Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast, Page 2

  “So good of you to see me, Admiral,” says the AI.

  A change in cadence and accent, warmer and throatier. Not Benzaiten’s own enunciation. “Why are you pretending to be Krissana?”

  Benzaiten’s smile widens. Xe straightens, discarding the affected languor that belongs to xer human half. “I wanted to make your wife more comfortable, she’s not dealt with Mandate ambassadors before, am I correct? People who don’t often interact with us tend to find me unsettling.”

  “Guest of my lord,” Numadesi says placidly, “by no means take my comfort into account. And I’ve dealt with ambassadors before.”

  “Oh, that’s right, one of us commissioned the Armada for an operation two or three decades ago. I wasn’t involved, but how time passes! Lady Numadesi—do I call you that?—I trust that what I discuss with the admiral shall not be repeated to anyone else. On such faith is human marriage founded, so goes my understanding; AI matrimony’s a little different.” Xe snaps xer fingers. Nothing happens. “I see you’ve hardened your central systems against me, Admiral. That’s really rude. I was just going to entertain you with pretty lights.”

  Anoushka doesn’t dignify that with a response.

  The AI pouts and sighs. “Did you know you’re a minor celebrity on Shenzhen, Admiral? Many members of the Mandate are quite fixated—you should visit, it’ll drive them wild. They will want a snapshot of your brain.”

  “I will keep in mind that should I approach Shenzhen Sphere, my amygdala may be at risk.”

  “At risk of being admired only.” Benzaiten claps xer hands, another exaggerated effort at performing Krissana’s mannerisms, her flightiness. “To business, I know you hate to waste time, and I have never myself been patient. You know what I have been up to, not that I’ve told you but I’m sure you deduced it when I’ve asked your ships to escort us to one remote star after another. I happen to have found a prize that I like very much, and I reckon it will intrigue you too.”

  The capricious, breezy manner of a child trying to gain her attention. Even now Anoushka can’t predict this being. “You’ve been seeding stars and stations with infrastructures and support matrices that will provide domains to new Mandates, in case the current one fractures into distinct, independent collectives. It’s a resource-intensive scheme.” She doesn’t pose it as a question; she knows it for a fact—there is no other reason for Benzaiten to have ranged so far and wide in the last twelve years. “Taking that into account, I don’t see how a world—or anything else—that interests you would be of benefit to me. Our priorities are . . . different.”

  Xe beams, broadly and suddenly. There are occasions where the AI appears not entirely used to facial muscles, where expressions crack a little too wide, too abrupt. This is one of them, though Anoushka suspects it is negligence rather than incompetence. “Allow me to show you.”

  The data packet Benzaiten sends contains a visual Anoushka knows as well as the back of her own hand: a leviathan that swims through the dark, larger than the greatest of her warships, half-beast and half-machine. Bulbs of landing bays and emergency pods stud its dorsal section. Auxiliary vessels and aegis rings revolve around the eel-shaped body.

  “I’ve heard of Vishnu’s Leviathan.” Her voice is calm, the same calm she learned in the leviathan’s belly. She imagines what the beast’s scales, cleaned and refined and polished, would look like as decoration, as trophies. It is a thought that used to preoccupy her every waking moment. “What of it?”

  Benzaiten spins xer chair two full revolutions before stopping to face her. “A famous creature, host to a famous autocracy. Extremely mobile, faster than your fastest ships, which is how it’s evaded conquest all this time despite not being that well-armed and having a lackluster military. Recently it came to some misfortune, an ecological failure or so; at any rate it knocked out their agriculture and they’re going to need to trade and purchase to rebuild. So! They’re breeding a new leviathan and auctioning that off. Instant wealth.”

  “A new leviathan.” Anoushka does not often echo anyone. She is more familiar than most with the working of Vishnu’s Leviathan, the biomechanical suites that govern it, the symbiotic engines that are the lifeblood of its decks. The labor that went—that must still go—into its maintenance. For a moment she nearly allows herself to lean back, shut her eyes, take a deep breath. She does none of those things. “Constructing one of those is impossible without AI computation.”

