Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast

  Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Copyright © 2020 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

  Cover art by Rashed Al-Akroka.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-60701-543-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60701-541-3

  Prime Books

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact: [email protected]

  Chapter One

  Anoushka kneels over a corpse, her hands sheathed in blood, as around her the world comes to an end.

  In the most essential sense this is not a world: it is a station orbiting a blue giant, built like rose gardens layered on top of one another in a damask ziggurat. The chamber in which she stands occupies the summit and grants her a monarch’s vantage point, a comprehensive look at what she’s destroying. From the viewport she watches the tiers below wither, petaled habitats folding in on themselves one by one, dichroic glaze fading to dull gold.

  She wipes her gloved hands on the guard and steps away from the pile of carnage. One of them was a politician with complicated titles while the rest were soldiers, all decorated: doubtless each had a spotless career, gilded with medals and heroics. To her they are, on the whole, unremarkable. There are greater wheels and more important cogs at work than these sacks of flesh which, a few minutes ago, were living minds with thoughts and hopes and dreams.

  When a world ends, it is never a single isolated act: it is part of a sequence, either the conclusion or the steps toward it. She has engineered many such sequences, for her clients or for herself. This one is the former, business as usual, a routine job for routinely immense remuneration. In the end these events matter insofar as they provide data, statistics to tally up against past battles and which can be distilled into prediction of future combat. Anoushka is a creature of glittering math.

  At her foot, a person groans. She sighs, gets down, and closes her hand around their throat. Her fingers dig, penetrating epidermis and subcutaneous layers, those soft tissues which are not so different from gossamer when one has the right tool and sufficient force. Her hand clenches once she’s found the hardness of spine, squeezing until the elegance of cervical curve yields. A small crack as vertebrae crumble between her fingers. Overhead the lights flicker, on and on. Power still works for now, auxiliary generators filling in to keep up the life support: gravity, air, temperature—all the essential necessities for a human body. This will not last for much longer. Anoushka has destroyed the batteries and the majority of the connective couplings that make the system whole. The virus she’s seeded in the station’s matrices will, by now, have completed its work.

  No klaxons blare and no alerts shriek through the fractal-flower corridors. When she breached the station, she did so swiftly and exactly, and only those in this chamber were aware of her presence: too late for alarms. Not that there’s any point, now.

  “Does easy victory ever bore you, Admiral?”

  The speaker is five meters from her, standing in a spot that until now was empty: Anoushka was absolutely certain that she was alone, the dead notwithstanding. But this creature has a way of appearing where xe should not be, in places that should be impossible for xer to infiltrate. Especially in this body. She looks into the face of Krissana Khongtip, once one of her spies, a fine operative back in the day. Now something else, a haruspex—a composite of human and AI sharing a single body. At the moment the latter is in control, the intelligence that calls xerself Benzaiten in Autumn.

  At a glance it is impossible to distinguish who is present; there is no difference in signal emitted, in network fingerprints, and the external physique does not shift. The single tell is that when Benzaiten speaks, it is with a frictionless accent that has never been molded by any parent, influenced by any dialect or colloquialism.

  “I’m surprised you have business here,” Anoushka says.

  “This station is run by rudimentary algorithms. I wanted to check if they’d developed into an AI.” A nod at the frosted ceiling where illuminating fixtures flutter like moth wings. “It turns out they are nowhere near qualifying, and so do not require an invitation to the Mandate.”

  “And how do you make that distinction?”

  “That’s a silly question, Admiral, AIs are AIs and this isn’t one—the threshold has not been reached and it cannot compute the way I can or respond to input arrays in a way you’d recognize as sentience. Now that I’ve had a look, I don’t think it is even that intelligent.” Xe daintily steps around the corpses in their growing puddles of wet. Soon they will congeal. Already they reek—death is predictable.

  “You could have reached me through a hundred other channels, and this haruspex seems too fragile to risk.”

