Cover image of "Machinehood," a fast-paced techno-thriller

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Welga Ramirez is nearing her thirty-fifth birthday. She’s a veteran of the Marine Special Forces but a little long in the tooth for a shield—a bodyguard—though the pills increase her strength and the speed of her reflexes. And at thirty-five she’ll hit the limit. Platinum Shield Services only employs shields who are younger. They have to look good for the cameras which, like everywhere else in the world, swarm about her in the air. And the company thrives on the popularity of its shields. Truth to tell, aging is a problem for Welga, too. Because she receives much of her income from tips that come from her fan base around the world. But Welga is about to face a life-threatening assignment as S. B. Divya’s fast-paced techno-thriller, Machinehood, begins to unfold.

A world of bots and gigs and pills

Welga is lucky to be employed at all. She lives at a time when few have salaried jobs. Most survive on gigs. All because bots have long since taken on most of the jobs that matter. “Some jobs still belonged exclusively to people, but much of the world’s workforce did little more than babysit bots while they did the real work.” But to perform even the most perfunctory of jobs required taking pills, “the tiny biomechanical machines that could affect everything from intracellular transport to DNA and RNA editing.” Pills to boost alertness or reaction speed. Pills to toughen muscles. And, of course, pills to prevent or treat disease. In fact, pills for anything and everything to help a person compete with the ever-more-capable bots.

Of course, humans being human, people complain—often violently—about all this. Huge organizations of armed protes (protesters) demonstrate wherever the action is. Some set out to destroy the bots. Others take aim at the pill funders, the obscenely wealthy venture capitalists who controll the production of pills. “The promised land, always a few years out of reach, was to keep people human—mostly organic and outwardly the same—while enabling them to be as fast/strong/smart/reliable as the bots.” But as Welga and her colleagues set out to shield Briella Jackson, one of the biggest pill funders in the world, a new force suddenly announces itself to the world: the Machinehood.

Machinehood by S. B. Divya (2021) 416 pages ★★★★★

Artist's rendering of a humanoid robot a little like the androids in this fast-paced techno-thriller
In the popular imagination, robots look like this. In reality, they can be of any shape or size, from microscopic cameras like those of the swarms of this novel to boxy machines on wheels to arms that hang from factory ceilings. Image: Forbes

The world’s first emergent AI?

As Welga, Connor Troit (“her partner in more ways than one”), and an apprentice shepherd Brielle Jackson from one building to another, a team of bots attacks them. One, though, appears to be human. It’s lightning-fast and murders Jackson before their eyes. “Murder had gone out of fashion with ubiquitous camera swarms and AIs… until now.” But when Welga then disables it with a shot, she sees the metal in its guts.

Clearly, it’s a bot, too, but one of a different order. This is an android, half-human, half-machine. It’s endowed with physical and mental agility that is superhuman. And somehow, as the swarm of tiny cameras flashes the news far and wide, editors conclude that the world’s first emergent AI has shown its face. At the same time, and clearly related to Jackson’s murder, the opening lines of the Machinehood Manifesto pop up in the news as well. Its founding principle: “No form of intelligence may own another.”

Bulletins from the Machinehood soon make its agenda clear. Humans need to be human. The pills and other contrivances designed to help humans compete with bots have all got to go. Bots need to be bots, however humble they may be. All life capable of thought is precious, human, animal, machine. And the Machinehood will continue to go after the pill funders and their production facilities until it has its way worldwide.

It will be Welga’s new assignment to stop the Machinehood.

A world of technological marvels

S. B. Divya’s imagination is endlessly entertaining. Hers is the world of 2095, a world of technological marvels. Homes and furniture that can be reconfigured by tweaking the software. Personal assistants resident in the brain that manage communications and search the net in the background. Buildings that can be grown, not built. Screens replaced with imagery showing through the eyes. And, of course, the whiz-bang weaponry that makes every one of Welga’s assignments a potentially fatal encounter.

But Machinehood is no treatise on clever technology. It’s a thriller, full of action and abounding with surprises. This is a superior effort in science fiction.

About the author

Photo of S. B. Divya, author of this fast-paced techno-thriller
S. B. Divya in 2022. Image: The Hindu

S. B. Divya is the pen name of Divya Srinivasan Breed, who is a science fiction author as well as an engineer. She was born in India but immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of five. As Wikipedia notes, “The S in her pen name stands for her patronym, Srinivasan, and the B stands for Breed, her husband’s surname.” She holds a BS degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a major in Computation and Neural Systems, and an MEng in Signal Processing from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to becoming a full time writer, Divya worked as a signal processing engineer and data scientist for several years. . . She holds multiple patents in pulse oximetry and signal processing.” Divya is the author of two novels, a novella, and many short stories.

I’ve also reviewed the author’s first book-length work, Run Time (A promising debut in science fiction).

I’ve included this novel among The best techno-thrillers. And, for another novel about bioengineering that, like Machinehood, features lots of inventive technology, see Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata (When nanotechnology and genetic engineering merge).

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