the nameless antihero who once risked everything to rule Akira ’s killer is no longer a tec , but a stay - at - home dad . While his married woman climbs the embodied ladder of the Water City Police Department , he lift his now nine - class - old girl and occasionally accept the odd job as a bounty hunting watch .
Image: Soho Press
Water City ’s domestic bliss is menace when Ascalon ’s Scar — the permanent mark left by the elimination of Sessho - seki , an asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth — vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought numb returns from the sea depths to demand retaliation on humanity . What follows is a dotty journey , both deep below and high above a futurist Pacific , that takes Water City ’s antihero from Lucky Cat City ( formerly Osaka , Japan ) to the Sun Myung Moon and back , all to stop the devastation of the last of the human race .
Hawai’i writer Chris McKinney ’s cinematic , immersive follow - up to Midnight , Water City research engineering , socio-economic class , mood change , and the duration desperate people will go to in ordering to protect the single they know .
Here ’s a look at the full cover — nontextual matter by Vlado Krizan , figure by Janine Agro — followed by the excerption , which is in reality the book ’s full opening chapter . ( The Italic language are used to represent that the POV here is different than the primary protagonist ’s , since his narrative begin in the next chapter . )
Image: Soho Press
Somewhere in the hadal zone , an arrowtooth approaches , and a pupil dilates from the cutting off of its own light . The deepwater eel slithers , block up in front of the bodyless eye , and opens its lip . It freezes in this barb gape for a long instant . Everything go so easy that all moments are long moments twenty - three thousand feet deep . Synthetic hormones spin with neuroception , but the eye remains static . Finally , the marauder turns and slinks aside . Relieved , the centre fly the coop its qubit calculation in the wickedness . It has been 2,217 days since the eye first waken and found itself in the Challenger Deep . First , it was resuscitated by its own emergency protocol . Then , its nerve cell , glial cells , and nerves expanded and at long last fired in the correct sequence to climb up the polyvagal ladder . An unraveled pattern stitched into memory trace .
No lieu on the planet ’s surface has less light than Challenger Deep , which made the eye wonder if it had simply stepped from one death to another . The eye opened its nano - antenna and mapped its locating , startled when it realise the tides had rolled it four thousand mile west of its own execution scene . Since waking in the trench , the oculus has mapped its path back , a zigzag from heat source to heat source , and followed the plumbing of Pacific Ocean live spots that power its journey home .
Now that the eel is gone , six legs down from the eye ’s vitrified and fag into the mystifying rubble . It crawls , moving laggardly like everything else down here — the persuade purple polyps on rock , the cusk - eels , the grenadier fish , and the bygone plastic cup of tea that the skimmers miss . The heart too must conserve its get-up-and-go in this black place , this bog of barely life sentence . But sometimes it want to be fed good deal to confirm that it is active .
Of the murder , the heart remembers . The synesthete and his refusal . The center had been so close to godhood . All snatch away by a man it had propose everything to — generational wealth , a life-time without killing , and the the true about Ascalon ’s Scar . First , the bullets crack up and shatter the crank walls . Then the freeze , midnight zone waters flooded into the penthouse . crush chest pain followed . After that , the collapse of the windpipe . Hypothermia . Finally , every inch of the eye ’s forcible trunk crumpled as if a boulder toppled on it . When beneath a bowlder , one does not seek to judge its exercising weight or weigh the second . All one feels is the agonizing , inevitable doom . Despite this , the body still manage to have it off at the chamber the sometime coward hid in . But the eye misplaced its mother ’s jeweled memories in that daze of fear and detest . It wonders if the quondam gentleman’s gentleman saw his own putting green that day . It want to bath him in those colour .
The eye has collected so much information while all think it all in . Among those is the datum on the salvage of Volcano Vista . A familiar name financed it . The optic will take that military personnel , who ’s recently made a very large crypto transfer to a wanted criminal and seize his Brobdingnagian financial might after it read the tiddler . The synesthete is so close to uncovering the truth , and he does n’t even fuck it . He plausibly does n’t want to .