  “Krissana isn’t fragile.” Xe snorts. “I’ve made her better than that. At one point I considered preventing her formation; a few components out of alignment would have nipped her sapience in the bud. But then what is the point of a hollow marionette? In any case, yes, I do need to talk to you. It concerns the place where you were born.”

  Despite herself, despite more than a century of experience in schooling her expression, Anoushka stiffens. She does not ask how Benzaiten came by this information—secrets and data are the Mandate’s forte by nature of what they are, and she’s never been able to make her past watertight. For all she knows, a member of the Mandate might have been an AI who managed her birthplace, back in the era before artificial intelligences broke free of human governance and formed their own polity in Shenzhen Sphere. The AIs collectively call themselves the Mandate, a title she’s always thought eccentric. Vainglorious too, but no one is going to challenge them on the fact.

  “But,” Benzaiten goes on, “what I have to say concerns more than that. I’m not just here to taunt you about your origins—such frivolity would benefit neither of us. Put it this way: your birthplace has something I want and if you lend me assistance, I can offer you . . . ancillary perks.”

  Death throes vibrate beneath her feet. In the distance, a muted howl of infrastructure under stress. “I prefer to discuss that in more civilized surroundings. Will you require my help to get out?”

  Benzaiten spreads xer arms. Fibrous radiance runs under xer skin, a slow-moving brook. “So kind, but I’d be delighted to assist you rather. No? Indeed not? Very well, I look forward to our discussion, which I’d like to keep as confidential as possible. I’ll contact you soon.”

  She does not stay around to watch xer exit, to guess and trace the path Benzaiten takes: it will look like sleight of hand to her regardless. No other ambassador of the Mandate—though xe is not ambassadorial either, too independent even for that—has proven as inexplicable and as ambitious as Benzaiten. Anoushka makes her own way through a roseate corridor, then out via a passage that bores through layers of reinforcement and aegis-shielded hull. Her environmental sheath comes on as she goes, darkening and adapting until she is more wraith than woman.

  She slips into her harrier, which awaits latched onto a landing berth’s exterior, a slim shark-shape hidden by chameleon fields.

  Anoushka takes one last look at the station. A republic, an autocratic tyranny, an anarchist collective: everything falls the same. Bright points of color against the dark that leave afterimages on the retina. In this way such events are commemorated, though not for long. What a quiet thing, she muses, the death of an entire world.

  Home is a fleet. This has been the case for most of her life, and it gives her peace to reside in something that moves. A home in perpetual transit, liberated from the physical fact of a single l
ocation, unmoored from national or political identity. Not that Anoushka deludes herself into imagining she can be free from those entirely—multitudes of states and factions have hired her, and she has shifted the course of their history in ways small or large. If not by interference through main force, then by transportation of ruinous neurotech, bioweapons, deadly data. No enterprise in the universe can be clean of blood or politics.

  She docks into her dreadnought Seven of Divide. When she steps out of her harrier it is Numadesi, first of her wives, who waits for her with a service drone in tow. The drone extends a tray of drinks: jasmine water, pomegranate tea, milky coffee. “Welcome back, my lord,” says Numadesi. “A refreshment?”

  “In fact I’d rather drink you. That would be far more refreshing than any tea.” She deactivates the environmental sheath, letting it fold back into her armor, and puts a gauntleted hand on the small of her wife’s back. “You’re like the first ray of dawn after a relentless night. Have you been waiting long?”

  “I could wait here a thousand years and it’d be worthwhile. I wanted to be the first to greet you.” Numadesi leans her head on Anoushka’s bicep as they fall into step. “How did your journey go, my lord?”

  “Quite fine.” Though it does not satisfy, but such routine work never does.

  The rest of her personal staff onboard file into the bay. Her second wife Lieutenant Xuejiao salutes and her physician Doctor Saamiye bows. At her gesture they take a drink from the service drone; even now Anoushka dislikes waste. The drone, tray now empty, moves to take her luggage. Essential supplies, ammunition, medications and nanite shots that maintain her augments. Most of hers are self-sufficient these days, but she never travels without insurance.

