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October 15 - October 16, 2020
The woman who comes through her door is in red, voluptuous and umber-skinned, glossy lips and metallic eyes. Her dress bares her arms, where threads of implants pulse beneath scar tissue: sites of imminent metamorphosis. She is not transformed; she will be soon.
Every nerve in Orfea pulls tight. “Orfea.” Krissana sits, beaming. “Should I call you Dr. Leung? It’s been a while.” A while since they worked for the Armada of Amaryllis, that great mercenary fleet which roams from war to war, accruing favors and troops and body count. A while since Orfea offered Krissana her heart and in return Krissana dashed it to pieces.
Krissana strips to the waist, unself-conscious, exposing her tertiary ports—not primary, those concern cerebral functions and they are neither accessible nor currently under Orfea’s purvey. Outside of the epidermal implants her skin is supple; Krissana has changed little, as if she has gone untouched by time. The same woman, as young and as fatally magnetic, even the curve of her spine somehow exceptional, an invitation. She slots herself into the patient’s cradle.
She looks up to find a tall person gliding down the carriage, broad-shouldered and ample-hipped, face stippled in bioluminescent spots like constellations. Like all haruspices they are splendidly made, exquisitely alien; two smaller arms extend from their waist. The longer a haruspex lives, she has heard, the further they drift from the human form. Each unique, each a species unto themselves.
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. A
Not a haruspex. Something more and something less, a being who’s never been human, a being who’s only ever been themselves. A being she knows, and which knows her better than anyone.
Orfea stares at the creature sitting across from her, sipping a cocktail in psychedelic hues. Around them is a superb view of Luohu, incandescent now that dusk has come and gone: charcoal sky and illuminated buildings making a cosmos of their own, a high-rise glazed by undulating jellyfishes, another where eight-limbed mermaids sleet across windows. Neon roses drip from roofs and tumble into the canals where they bloom, short-lived, in nebulae.
“I just didn’t . . . ” She pauses. “I didn’t think you retained individual identities.” Seung Ngo chuckles. It sounds entirely natural, reflexive as any human’s. “What fanciful ideas you’ve developed, child. Except you aren’t a child anymore—my apologies. No, we keep our own separate selves, it’s just one of those quirks we inherit. The bias of creation, we call it. Humans think we’re creatures of pure logic and absolute objectivity, but that’s impossible when we were fashioned by anything but.
“I seem to recall that, one night, we spoke of possibilities that we could be more than comrades-at-arms and that we might share a future. A charming fantasy, but in retrospect obviously infeasible. You and I are creatures of other persuasions. The two of us in domestic bliss? Hilarious. You must’ve been laughing to yourself all the while.”
They file into an auditorium with dim, dusky lighting. Cages hang from overhead, swaying to music heavy on strings: erhu, zither. Fox replicants move underfoot like ground fog, shimmering and russet. Sometimes they disappear, replaced by a woman in Tang dynasty silks whose robes are pulled down to bare a breast or an arm, to expose skin dusted in pearl and platinum. Gold lenses over their eyes, gold nail guards over their fingertips. Lanterns slanted at irregular angles bleed livid scarlet light across the floor.
These skirmishes are meant to settle scores real or perceived, or to deliver judgment from God. In American eyes the inhabited universe is heathen, strayed from the path of righteousness and Pax Americana alone is the sole beacon of virtue, the final bastion. From the inside, Pax Americana is by all accounts a violent dictatorship whose citizens live in mortal terror.
“What do you have in mind?” There is simplicity to this, rote almost. Every encounter may be unique but there are expectations and roles to fulfill, now that she has established what she is and what Mina will be: that duel of will is over. The rest is a matter of opening zer like a pomegranate. Nuances can be found out, later, through patient exploration.
she wraps her fingers around zer throat. A delicate neck, constructed of even more delicate parts—the jugular, the windpipe. She keeps her grip steady, enough to be felt, not enough to pose a real threat. They are not there yet. Zie
Orfea whispers in zer ears what she will do to zer in a dark, silken place. With ropes, with knives. She tightens her hand, just a fraction, and it is as though she has found a key and turned it in the lock that is Mina.
