New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

That summer was immortal. July was especially savage with sixty-two heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today’s heat.

Then the monsoons came. Undeterred, hundreds of Red Devil fans flooded the World Cup Stadium, waving flags of their reunified nation. Their dreams vaporized after the first round. Mexico: 7, United Republic of Korea: 0. The very next day, the sky cleared. A white sun buttered a salvage yard with rust while an old bomb-disposal unit, the Grumman A-1, moved in a figure eight. It cleared the path for a young girl named Ruijie, who was dragging the body of a woman by the ankles, naked arms thrown back as if shouting hooray.

The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and long blond hair, the kind that shone with each brush. She was falling apart. Her face had been shredded into confetti, held together by one bleary blue eye, while her torso was a smooth bioplastic vest, translucent as a milk carton. Ruijie had tried pressing the power button located on the nape of the woman’s neck. She’d gotten a twitch of the ankles, a froggy jolt, but nothing. The robot was dead.

Still, what exquisite legs. Ruijie planned to take them home.

She paused to check the battery level of her robowear. Two hours to go. Affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customized circuitry to aid her ability to walk. For she was beloved.

Close to the edge the salvage yard bloomed into silver grass. Tufty reeds stirred from the breeze while broken war machines slept like ancient dinosaurs, abandoned from the unification war. Ahead of them lay what could be the second-deadliest robot in the yard, the SADARM-1000. When it was still active and nimble, it was a house of horrors from whose impenetrable womb wave after wave of bladed robots would emerge, whipping through the air, keen to slice and beep and blow.

Decades later, now retired, the SADARM reclined on its side like the Buddha of Miamsa, indolent in the shade. The belly had been decimated by a stray blast on a bridge, then pried open and plundered for wires, chips, anything glinty. Ruijie backed up against it, pulling the woman by the feet, but the woman’s head knocked against a piece of buried metal, and her blue eye popped out. Cursing, Ruijie chased it through the grass— the one eye! — until it slowed to a crawl at the base of the SADARM’s belly and kissed the pregnant curve.

Ruijie took a minute to crouch and a second to reach for the eye, then froze. A hornet had landed on it with a flick. It unfolded wings of black glass. Another skittered down the slope of the SADARM’s belly. More crawled out of the smelted head. Maybe under the visor, she’d find a gold blanket trembling inside the SADARM’s skull. They could be drones, the kind that slipped into your ear and slid a long thin needle into your brain, or maybe they were just yellow jackets, sedate until they weren’t. Which was more deadly, real or not real?

The real knew no restraint.

She decided to be perfect and still. Like a robot. Except a robot wouldn’t need mechanic braces to walk. A robot would be thrown away for needing anything at all.

Back away, back away.

Then a hum stirred from deep inside the SADARM. With a tilt of their wings, the hornets buzzed back, a righteous swell of anger, but the singular hum drowned them out. Low and peaceable, it lifted and dipped, from treble to bass, land to sea, the tide rising and pounding against time, the shudder of a temple bell, the ohmmmmmm in the vibrations that snaked up her robowear and scraped the hairs on her arms.

The hornets fell silent.

Someone’s inside. Even her thought was a whisper. And it must be a magical someone to hum a nest of hornets to sleep.

RUIJIE WAS THE ONLY GRANDCHILD from both sides of her family. Her relatives in Fuzhou called her Rui-Rui and Mingzhu, and her father especially thought of her as a precious pearl.

Her symptoms first appeared in the fourth grade when her father was regaling them at dinner with Ruijie’s science fair project, “The Great Silence and Why I Think We’re Not Listening,” which took the grand prize, and her mother joked about how the table could benefit from their own great silence. Ruijie snorted shacha sauce up her nose and she reached for a glass of water. Then dropped it.

Later that week she dropped her chopsticks. They clattered to the floor, dragging the slippery noodles by the hair. Her father remarked on her clumsiness. Ruijie remembered feeling sheepish, maybe defiant, but not scared. Not yet.

The tremors grew. Her fingers refused to fist. She took advantage and flipped off the annoying kids in front of the teacher. But she couldn’t hold a pen, or type; then she couldn’t stand without wobbling. Then came the tests, between endless waits in endless hospital lobbies, the glow-in-the-dark scans, the shots drilling deeper and deeper into her spine. The doctors lobbed acronyms, like ALS, PMA, and MMA, which regrettably was not the martial arts. There were nights she couldn’t sleep because her body clutched her awake in a squeezing iron fist. These nights she’d pretend to breathe softly when her parents sneaked into her room and knelt beside her bed so they could wrap her hand in sandalwood beads and pray.

She was measured for her first set of robowear. Ivory oblong disks, serving as both sensors and motors, rested on her hips to usher her gait, like a gentle push on the swings. For the first time in weeks, Ruijie stood on her own feet. Her father said she looked “super.” Her mother took a picture and touched it with two fingers, as if the Ruijie frozen in time were more precious and real.

Prepare your hearts, the doctors told her parents, instead of her. But Ruijie, three-time winner of the science fair, believed in the miracle of science. She believed in the trillions of tenuous threads tying the self to the rest. 物我一體. Matter and I are One. The grace of union so the swimmer flowed with the ocean, so the archer flew in the arrow, so the calligrapher bled from the brush. With this belief, she would wake, walk, and breathe with cosmic synergy, full of darkness and spinning lights, and her body, which broke down day by day, remained a solar system where all the stars would burst and burn, but until then, every quantum speck quivered bright with integrity.

This is an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park, published by Oneworld, the May 2026 read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us, and join the discussion on Discord.