And Shall Machines Surrender (Machine Mandate, #1)

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Shenzhen is unique in its capacity to contain and maintain multiple ecospheres, each a city in its own right—a customized climate, a customized dream.

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.

“When they died, it was the human half in charge.” She imagines sinking into those tenebrous waters, trapped in a prison of her own flesh.

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

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.”

if the AIs are truly autonomous, they cannot possibly be in total unity. There must be disagreement. There must be fragmentation, schisms in how to govern,

The mind is so vagarious it easily turns against itself. Even memory is malleable—especially that.”

perhaps the point of hospitals is to preserve the flesh to the exclusion of all else.

Haruspices act as safeguard against apathy. It is easy for us to detach from human concerns, become a world unto ourselves.

By nature we must be in flux to grow.

To accept institutional hierarchy, to become part of a polity, is to accept a yoke:

there’s something to be said for using embodiment as a canvas. An art form through which you express your interiority.”