The Awakening of Insects: A Tor.com Original

By Bobby Sun

Patterns emerge in the most unexpected places as a scientist studies the flora and fauna of a new world.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780765396501

Bobby Sun

Bobby Sun is a Chinese-Malaysian writer and spoken word poet who grew up in Singapore and is studying in London. His work has previously been published in the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month ("SingPoWriMo") anthology (as Robert Bivouac) and Rosarium Publishing's anthology of Southeast Asian steampunk, The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia (as Robert Liow).

Book preview

Jingru smelled the storm long before it came.

The dusty, moist scent wafted in on the morning breeze as she tended the flowers on her porch. It tickled her nose. Her assistant-intelligence, Aimee, chirped a precipitation warning through her jawpiece.

Attention! A significant pressure system has been detected by Central Station. There is a 64 percent chance of a sub-category storm in Reserve-133 in the next 12 hours. Estimated wind speed is 57 kilometres per hour. Please stow all lightning- and wind-sensitive equipment in an appropriate location, Dr Lee.

Yes, Aimee. Thank you. I’ll get the collectors.

She put the watering can away; there would be no need for watering today. With a deliberate ease, she glided across the faux-wood boards of her front porch and slipped into her shed. The shed, somewhere between smithy and laboratory, was neat and almost well-mannered; her unstudied specimens, packed in cryojars for preservation, were neatly shelved and categorised. A long workbench was arrayed with glassware and cutters, while various items of powered lab equipment and assistant drones lay dormant along the walls. A door at the back led to a large storage room, where the specimens she’d finished studying went. Her field armour was in the corner, plugged into its charging station: a silvered, helmeted suit equipped with an exoskeleton for speed and laced with shear-thickening ferrofluid to protect from unexpected impact. Manoeuvring cables, tightly wound and connected to a body harness, rested on either side of her hips, and a pair of flechette guns were woven into its wrists. She unfastened her clothes from her body, stepped into her armour, and checked its equipment one more time before stepping out. She had work to