And Shall Machines Surrender (Machine Mandate, #1)

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

A sweep of sky, cloudless, blue straited with the silver of climate control and auxiliary supports. An immensity to fall into: looking up she feels almost vertiginous, untethered, the sensation of at once being locked inside her skin and floating perilously free of it.

She can’t begin to guess at haruspex psychology, what it is like to be living icons, earthly souls made immaculate by machine: the postmodern zhenren. What it is like for a human brain, with its imperfect storage and tremulous pathways, to join with and gestate an AI.

Conspiracy theorists make their own pathways from bizarre materials, from hypotheses balanced on the head of a pin.

“When the Mandate first established administration,” Krissana is saying, “they actually prohibited contact between human and haruspex. Literally human citizens couldn’t notice a haruspex, had to pretend not to see and hear them in public. That interdict was just lifted, oh, nineteen years ago? The marriages started pretty much immediately—there must have been a lot of illegal crushes around. Not many haruspices marry other haruspices, though.” “Too many AIs in the mix?” “No.” Krissana smirks. “Too much ego.”

Haruspices teach us pain, and pain is a necessary survival mechanism. To lose the capacity for it and for grief would doom the Mandate to stagnation. We would be, but no longer become. By nature we must be in flux to grow.

consider if you play back someone else’s memories. They don’t have the same meaning to you as they did to their original owner. Moments that signify deeply to them are as thin vapor to you; keepsakes precious to them are as worthless trinkets to you.”