Book Review: Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji
In the far future, a fleet of ships, Archimedes, Chandrasekar, and Bohr, have embarked on a journey from Earth to colonize a habitable planet in the system of a star Tau Ceti which lies just beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Each ship has about thirty five thousand or so inhabitants, and the youngest children on board are the seventh generation of the First Crew that left Earth over 130 years ago. Now the fleet is getting close to their destination and they have to turn on the drives and enter the Tau Ceti system to make a new Earth for themselves.
We meet Ravi McLeod, our POV character, a midshipman on the Archimedes. Ravi is training to be an engineer, a tall order it seems for him, given his family background. His family the McLeods are not known for their academic or moral aptitudes. Worse, they are known for being lawbreakers and pilferers. On a finite-resourced ship traveling through space on a multi-decades’ trip, such behavior is unhelpful, and gets culprits reduced through the behavior ratings to Dead Weight, upon which they are sent to the recycler. From Ravi’s POV, the social and functional standings of the ships’ people is loosely entrenched through expectations and prejudice, and apparently reinforcing evidential behavior. Ravi is trying to live down his family’s infamy and qualify to become an engineer, unlike his cousin and closest companion, Boz, who despite being a great programmer, is a more typical McLeod; she spends her skills on hacking and building illegal robot-like things called LOKI.
LOKIs bring up the reason why thousands of people are leaving earth, the HomeWorld, for Tau Ceti. LOKI (Loosely Organized Kinetic Intelligence), which hint at a sort of malleable thinking system equipped with locomotion, seem like advanced form of AI robots built by humans on Earth to help with work, decision-making, and warfare. Eventually, inter-human wars exacerbated by the LOKIs nearly wiped out humanity. The wars over, humans built better LOKIs which excel more than humans at rigorously analyzing scenarios and making best decisions, so the LOKIs now run all of humanity’s affairs. By thus ceding control to the LOKIs, humanity had achieved peace and prosperity from the ashes of war and destruction. Albeit, humanity had traded most of its agency and self-determination to the LOKIs.
To get away from this infantilization of humanity, the First Crew had left earth on three ships to Tau Ceti system where they’d establish a human society free of LOKI control. Drones and cybernetic brain connections is how the fleet lives; highly intelligent independent drones, LOKIs, are illegal on the ships and the would-be new world.
With his brain and other neural implants, Ravi, like everyone else on the ships, can directly access and receive information in the fleet’s communication system, the hive. Which further complicates the situation when he sees a girl without a spacesuit outside the ship in space, and starts getting weird hallucinations. The visions get worse, and working together with his cousin Boz, Ravi begins to suspect that some persons, or some aliens, may be sending him messages. To answer the question of who the girl is, and what these messages mean and who may be sending them, Ravi and Boz set out to investigate the ship’s hive and logs, all while the pressure of the approaching Braking Day builds up anticipation on the ship, and those who aren’t so keen to leave the learned comforts and safety of the ship for an unknown world start to make their point.
I enjoyed reading Braking Day. The plot is intriguing in an effortless way. The descriptions of space and technology are immersive and sensible. Through Ravi’s POV, the author describes the experience of the cybernetic connections and getting into the hive. The enhanced capabilities and weaknesses are explored in a graphic and factual manner. The stage is set by competing visions about the nature and role that technology should take in human lives.
Braking Day also brings up questions of classified histories and how much a ship or society’s rank and file should know about their mission and history. Fighting and ethics on ships traveling through the expanse of space with the great views and dangers of stars and galaxies in their wake are brought to bear. Character development is also quite good; social hierarchies and informal prejudices are explored, even if just at the family-level. From Ravi the wannabe engineer and his LOKI-builder cousin Boz to navigators and captains, those with better expectations of good behavior, Braking Day very well examines the human condition on a far flung fleet in outer space in a relatable way to our current world.