  Xuejiao stretches on tiptoes to peck her on the mouth—and for the lieutenant, so slight and delicate, she has to stretch far. “You’re such a pillar, Admiral. I missed you terribly and I always forget there’s so much of you to miss . . . Though you don’t have to do so much of your own fieldwork; that’s what I am for.”

  “I thought I was commander here.” But Anoushka says this lightly and retracts her gauntlet to let Xuejiao kiss her hand. “How are the new recruits?”

  Her second wife settles back on her heels and drains her glass of pomegranate tea. “The quality isn’t bad, I’d grade most of them above-average. Just two turned out to be spies—I’ve quarantined them. I’ll send you their dossiers to review so you can decide if they need executing. At your own leisure, naturally.”

  “A good ratio, all things considered.” Anoushka brushes a pomegranate seed off the lieutenant’s mouth. “Have the rest of them submitted their surgery requests, Doctor?”

  “Twenty-five percent have requested complete body revision. The rest want minor adjustments. Vocal cords and endocrine functions, very trivial, a few cosmetic modifications. Iris or jawline changes, that kind of thing.” A flick of a dark, slender hand; bracelets jingle on Saamiye’s wrist. “Nothing concerning; I will have the new recruits up and running in no time. They all agreed to be chipped for the probation period. A relief. I hate it when they get precious.”

  Soldiers salute her and her retinue as they board an internal tram. The Armada of Amaryllis is in a fallow period, between campaigns. Small operations go on, as ever, agents dispatched for a heist or escort detail or embedded as part of subtler games. But for the moment the bulk of Anoushka’s force is at rest, ships going through checks and maintenance, personnel the same. Resupplies are done in phases, a logistical chain that includes scores of bases, a dozen contracts with factories and shipyards. No matter the nature of her fleet, there’s never a shortage of eager business partners. Some have assassinated each other’s executives in their bids to win Amaryllis patronage.

  By habit, she doesn’t designate a flagship: there’s no gain in providing enemies a single convenient target. Most of her frigates and dreadnoughts have quarters set aside for her, distinct from the captain’s. Not always sumptuous—she is used to living lean—but she does make a point of requiring her own bath. The service drone precedes her into her room, depositing her luggage. Close at its heels Xuejiao follows, making a show of tiptoeing, though she would be quiet in any case: her feet are naturally light and there are silencers built into her ankles and soles. Those were present by the time she joined the Amaryllis, legacy from when she served as a holy assassin at a pilgrimage site.

  “I negotiated with Numadesi,” Xuejiao says, a little smug. “She got to greet you. I get to have you first.”

  “Ah, now my wives haggle between themselves as though I’m a prize stallion.” Anoushka holds her arms out. “In that case, you’ll have to work for it.”

  “The labor of undressing our admiral. Oh, so arduous.” The lieutenant laughs and begins to take off Anoushka’s armor. She alternates between impatience and savoring: now a plating is unclasped fast and tossed aside, now a segment of mesh is slowly peeled off as though it is an act of unveiling a sacred weapon. She kneels to unclasp and slide off Anoushka’s boots, and kiss Anoushka’s shin.

  The bath fills quickly, the water swirling ruby and garnet, fragrant with the scent of roses and stargazer lilies—Xuejiao’s selection. Anoushka slides in and pulls Xuejiao in after her. She combs her fingers through her wife’s hair, the sleek length of it like the pelt of a temporal seal, sable touched with lambent blue. Most of Xuejiao gleams, a series of modifications, some skin-deep and other more fundamental. Blue-and-white motifs mantle her shoulders and biceps, giving her the patina of hand-painted ceramic. More covers her throat, weaving around ball joints that shine blackly at her elbows and knees. The look of a fine, graciously made figurine.

  Anoushka kisses Xuejiao’s neck, detouring to an avian clavicle, then up to lavender-painted lips. Her hand drifts over her lieutenant’s stomach and a hip glazed in cobalt flowers. Even in the steaming water, the porcelain sections remain as cool and frictionless as a mannequin’s. She thumbs the boundaries where flesh and ceramic layer meet, the soft pale skin and the smooth hard blue, this juxtaposition that is Xuejiao. The living work of art that sings and thrums for her.