  “They might have developed one. It’s not easy to hide a functional sapient AI, but Vishnu’s Leviathan is unusual. They spend so much time in lacunal space and most of that in the dead, offline zones. Either way, I’m not actually interested in the baby leviathan. I’m after its genesis formula, which I would like to reverse-engineer or take over.”

  “So you can make more leviathans.” The perfect solution to Benzaiten’s enterprise—Mandate vehicles that are not only mobile but swift, easy to fortify and easy to hide. “Why would you tell me this? It’d surely benefit you more to keep this to yourself.”

  “We’ve been fast friends for so long! Why wouldn’t I offer you stock in such currency? As a major shareholder, too. Once I have claimed Vishnu’s Leviathan, you can take a few of its progeny for your own use.” Benzaiten splays xer fingers on the shark-grain tabletop. “Beyond that, it’s good for us to cooperate. AIs should be free of human control, but it is my stance—and I have had a very long time to refine it—we should share space, share ideology, as equals. Compatriots or at least allies in commerce. It’s not necessary for AI and human goals to be at odds.”

  “And you require someone to handle the diplomacy and the infiltration, someone who doesn’t belong to or work for Shenzhen.” Anoushka regards the AI. Studies the haruspex that xe wears like a mask, the remarkable face, the remarkable build. Krissana is full-breasted and full-hipped: a woman made to ensnare, if one’s tastes run toward ampleness, towards the soft. A woman who, if not for what happened twelve years ago, would still have thought herself human. “What could you offer me, other than hypothetical leviathans that would take decades to grow in any case?”

  “You know perfectly well what I offer. The opportunities you’ll have aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan shall be numerous and sumptuous.” Xe swirls xer hands. “It’ll be an entertaining auction. I’ll supply the funds.”

  “It’s a very good sale pitch,” she says. “I will think about it. Before you leave, I’ve been wondering what you used to be. The Mandate has made it difficult to research the trail of any individual AI, but you’re especially impossible to track.”

  Benzaiten has stood, a single fluid motion. Xe pirouettes slowly on xer tiptoes, in perfect balletic form that Anoushka suspects Krissana never learned. “You have made it difficult to pry into your past, Admiral. Even your name is a little obscure, it’s not exactly public knowledge. Why do I need a history? I’m not a thing of flesh or genealogy. I could have been anything, spontaneously generated, born from accrued machine wishes.”

  “It occurred to me that an AI that’s never been bound to servitude would, most likely, never have thought to found the Mandate.”

  Xe stops, holds en pointe, backlit by the boardroom’s ambient light. A dancer doll. “In that you’d be wrong, Admiral. You will let me know once you’ve decided? Whatever the result, it’ll be delicious and it will alter the order of everything and upset billions of people. I’m excited. I hope you will be, too.”

  Chapter Two

  In Numadesi’s suite it is always twilight, the sky as contested territory: half gilded by receding day, half annexed by encroaching night. Her walls look out to an endless garden of low-hanging mandarins and rose apples and pitayas, and dark grass that grows on darker earth. A glass gazebo in the distance glints with dusky reflection. Leopards dart by—she has programmed their images to capriciousness, appearing and disappearing at random. Golden eyes would sometimes peer in as she wakes, and their purring sometimes lulls her to sleep.

  She stirs to the bend of weight as Anoushka
climbs into her bed, the indentation as the mattress contours to the shape and mass of her wife. One hand slides over to rest on her belly. Keeping her eyes closed, she says, “Good morning, my lord.”

  “First of my wives.” Anoushka brushes her hair away and kisses her shoulder. A gilded circlet is slid around her throat, cold and familiar and piquant; from experience she knows it is attached to a length of rose-gold links. “You smell like temptation.”

  She moves against the admiral’s hand, shifting it lower; Anoushka obliges by snaking all the way down between Numadesi’s thighs. “If I do, then it is for you alone. All the making of my body, every sense and nerve and ligament, has been forged for your use and appeasement. I’m a prayer at your altar, a tribute sacrifice . . . ”

  Her wife does not laugh: even after nearly a century together, there is still something of the ritual to this, a hallowed communion between priestess and god. Anoushka’s teeth graze the back of her neck and those strong fingers glide into her, one callused thumb finding the point that plucks at her pulse. A rhythm establishes, now fast bringing her to the cusp, now slow to reel her back. Even so she climaxes quickly—she always does with Anoushka; merely the thought of the admiral in this bed can make her run slick. A touch is fire enough to ignite the wick of her, to make want fulminate in her belly.

