The End of Sleep by Vyvyan Evans

 

What connects a new highly addictive gaming app, viral conspiracy theories by the mysterious Dark Court, and a fatal insomnia pandemic? Enter Lilith King, the world’s most famous cybercrime detective.

 

Lilith had always known she was different. Attitude to burn, for one thing. The strange chanting in her head since she was seven, for another. And then, the Aura, the sensory disturbance that makes her sick to the pit of her stomach, seemingly coinciding with the new, strange apparition that’s haunting her. She also has the ability to solve crime through touch alone. Together with Dr. Kace Westwood, a sleep specialist genius and a freak like her, Lilith must figure out whether the deadly insomnia pandemic is linked to the vagus chip implants being offered to all qualifying Unskills. Or are people’s language chips being hacked? And why is only the lowest soc-ed class being targeted?

 

The End of Sleep (Songs of the Sage, book one) by Vyvyan Evans

Start date: May 9, 2022

End date: May 12, 2022

Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: rape, sexism, classism, transphobia

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Hold onto your hat because there’s a lot to unpack.

The End of Sleep takes place about 110 years in the future. None of our current countries exist, but there’s still a United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), and North American Treaty Organization (NATO). There used to be an international law mandating that all newborns be surgically implanted with language chips (in addition to the various other cybernetic parts that everyone has), but following the Great Language Outage, that law was repealed. People still install the chips in infants, though, because they don’t want their children to be “left behind” in this modern world. Countries are labeled by tiers (Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three) that relate to how much the country depends on technology with Tier One (cough, first world, cough) being the highest.

There’s a global caste system wherein people are compulsorily certified for work by a score received from an IQ test they’re given at age seventeen. These so-called socio-educational (“soc-ed”) classifications are from lowest to highest: Unskill (IQ score 95 and under), Semiskill (IQ score 96 to 100), Skill (IQ score 101 to 106), Professional (IQ score 107 to ?), Executive, and Superior. In Tier One countries, Unskills are deemed unfit for work because their (previous, assigned) jobs have been replaced by automation.

A group of Unskills have organized Anti Full Automation (shortened to “AnFa”) protests to oppose their recent unfit-for-work designation. They are referred to by the insult “useless eaters” by members of a right-wing chatroom called Dark Court, which appears to be run by a conspiracy-rich group accusing Unskills of acts like “running large-scale child abduction networks, trafficking the children of other soc-ed classes for pedophile rings” (stop me if this sounds familiar to you) (Evans 44-45). Dark Court counter-protesters, clad in balaclavas for assumed anonymity, show up to these protests advocating for the forced sterilization of Unskills amongst other things.

Our main character is Dr. Lilith King. She is an Interpol Commander specializing in cybercrime with a PhD in cyberpsychology. There’s a fatal insomnia pandemic sweeping through the population of Unskills in Tier One and Tier Two countries that’s killed 58,000 so far, and per the request of the Security Council’s Counter Cyberterrorism Committee, Lilith has been assigned to the case. To sum up Lilith’s attitude: “I do cybercrime, not medical emergencies” (Evans 29).

Before I proceed, I must mention that Lilith is an unlikeable character with, what I see as, no redeemable qualities. She hates all men (“‘I hate men!’ I said quietly, to no one in particular”), but she doesn’t seem to think too highly of women either (Evans 61). It might be more accurate to say she hates everyone.

[Embry] had a ring through her nose. In her twisted position, I could make out large red and yellow fire-wing tattoos on her shoulder blades. She repulsed me…I hoped I hadn’t caught anything… She might have been pretty with more hair and without the nose piercing… As she moved, I saw a patch of dried blood on the sheet where she had been lying. I felt like retching. (Evans 12-13)

