This is my post during the blog tour for The Jade Labyrinth by Alanna Mackenzie. In The Jade Labyrinth a young rebel leader undertakes a perilous mission to reprogram the artificially intelligent rulers of a colonial empire, traversing through hostile landscapes and braving grueling mental and physical challenges.
This blog tour is organized by Lola's Blog Tours and the tour runs from 2 till 15 October. You can see the tour schedule here.
By Alanna Mackenzie
Genre: Science Fiction/ Fantasy
Age category: Young Adult
Release Date: 12 September, 2023
Blurb:
A meeting. A maze. A perilous journey back to an Empire on the edge of chaos.
Walter Saltanetska, leader of the Jade Rebellion, is nearly ready to return to the heart of the AI-ruled Empire that has branded him a treasonous fugitive. His mandate is clear: to reprogram the AI Masters before their earth-destroying habits spiral out of control.
First, he must brave gruelling training in a land fraught with danger—rugged mountains haunted by spirits, a parched desert patrolled by watchful drones, and a labyrinthine cave guarded by armed robots. As his physical, mental, and magical abilities are tested by harrowing encounters, Walter must work to resist forces that threaten to destabilize his mission.
The biggest threat he faces is not one he encounters along the course of his journey, but one that originates within him. Walter returns to the Empire’s capital in a mind-altering disguise that proves to be a double-edged sword. Drawing him closer to a soul mate who rekindles his admiration for the AI Masters, it also distances Walter from the human emotions that sparked his desire to join the Rebellion. In his final showdown with the AI Masters, Walter must keep his mind under control, or risk jeopardizing the mission that he and his allies are counting on to reverse a looming tidal wave of destruction.
The thrilling third installment in The Jade Chronicles, The Jade Labyrinth weaves dystopian science-fiction with high fantasy while exploring an essential subject: the perils and promise of artificial intelligence.
Links:
- Goodreads
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
The Jade Labyrinth – Excerpt #1
Waiting for night to fall was the hardest part. The tedium was made worse by lining up to pass the security checkpoint, and afterwards they broke camp and had to wait a few more hours until dinner was ready. The traders appeared to be in good spirits, Tyrian most of all. He drank copious amounts of brandy and mulled wine that night around a blazing campfire and ordered his fellow traders to sing and strum various eclectic instruments. One was a sitar, an oriental-sounding instrument from the Southern Jungles, another was a khoborga, a traditional Xeyan’na flute that had a harsh ring to it, and the third type of instrument was a meyre, a hollowed-out drum stretched with leather hide.
The revelry did not interest Walter, but he was grateful for the distraction. He was intending to discreetly slip away after dinner to do his work, but Tyrian grabbed him by the wrist just as he finished the last of his curried chickpeas.
“Will you be staying for the entertainment?” Tyrian asked boorishly. As drunk as he was, the lead trader seemed oddly lucid, and the way his moss-green eyes bored into Walter made the young man shiver.
“I’m tired. Think I’ll have an early night tonight,” Walter replied.
“Your friend… she’s a pretty one,” Tyrian drawled, gazing across the campfire toward Eva, who was bobbing her head in time with the music. “I was hoping she’d join in the diversions.”
Walter set his jaw. The last thing he wanted was this unrefined trader making designs on his friend Eva. Now that he thought of it, the trader had seemed romantically interested in her from the beginning. Although Walter had first attributed the trader’s lingering gaze to curiosity about her mixed-race origins, he now realized it was because of something more. But Walter recognized an opportunity for further distraction. He hated to do this to his friend, but he needed every advantage he could get with these wily traders.
“She’s an excellent dancer,” Walter exclaimed, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth he regretted them. He had no idea how well Eva danced, and he didn’t want to put her on the spot. But what better way to ensure that he could work uninterrupted than to have Eva distract the traders with a dance?
“Is that so?” Tyrian said. “Well, let’s see it, then.”
Walter reddened as Tyrian called across the campfire to Eva, causing the sitar player’s melodious rhythms to stop abruptly. “Pretty lady,” Tyrian drawled, taking another swig of brandy. “Your friend here says you can dance.”
Eva glanced at Walter, and the rebel leader tried to convey an expression of pleading in his eyes. Eva caught on, but Walter could see that she was not pleased with him.
“My friend is too flattering,” she replied coldly, “but I do enjoy dancing. With a partner, of course,” she added.
Walter froze. He half-expected her to invite him to dance with her, but instead she beckoned for Tyrian to come closer. The brilliance of her strategy was apparent. As the three instrumentalists began their tune, a sharply cadenced flamenco, Eva bowed before Tyrian and held out her arms in an invitation. The lead trader eagerly accepted the offer, and the other traders formed a circle around them, cheering and clinking their brandy-filled glasses as the music grew more animated. Walter watched for a few moments in rapt fascination; he was not so captivated by the dancing itself, but rather by the sheer resourcefulness of his friend, who had been able to gracefully choreograph a routine in mere seconds.
With the traders’ attention thoroughly diverted, Walter was able to relax as he crept away into the shadows of the gloomy late-autumn night. The temperature was plunging as the sun had recently set, and Walter felt the assaulting chill of the air once he left the campfire. To avoid any encounters with the traders, he decided to do his work in the open air, behind a nearby rock formation, rather than in one of the wagons.
It all happened very quickly. Walter consumed the lydion—about half a teaspoonful was all that was required—and immediately he felt his mind shift into a different gear. He studied the code of his spyware detection program, and with fresh eyes, determined what its weaknesses were and how they could be shored up. It was startlingly easy to spot them with his newly heightened sense of awareness, a sort of hyper-sensitivity to the nuanced cause and effect of any computational system.
As the lydion permeated his body, Walter’s mind became clear, focused, and unplagued by anxieties. He often felt that way after a seizure, as though a buildup of tension within his brain had erupted, clearing away the debris from his neural pathways. With lydion, he felt as though he could accomplish the most complex programming task in a matter of minutes. There was nothing getting in the way—no distracting ego, and most importantly, no emotional baggage attached to any task he set out to accomplish. A meditative sense of calm accompanied his work, along with the feeling that he was conserving energy that would have otherwise dissipated.
Within twenty minutes, the upgraded program was completed. Walter could still hear the reassuring background noise of the drumming and the swirling, exotic melodies of the sitar and the khoborga. As the new spyware program ran, he felt tranquil, but poised to react to any hint of a result. And, within a few more minutes, he found it: a backdoor trojan horse, almost negligible in its size, that had burrowed its way onto the tablet’s hard drive.
Investigating its origins, he saw the culprit. A mail attachment that somebody named ‘vokyrv81’ had delivered a few days ago into his inbox, that he had opened mindlessly, revealing an advertisement for hotels in the Barrens. He realized, too, that the name spelled backwards was that of the trader he and Eva had been speaking to, Vrykov. He cursed himself for having opened the attachment, for it was doing its grisly work to mine the contents of his tablet.
- The Jade Rebellion (The Jade Chronicles #1)
- The Jade Talisman (The Jade Chronicles #2)
Alanna Mackenzie lives in Vancouver, Canada. She holds degrees in History, French studies, and Law from the University of British Columbia. An environmentalist at heart, she believes in using the law as a tool for social and environmental change. When she is not pursuing that passion, she can be found brainstorming the next chapter in her novels, playing Irish fiddle tunes on the violin, and hiking West Coast trails.
You can find and contact Alanna Mackenzie here:
- Website
- Goodreads
- Amazon
There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of The Jade Labyrinth. One winner wins copies of the following three books: The Jade Rebellion, The Jade Talisman and The Jade Labyrinth.
For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
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