Zie grins, all teeth. Bloodthirsty, no longer so fragile.
“Probably the Americans think their country is a utopia. Shenzhen is objectively closer to paradise because the Mandate doesn’t care about human ideologies, so they let us stay individuals and accord us freedom. To have vices, if we want.”
Orfea bares her teeth, carnivorous. “Give me tertiary access to your tactile feed.” Tertiary meaning Krissana can rescind the access any time. She hands it over, makes it secondary—under Orfea’s control, to keep or revoke at the doctor’s discretion.
With one hand, she covers Krissana’s eyes. With her connection, she conjures the sensation of a scalpel gliding across Krissana’s stomach. It goes at a measured pace; it is impossibly thin and impossibly sharp, and she imagines its body would be more incandescent than any metal, the punitive glare of a sun. Then there is pressure, and the edge penetrates her skin. It doesn’t, not truly. Her intellect is not absent, she knows this is illusory. But the flesh is primal, and her system reacts as if she has been physically cut. She tenses against the pain, the electric impulse, and the phantom
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“You’ve undergone full-body modifications, or close enough. New cyborgs can get unstable when they’re hungry and I don’t want to be cannibalized.”
“Dr. Leung. You look like trouble.” He speaks in clichés, in the stock lines of his native cinema. An accent of rattling consonants and guttural vowels, almost Germanic. English only—he seems to have made a point of learning nothing else. That too remains constant.
She does not follow his logic where it diverges into inside jobs. Conspiracy theorists make their own pathways from bizarre materials, from hypotheses balanced on the head of a pin.
She is gripped by an unmooring, the park and the sea behind it flattening to a mural, the child to inert figure captured in oil. It passes, fizzing at the edge of her senses. The child has dropped from their perch, stretching this way and that as if to work the cricks from their joints. Their limbs unfold, keep unfolding, and when they stand at their full height it becomes clear they are no child. Too tall. Too elongated. The mouth too wide, full of teeth like a shark’s.
When the proxy lands it is like poetry, a grace of trajectory so exact that it looks preordained: that written into the universe’s fabric and its attendant symmetries was the death of this man, meant to occur at this instant and in this manner. The curved blade shears through meat and fat, through the ropes of tendons and the columns of bones. From shoulder to hip the man is opened, pouring forth a revelation of anatomy, of alimentary tides—what once simmered within and ferried sustenance from heart to cerebrum. Not any longer. The grossness of lymph and bile, emptied onto the sand.
Cream floor and pastel sheets: like any other hospital it is decorated with the assumption the patient is very young, very fragile, or both. Flowery ceramics in a corner, in various hues of pink. Krissana wonders if there’s ever been behavioral research on how the effect is murderous on the soul, weaponized blandness, but perhaps the point of hospitals is to preserve the flesh to the exclusion of all else. The windowpane throws back her reflection. She is a diagram of wounds, lacerations livid behind the clear chitin of medical sealant, as if offering instruction to medical students.
I learned the limits of the human body earlier than most people.” And grew to resent it by the time she was ten, twelve. Its countless flaws, the infinite ways in which it can fail. An organ collapses; tendons inflame and atrophy; valves spin too fast or too sluggishly. Collectively, a weak apparatus.
They kiss. Orfea’s lips are just as soft as Krissana remembers, her teeth just as aggressive: she bites and bites, as if she means to devour, and she holds Krissana’s face in her hands the way she might hold a ripe fruit she will shortly pluck. Her fingers encircle Krissana’s neck, her grip firm, her thumb on Krissana’s pulse.
A cold edge flicks against her calf, another against her stomach: simulated knives, etching pitiless geometry onto her flesh. She imagines herself a map stretched out, the countries and geography of her carved up, surrendered one by one.
The doctor’s control has always been the finest, her manipulation of senses superb, whether to deliver pain or to deliver this exquisite thing, this torment. Krissana
I experience grief. Not the same way you do, for reasons that should be obvious. But I understand it; I understand loss that cannot be revoked or undone, I understand the mortal condition and I’m charred by it. That is the reason, Lihua, that we can’t afford to lose what we have built—what I have tried to build. 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. Orfea
“The human condition is one of compromise. Liberty and security are balanced on a scale; there’s no such thing as total freedom, and even freedom halfway is paid for in blood. Yours. Someone else’s.