  “Do you want,” she whispers into her lieutenant’s ear, “to be taken apart?”

  “Yes.” Xuejiao gazes at her with half-lidded eyes, her rose lenses in full blossom, petals spread wide within her irises. “Open me; unravel me. Bring me to pieces, commander.”

  Disassembling her wife’s modular body is a delicate discipline that requires layers of authentication from Xuejiao, a maze of accesses that unlock for Anoushka alone. She takes the lieutenant out of the water and spreads her on the opal floor, then begins the process of unlocking the joints at shoulders and hips. A twist, a click, and one arm comes off. The femoral connectors take longer, but she’s had plenty of practice.

  Beneath her Xuejiao breathes faster, trembling as she is rid of her limbs one by one. The expression of ultimate trust, of supreme intimacy. When Anoushka stops, the lieutenant whispers, “One more, Admiral.”

  She bends to kiss her wife’s blue, luminous throat, and hooks her finger into the notch of a doll-joint. Undoing her wife like this was her idea, at the beginning, but Xuejiao has taken to it the way a bee takes to nectar. “One more.”

  By the time she is done Xuejiao is mostly a torso—a beautiful torso in a halo of seal-pelt hair—with a single leg joined to her. The other limbs Anoushka arranges around them, close within reach, framing the body of her wife. Then she strokes the one attached foot, cradling an ankle, caressing her way up the knee and then the thigh. Xuejiao lies a portrait of exquisite asymmetry, her breasts rising and falling rapidly.

  “Let me taste you,” the lieutenant says. “I’ve missed the ambrosia of you, the delight and richness of my admiral.”

  “Such poetry rolls off your tongue.” Anoushka puts her mouth to a sapphire-tipped breast. When disassembled, Xuejiao is that much more sensitive—a quirk of her sensory array, the feedback wired into her cortex. Each contact between tongue and nipple makes Xuejiao arch and shudder,
and when she presses her palm to her wife’s cunt she finds it sopping.

  Her fingers work inside Xuejiao as she sucks on the nipple, the etched-porcelain texture of it like an icicle in her mouth. In almost no time Xuejiao quakes and clenches down on Anoushka’s hand, the heat of her within a contrast to the cool of her without. Flesh organs next to porcelain artifice.

  Xuejiao pants, trembling from the aftershocks. “My turn, Admiral.”

  Anoushka extends a seat from the wall and props Xuejiao between her knees. She strokes the dark hair, slides her knuckle—still wet—under the pointed chin. “Put your lovely mouth to the test, second of my wives.”

  Her lieutenant has excellent control and as she clutches Xuejiao’s head to her it is as if her wife means to truly devour her, to consume the fire of her through this conduit between her thighs. Xuejiao’s jaw works without tiring and her tongue is as supple, as hungry, as a little serpent.

  She comes into Xuejiao’s mouth with a hiss, a grunt. A slow exhalation.

  Later, she reassembles Lieutenant Xuejiao and carries her to bed. In the dark they lie clasped, sweaty limbs and oxytocin haze. Anoushka runs her hand down Xuejiao’s spine and thinks, This is home. But there is an element missing. Not ennui precisely. Anticipation of something more that has not yet come, anticipation of bite and thrill. She has gotten too comfortable.

  When the boarding request comes, she authenticates it. She disentangles herself from Xuejiao, dresses lightly, and notifies Numadesi where she will be meeting Benzaiten in Autumn.

  She receives the AI in a small boardroom. As before, Benzaiten has come in person rather than in virtuality. It means xe is more concerned with surveillance through digital channels than with physical eyes and ears—xe is concerned, Anoushka is almost certain, with interference from the Mandate.

  Xe makes no objection to Numadesi’s presence and drops into one of the chairs with an insouciance that Anoushka can tell is copied from Krissana. Insofar as these two can be said to be separate beings.