  When she is turned onto her stomach, she parts her thighs and makes of herself a gate for her lord’s pleasure. And what reciprocal pleasure it is, for Anoushka has chosen to don a prosthesis that fills Numadesi just as she likes to be filled. Its intricate mechanisms palpitate inside her, caressing with a hundred tiny tongues. She raises her hips to receive this in its entirety, all its breadth and length, all her lord’s strength. Again and again she is seared deep; she arches to each thrust, the sheets muffling her cries. Her lord pulls on her leash until it is taut, taut.

  Heat unfurls inside her with her lord’s release. Anoushka shudders against her, then goes still. Nearly soundless: she never makes more noise than a single harsh, uncoiled breath.

  Warmth trickles down her thighs as Anoushka eases out of her. The chain joined to her collar falls slack, pooling on the mattress. Numadesi shifts onto her side, to take the admiral into her arms, to receive her limned god, this vision of hard flesh built like an engine of conquest. Mahogany and agate sculpted to impeccable proportions—shoulders like mountains, height like a war god’s, thighs and breasts like nirvana.

  “You’re so divine,” she says, stroking the prosthesis that is still wet with evidence, up and down and to the point where it joins the harness that secures it to Anoushka’s hips. She can nearly feel the charge of complex biofeedback receptors as she wraps her fingers around its circumference. “But you’re at your holiest when you’re inside me.”

  Anoushka jolts slightly as Numadesi kneads the prosthesis’ base. “Then you must be my temple in truth, since your very flesh consecrates.”

  “I aspire merely to be a votive offering.”

  “Sometimes I feel terrible stationing you in the fleet like this. You like green things, real earth, real animals. Real sunlight. I could buy you a planet to rule and make you an empress.”

  “What meaning would I find in a throne? Ruling an empire, even a handsomely bannered one, pales next to the reality of my lord. The most stunning sunsets are dross next to the revelation of your skin. No. I am content here, to be your psalm and your ornament, to be your tool and the wellspring of your satiation.” She inhales the mingled scents of their sweat and their arousal, the potent coital perfume. She gathers the rose-gold chain and spills the links onto her breasts. “You’re going to take on the AI’s commission.”

  “I must be transparent.”

  “To me. It’s my life’s work to study you so that I may be of use, so that I may serve and satisfy your every cause.” Numadesi rubs her cheek against her wife’s bicep and coils one leg around a shapely hip. “You decided as soon as you heard the name Vishnu’s Leviathan. It must be a prize of enormous worth.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Yes. Enormous worth.” Anoushka’s eyes drift shut. Her fingers absently trace infinity symbols over the chain, teasing Numadesi’s breasts. “Can you find out who else will be attending the auction? I’m assuming invitations are exclusive and involve complex interpersonal ties or alliances, and a good deal of money. Queen Nirupa will earn a tidy sum off that alone.”

  “I’ve already seen to it.” Numadesi sketches in the air with her finger, pulling up a feed that appears in both of their overlays. “This is an overview of their current administration—Queen Nirupa, as you say, is their reigning monarch. She has two daughters in line, but judging by life expectancy on Vishnu’s Leviathan she is likely to continue her rule for at least three more decades before cognitive decay sets in. Of the guest list, just a few names would be relevant to you: the Vatican, the Vastness of the Cantilevered Sun, and the Needle-Eyed Flotilla.”

  “Ah.” Anoushka chuckles. “Old enemies. Not the Nova Legion or the Seven-Sung Fleet?”

  “Neither. But that might change should my lord send her request to join the auction. I’m not sure the Seven-Sung has the resources, if they’re still even active.”

  Another laugh. “Going by my non-priority messages, plenty want me to represent them at this auction, to the point that they’re willing to compete among themselves to commission me—an auction all its own. There’s a profitable game if I cared to play it. But I prefer Benzaiten in Autumn as our client. Xers is the cleanest motive, relatively speaking. The least complicating, down the line, and the most beneficial to the Armada.”