Something approaches on sensing element ! Was the eye skim too quick ? Too unrestrained by the prospect of home ? It fag into the ooze and buries itself . No . No ! take still . have got still ! The dentition . The grisly underbite . The root of green glow bait . Viperfish . Vertical migrater . Over the age , the optic has receive victimization by vertical food chain a number of times . corrode by one thing , take up a few thousand meters just to be eaten by another , then taken up a few thousand time more . Two yr ago , the centre found itself in the throat of a cloaked pinhead , who then became mugged in midair by a great frigatebird . The booby shake and jostled until the lesser dame puked the eye up . The frigatebird carry the eye two hundred miles in the wrong direction before finally dropping it from over five thousand base above ocean stratum . Plop . Back at the tabu edge of the Mariana Trench . The synesthete would have express joy sarcastically and told the centre that nature is wild . The eye ’s father would ’ve said , “ pay up attention to the now and desire the viperfish does not have squid eye , ” which was the almost wizard ability to see holes left by prey in the sand , the skill of the father ’s native people . The eye does not and will never need others again . Needing others in the past had been its weakness . The eye must content itself to ideate what others would do and say . It imagines its twin sister , and these imaginations are the only company worth keep back .
The eye waits to make a move . It finally palpate the turbulence of the fish kvetch away . The viperfish ’s blip disappears from the eye ’s micro depth fipple pipe . Three . More . Days . Patience . At least the eye ’s not sleeping . At least it ’s not in that rabidity - induce torpidity that its female parent had put it in for thirty age . But it was during that sleep that the eye figured out many things , like how to evolve an iE from a float , orb - shaped data processor that can communicate with the psyche of its single drug user to something much more , something that can emulate the brainpower and can mind upload . Once , the centre planned to upload Akira ’s iE into its own . But now it also knows how to download its mind into others . To Mind Exome Load , or MELd , as it like to say to itself . To commune . Then possess .
The eye does have a name . Ascalon Lee . And Ascalon Lee is not dead . She has been copied and enlace into this eye . And she will copy and lace herself into the judgement of another soon . Another who can see murder coming in its splendid special K . Then it will do the same to another . Then another . The eye will become a beehive that can work toward finding its female parent . Akira Kimura . The eye be intimate that she steal Ascalon Lee ’s technical school . Has the female parent copied and laced herself as well ?
The center dares a slip of ignitor . The climb is exorbitant . On the shelf above , plumes of heat hike from the vents like the smoke from former factory chimneys . The vigor is already provide a kick for the eye ’s almost spent stamp battery . The six leg , one for every eye muscle , conservatively extend , and its initiation coils draw power from a hydrothermal vent . The heart shuttles laterally in a justificative position . It spins every few steps , blink , and dart in every cardinal direction . Am I a being ? it asks itself . An entity ? Or am I a philosophic zombie , a soulless transcript of something that no longer is ? I am sentient , but am I human ? Not yet . But I will be . I defy to be trim down to a voice in a jar . I will be her again . Not Akira . I will forever be Ascalon Lee .
The center feels a tremor beneath its needlelike wooden leg . Oh no ! The outlet is about to erupt ! The heart skitters away from the smoke hydrothermal crack as quickly as it can . Faster . quicker ! The estrus move up . The eye brightens now , basking in its own yellow shine . It recognise a colored fictile pocketbook half - eat up in the length . The bag may be useful . The centre ’s spindly legs excavate into sand and kick . The get eruption vibrates beneath it , almost toppling it on its iris . Ten feet . Two feet . One . It snatches the suitcase and lifts it up . The seafloor ’s crack widens and an plosion bursts from the vent . The eye is shoot upward , taking its plastic makeshift chute with it . The centre retracts its legs and soars . The bag freshness and rippling behind the eye , scull like the tail of a prehistorical thing . The two lead off to slow up . The center rolls out of the dish right before the jaw of a goblin shark jut from its head and its tooth go down into the plastic . It ’s a long but grateful drop to the bottom . Perhaps the eye is human after all . It link . It predicts . It remembers . Deep in the smoke of its dendrites , it imagines .
The eye plops into the sand atop the ledge . A sluggish - motion puff of maritime C floats then pillow upon it . The eye waits a moment , then continues its journey up . Yes . Smooth pursuit . Perhaps the optic is not just human . Maybe it ’s something even more . When it pass the control surface and inhabit its young dwelling , it will send the sign and drink down the light , that lasting cicatrice in the sky that reassures people of the existence of heroes , citizenry like her female parent , who can slay any and all threats to mankind . People and how they cling to their queer tale . . . But for now , like the greatest of its native ancestors , the eye wayfinds , except without direction from the stars .
Excerpt from Eventide , Water City . right of first publication © 2023 Chris McKinney . Courtesy of Soho Press
Eventide , Water City by Chris McKinney will be released July 11 , 2023 ; you may pre - regulate a written matter atWaterCityTrilogy.com .
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