Death Engine Protocol by Margret A. Treiber is dystopian science fiction with a liberal sprinkling of body horror. Captain Eris, aka the Death Engine, is a tweak, a human genetically modified to have superpowers. Her superpower is 1) that she’s unable to stay dead, and 2) when she comes back and her body regenerates, she gains temporary powers that protect her from whatever killed her. Gunshot wounds equal diamond-plated skin, drowning equals being able to breathe water. You get the idea.
As a remnant of a US superweapon project, Eris has been through a lot. She’s sarcastic, angry, and completely done with it all. I can’t really blame her. At the start of the book she’s enjoying retirement and hoping for a peaceful (and permanent) death of old age when a mercenary tweak bludgeons her to death, regenerating her to her former youthful self and giving her cyborg-frying electrical powers.
At this point, I should mention that Death Engine Protocol needs pretty much all of the content warnings. Eris gets brutally murdered repeatedly in this book, and there’s also torture and SA in her past, during her time with the superweapon project. If you’re disturbed by that kind of content or have experienced that firsthand, this may not be an enjoyable read for you.
Dragged from the comforts of retirement, Eris sets about finding out who sent the tweak to kill her and why. Along the way she makes a new friend, rediscovers an old one, and learns that she’s not quite as alone as she thought. She also discovers a group of evil realtors trying to depopulate Earth so they can buy low, sell high, and turn the planet into an exclusive playground for the super wealthy. And while Eris reacts with surprisingly little retaliatory murder for being repeatedly killed, despite the pain, the horrific nightmares, and not being able to just stay dead, what the realtors are trying to do to her home really pisses/ticks her off.
I had a little bit of a hard time with how resigned Eris seemed to be about being repeatedly tortured and killed. Aside from a fair bit of swearing, she’s a lot less angry than I’d be in that situation. It reminds me of a conversation I’ve seen around the internet here and there, about how much more suffering female superheroes seem to have to endure. Guy has his family killed or his girlfriend fridged, or maybe the bad guys killed his parents, and that’s good enough to justify a lifetime of bashing bad guys. So why do women have to endure so much worse before they’re allowed to fight back? To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of the author. It’s a comment on the way the society we live in has engineered us to think.
All the heavy stuff aside, Death Engine Protocol is a great story about a group of friends surviving the worst life has to offer and combining their strengths to save the world. If you’re into really dark superhero stories, I highly recommend it!