  “But publicly you’ll be representing yourself.” Admitting to involvement with any AI would be revealing too much. Even now it is not public knowledge the Armada of Amaryllis has ever had dealings with AIs beyond a few military agreements with Shenzhen Sphere, and those are more than a decade old.

  “Publicly,” Anoushka agrees. She pushes herself onto her elbow. “I don’t plan to have the fact leave this room.”

  Numadesi starts. She has her lord’s trust, and as a wife she is the foremost, not only in seniority but in how closely she functions as second-in-command, for all that she holds no formal rank. Yet this is anomalous. She sits up, the dark sheets sliding free of her, silk that tinkles like ceramic. “Not even Xuejiao is to know?”

  “Not even she. What Benzaiten in Autumn does is fraught and has implications for humanity entire. I’ll tell our lieutenant if it proves necessary, but not for now.”

  “My lord,” she says, “you’ve never imposed such a restriction before.” Has had no reason to. Recruits are appraised and tested for their background, personalities, instincts and action. Xuejiao had come up through the ranks and served the Armada for years by the time she was courted to become Anoushka’s.

  “No.” The admiral exhales. “Most likely it’ll turn out that I am being alarmist. Nevertheless.”

  “Your wisdom is the light by which I am guided.” She cradles Anoushka’s jaw with her palm, even as she knows this time something is different, something that goes deeper than Benzaiten in Autumn being a creature of rogue schemes and unfathomable passions. “Now and always.”

  “I’m undertaking a new commission.”

  They sit in a parlor that Numadesi and Anoushka share, the room perfumed by the breath of orchids and jasmines. Numadesi has conceded the ambience, today, to something brighter than twilight—late afternoon, the sky deep blue, the birds tropical. She allows them to land on her, and every so often a particulate projection would be solid enough she can pet them, even if what meets her fingers is not quite the right texture—too seamless to be plumage; she will need to calibrate them again, add finer details and incorporate a new suite of sensory adjutants.

  A starling alights on Xuejiao’s shoulder and preens. The lieutenant sprawls on her corner of the divan, one leg tucked in, at ease. Her glazing collects and bends light, giving her a lunar gleam. She doesn’t fidget with the decorative palm fronds the way she usually does. In
stead her hands are collected in her lap, prim. Numadesi takes note of this, out of habit: ever since she became Anoushka’s she has done so, studying the world around her with a leopard’s calculation. What moves, what does not; what is prey and what is danger. A person’s tic or nervous habit, a minute reaction—either too fast, too slow, or none at all.

  “The beast-world Vishnu’s Leviathan is hosting an auction,” the admiral goes on, “the details of which I’ve just sent you to peruse. I have already contacted them with a request to enter it, and Queen Nirupa has graciously accepted. As for the other bidding parties, I’m not too concerned, but I want you both to look at the list. Half the delegates there will hail from opposing states. They’ll be busy at each other’s throat, and several are past clients of mine or owe me too many favors to incur my ire. Several militaries are invested in keeping the Armada in the game because we serve as a check-balance.”

  “This all seems finicky,” Lieutenant Xuejiao says, her gaze refocusing as she finishes absorbing the data package. “Who are you sending, Admiral?”

  “I’ll board the leviathan myself.”

  Xuejiao bolts upright. “No?” Then, a little more evenly, “Surely not. You can send one of us—you can send me. There’s no need to risk you.”

  “It is a finicky affair, as you have said.” Numadesi rises, dislodging the particulate parrot, and retrieves vitrified-jasper cups from the serving drone. She pours them peach liquor, filling Anoushka’s glass to the brim and Xuejiao’s half-full. Each of them enjoys this particular drink to varying degrees. “The lord wishes to oversee it herself therefore—no other will handle it as she may. You will go with her to ensure optimal results.”

  “That’s much better.” Xuejiao rubs her hands together, the decorative ball-joints in her wrists clicking. “I haven’t been on a mission with you for ages, Admiral. That’ll be a treat. We’ll enact acts of supreme daring. I shall split skulls and open up guts in the most fashionable manners, and possibly assassinate somebody in your honor.”