Praise for Unity
“Imagine Neuromancer and Lilith’s Brood conceived a baby while listening to My Chemical Romance and then that baby was adopted by Ghost in the Shell and Blue Submarine no. 6. The baby’s name is Unity.”
—Meredith Russo, author of If I Were Your Girl
“Breakneck pacing, non-stop action, and delightfully-damaged characters combine with some of the most intricate and clever worldbuilding I’ve seen in ages to make this an incredibly memorable debut.”
—Sam J. Miller, author of The Art of Starving
“Unity is a wild firefight of a novel. But amidst the vivid dystopian worldbuilding—the undersea metropolises and scorched badlands—and all the breakneck action is something deeper, a philosophically and emotionally resonant exploration of what it means to carry multiplicities of ourselves, our myriad shades of being. Elly Bangs is a writer of both kaleidoscopic imagination and deep literary empathy, a cyberpunk star in the making.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War
"A dystopian science fiction novel about what it means to be human, and what it takes to retain and reclaim one’s humanity.”
—Foreword, starred review
“Unity is a killer debut by a thrilling new writer. Trust me, you’re all going to be hearing a lot about Elly Bangs and this gleaming and gritty world she’s created. And cyberpunk fans? Put down the game controller and read this now. This is the real stuff.”
—Daryl Gregory, author of We Are All Completely Fine and Spoonbenders
“Chock-full of both big ideas and high-energy action, Bangs’s thrilling debut centers on a mad chase across a dystopian Earth in search of a collective consciousness that could save humanity from itself. . . . This gritty, thought-provoking cyberpunk adventure does the genre justice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Epic science fiction, and intimately personal at the same time, thanks to the clever and revolutionary trick of disassembling the individual subject. Take THAT, the very form of the novel!”
—Nick Mamatas, author of The People’s Republic of Everything
“Unity manages to be simultaneously exciting and philosophical, a brilliant gut-punch of a novel. I cannot wait to see what Elly Bangs does next.”
—Kij Johnson, author of At the Mouth of the River of Bees
“Unity is a blistering post-apocalyptic interrogation of personhood and society. Elly Bangs brings grief, revelation, and humanity to bear in this incredible debut novel.”
—dave ring, editor of Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die
Unity
Copyright © 2021 by Elly Bangs
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon Publications LLC
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
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Series editor: Jacob Weisman
Editor: Jaymee Goh
Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-342-2
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-343-9
First Edition: 2021
987654321
Dear Reader,
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For N.
Table of Contents
Part I: Underworld
Part II: Nameless
Part III: Unity
Part IV: Redhill
Part V: Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Part I: Underworld
I
THIS IS THE FIRST THING I REMEMBER when I begin to cohere in unity: a woman standing at a railing, peering down into the vats at the final bottom of Bloom City—and a man in a cramped air transport lavatory, watching his reflection in the scuffed plastic mirror point a wave pistol at its own head.
Across ten thousand kilometers of distance I remember both these scenes, simultaneous with each other: how the beat of the compressors throbbed in her bones; how the power cell hummed and exhaled ozone when he primed the weapon to fire; how every nerve in her last remaining body drew taut as she braced herself to fall; how his reflection gazed back so stoically as to seem already dead, but his pulse was only quickening as he lay his finger on the trigger.
Just as he braced to fire, the woman swung her legs over the railing and leaned forward so that it was only one hand, then one finger, holding her back from the drop. She knew the machinery would leave no trace: in minutes, her body would be minced and spread thin across the ocean floor, unified with the trash and tailings. Meanwhile, the man imagined that whoever found his corpse would never grasp the irony: that after every narrowly dodged killing shot of every battle of every war, it would be his own weapon that finally did him in.
These two people were equally convinced of their own insignificance. Each could name only one person who might miss them. Neither knew then what I’m startled to realize now: that if he had pushed, or if she had let go, nothing would be left of the world today but a uniform ocean of lifeless quicksilver, the ghosts of billions dead, and the single lonely intellect of my lost sibling. Nothing else would have survived the last war.
I used to believe I could never have any one beginning, but in the eerie symmetry of that moment, I know I’ve found it. This is where all the threads of my memory start—because
