And Shall Machines Surrender (Machine Mandate, #1)

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Utopia or not, Shenzhen has its deprivation and different categories of life. Such things are a constant wherever one goes.

This is paradise; anything can be purchased.

What a thing, to offer a death: how potent it makes one feel, the rush of supremacy it grants.

“Gender heterodoxy, the Americans call it. They’re very particular about birthrates; they think gestating tanks are Satan’s technology and that gay couples can’t reproduce—recognize just two genders, you see, and even then under strict definitions. Breeding camps run by nuns, if you can credit the thought. They hand out little Bibles to every new intake.”

“Utopia isn’t about tastes. It is about the common good, the greatest comfort for the greatest number—that is what Shenzhen is.”

“I think I still have this hold over you. Unless it was all pretend. Was it all pretend, Krissana? When you said you wanted me to own you body and soul, was that a lie?”

She’s weak to Orfea, no denying it, weak to this woman the way paper is weak to fire. A dozen years gone, with countless body modifications in the between, and that hasn’t changed; it is chronic, a basal addiction.

I was a monster but I was among my own, and you were my closest in kind of all.”

“You were intoxicating. The idea of wielding strength, of being a person who inflicts pain rather than being its target.

“For what it’s worth, in my experience human parents are overrated.”

“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.

“To see the universe without fear, and to do it in the company of a beautiful woman who has a tremendous debt to me. Who has said she is mine, body and soul. I can’t say that has no appeal. What do you think?”