A science fiction book series set in the near future where language is no longer learned but streamed, and communication is a weapon of mass destruction
The Babel Apocalypse is book 1 in the Songs of the Sage series, set in the early twenty-second century. The book’s prologue introduces one of the protagonists, Professor Ebba Black, the last native speaker of language in the automated world, who lives in a time when language is no longer learned but streamed directly to language chips, implanted in people’s brains at birth.
In the prologue, Ebba is witness to a mysterious apparition, an angelic figure who transforms into a woman, Lilith King. Lilith is the protagonist of the second book in the series, The Dark Court, and provides Ebba with a warning, a prophesy, and a gift. The prophesy relates to an imminent global language outage, caused by a cyberattack on the language streaming servers in low Earth orbit. This language outage is the apocalyptic event with which Ebba, and Europol Cybercrime commander, Emyr Morgan, must grapple during the course of The Babel Apocalypse.
The six books in the Songs of the Sage series explore the power of language, and how, with the advent of powerful AI technology, it can be commoditized by big tech, and turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
Book 1, The Babel Apocalypse, explores this premise from an Earth-bound perspective, when large swathes of the world’s population suddenly lose the ability to use language, and consequently can no longer communicate.
Book 2, The Dark Court, which introduces Lilith King in detail, further develops this theme once language streaming is restored. It does so by exploring the consequences of the very language chips, implanted in people’s heads, which can be hacked, to kill off large swathes of the population. This is achieved by using language chips to suppress melatonin production in the brain, causing a fatal insomnia pandemic.
Book 3 in the series, The Rise of the Mashiach, sees Ebba and Lilith team up, to counter other-worldly forces, the mysterious Watchers, who seek to use infrasound to disable language chips, causing them to irradiate the brains of most of the world’s population—causing instantaneous death.
Book 4 in the series, The Time Seers of Kairos, contextualizes the events on Earth, by relating them to the sinister Sage, and an intergalactic plot to control all sentient beings with an addictive system of communication: the Mind Chant. This is a unique “song” transmitted from the distant planet Empyrean to an individual’s brain, across the known universe. The “songs” transmitted by the Sage can be switched off, causing death within twelve hours, for each individual targeted. Death occurs following a period of increasingly agonizing withdrawal symptoms.
The final books in the series, book 5, The Doomsday Covenant, and book 6, The Tower of Songs bring events to a head. The battle between good and evil rages, centered on who controls language, and the twelve ancient language engineers, whose souls are contained within mysterious void prisms.
The overarching motif of the Songs of the Sage book series concerns the nature, origin, and purpose of language.