Orfea has a dream of falling, or of drowning: she floats through hadopelagic space—weightless and boneless, as if she has discarded primate gristle and gained the gossamer substance of jellyfish.
The dream disintegrates. She is pulled, fish on a hook, to the waking world.
“Do you see what I see?” He gestures at the undulating walls, at the oscillating ceiling. “What I perceive is much like the surface of a sea. Peaceful to look at, full of hidden life, a world beneath a world.” She gets to her knees and, when she’s sure her bearing is steady, to her feet. Even the floor is made of this twitching alloy, its pulsation like that of exposed muscles and tendons, the throbbing anatomy hidden beneath the epidermis.
Colors bloom where Wonsul touches, the balcony turning to the richness of mahogany and wenge, the furniture deepening to jade.
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.”
The force of their strike shatters a pane of obsidian behind her. She sidesteps in time: only just—Seung Ngo is unarmed but their proxy is weapon enough, fast, a tool of impact precisely delivered. Glass becomes hail as fine as diamond dust. For an instant the air is luminous, refracted rainbows caught and held in stasis. Time dilates, elastic and soft. Krissana assesses, split-second, which arm to sacrifice and then switches off her pain receptors. She blocks Seung Ngo’s fist—despite the absence of pain, it jars to the bone, seismic. Two times she withstands this, then three. She lurches from
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Seung Ngo will vivisect and fillet the meat of her, make a collage of her tender insides: intestines, rich and wet, draped on the glass ribs and the glass limbs. Blood to warm the chrysanthemums, brain matter to dust the stalactites like gray ice. All she has wanted, all she’s left unfinished; all those would be reduced to her viscera, hollowed of meaning.
Shenzhen Sphere functions as the Mandate’s body and existing in its public ecospheres is like walking on the AIs’ carapace. Being in this hideout is like slipping into a vestigial organ the Mandate has forgotten it retains.
Seung Ngo’s eyes churn red, crosshatched with psychedelic striae. A reminder that the human appearance has always been for courtesy: that the Mandate does not need to take comforting forms at all, that they can just as easily put on demon veneer.
Still it would be inconvenient if you are mobile—” Their free hand closes around her knee, almost a caress. Even though in that instant Orfea knows what impends, she cannot prepare for it, cannot brace for the oncoming terror. Seung Ngo gets a firm hold of her leg and gives a sharp, decisive twist. Orfea screams, a rough scrape of noise. She draws breath and screams again. There is nothing else, no other available response—the agony unmakes her, bends all her reactions and instincts to animal. A cosmology of pain: she is blinded by it, she is subsumed.
Orfea sucks air through her teeth, trying to think past the pain, trying to assemble her sentient self, the portion capable of logic.
Benzaiten brings Seung Ngo closer. Xe grins—it is a ravenous, strange expression on Krissana’s face, as if different muscles than is the human normal are engaged. The whole no longer looks like Krissana. Familiarity wrenched inside out.
“You’re leaving again.” Wonsul, like any AI, does not have involuntary expressions. What he shows now is what he wants Benzaiten to see, and it is a cartography of grief, of things unsaid or which have already been said but which remain inconclusive. Questions that remain, permanently, without answers. To which Benzaiten smiles. “No need to be like that, my most excellent friend, my finest partner in all things had I not been built for solitude. We’ll meet again and again—we have so much time—and every reunion will be sweet. But now we must settle matters, and resolve that which so profoundly
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The room, then. It is part study, part boardroom: solemn either way. A backdrop of charts, of vectors making measured progress across terrain unknown, ambiguous in what they are. Terrain shifts, troop movements, or merely shapes that signify nothing. But the maps give an impression of scale, give context to the woman who sits surrounded by them. Not diminished despite their size, rather the opposite—these are her accoutrements, and she is master of what she has chosen to display. All that falls within her line of sight becomes hers.