Something about Lejeune’s voice unsettled me. It was brittle, a little too high, even for a woman, and slightly pitchy in a way that I knew would soon start to irritate the hell out of me. Intolerant, as always. I got that a lot. Her hair was slicked back over her head in a single sweep, revealing a high forehead. Too masculine. Too totalitarian. And whatever gunk she put in her hair made her mousey blond look dark and muddy. Her face was taut, slightly lined, unsmiling. She clearly had something to prove, or at least she felt she did. I sensed it. Her only redeemable feature was her lips, plump and sensuous. I knew I was being politically incorrect as always. Why shouldn’t an older woman be attractive? But I could think whatever I damn well pleased. As long as I didn’t say it out loud, no one could judge me for my thoughts. Those were mine alone. (Evans 67)

Lilith is openly condescending to people she thinks are below her on the social hierarchy (“Didn’t you learn that in whichever school you went to?”), and she mocks people who don’t have the highest language chip subscription service like her. However, she sees herself as a champion of the Unskills (Evans 16):

“I’m trying to make a difference from the inside. For all the soc-ed classes that have been silenced for too long, for the Unskills, for women, for the underrepresented and forgotten.” (Evans 55)

I was doing this for the Unskills. My pact with myself. Perhaps I was the patron saint of the downtrodden, a badge of honor... (Evans 72)

            The pandemic is suspected to originate from a “vagus chip” being implanted in Unskills as part of an “Up-Skilling” program funded by a Bill and Melinda Gates-like philanthropist couple named Abner and Tova Broad. The chip is supposed to stimulate the vagus nerve in Unskills “to rev up the natural learning process,” thereby increasing their IQ and enabling them to qualify for higher-skilled jobs (Evans 104).

Lilith has been tasked with finding out whether someone has hacked the vagus chip and her partner is Dr. Kace Westwood, a professor of neurology at Columbia University who authored a book on insomnia at eleven. His expertise only gets him as far as excluding the vagus chip as the cause of the fatal insomnia pandemic, but Lilith decides that she needs his help for the entire investigation anyway. For a self-professed man hater, Lilith falls in love with Kace easily and unbelievably. On top of that, her “love” for Kace manifests as attraction to his physical appearance, where she makes repeated mentions of his “big” size, which came off as inauthentic and a little racist.

I caught myself admiring the esthetics of his physical appearance. He had beautiful black-bronze skin and a strong, youthful looking-face and surprisingly, startling blue eyes. (Evans 69)

But first, I knew I owed the pretty boy dinner. (Evans 126)

[T]his time I took his big hand and placed it gently on my chest, slightly above my right breast. (Evans 226)

My body was racked with sobs as I cried into his big shoulder, soaking a patch of his shirt. (Evans 267)

It’s revealed early in the story that Lilith descends from an alien race (and it’s implied that her grandparents were Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but that’s a whole other can of worms). She’s told by an alien visitor that there is a Watcher, a gaseous “agent of chaos” on Earth, and it’s her responsibility to find and destroy it (Evans 150). Through her work, she realizes the Watcher has attached itself to the Head of Interpol, Jürgen Fleischman, who raped Lilith 20 years prior.

It’s implied that Lilith exclusively dates women (by this transphobic line she says: “I just don’t date anyone with a penis”) because of the assault (Evans 127). Unless Lilith is bisexual (based on her later falling in love with Kace), it’s damaging to put forth that survivors of sexual assault change sexual orientations to the opposite gender of their abuser for many reasons. A warning to potential readers: there is a graphic description of Lilith’s assault that lasts for around six pages.

            When Lilith finds the underlying cause of the pandemic and decides how she’s going to end it, all conflict dissolves from the plot. She uses her newfound alien powers (that have no learning curve and no presumable limit to what they can do) to get her and Kace through all obstacles. Any inconvenience they encounter is minor and entirely reversible. The person who wanted Lilith to investigate the pandemic ends up being one of the people behind it. In the months following the end events, Lilith tracks down the only agent of the pandemic she was unable to kill in a remote area of Switzerland, scaling a mountain in the process, but then doesn’t decide to kill them, completely deflating the buildup.

            I wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t root for Lilith. She didn’t seem like a genuine person. The only character I liked was Kace, and mainly that was because I felt bad for him.

 

Works Cited

Evans, Vyvyan. The End of Sleep. Nephilim Publishing, 2022.