More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 11 - February 15, 2022
Guifei is human, Orfea judges, though in Shenzhen that can be hard to tell.
A projected image like this could be an AI, not that meeting face-to-face is much more informative.
Kowloon currency has weakened during her voyage—but sufficient to fund her for a time, as long as her license to practice comes through punctually and she lives like an ascetic.
Dyson spheres of this size are rare enough, but 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.
Here all is pristine, polished people and polished fixtures.
Utopia or not, Shenzhen has its deprivation and different categories of life. Such things are a constant wherever one goes.
A while since Orfea offered Krissana her heart and in return Krissana dashed it to pieces.
“Did you know, when you become a haruspex all previous deeds or misdeeds dissolve? You’re forgiven everything, for all intents and purposes. Full amnesty under Shenzhen jurisdiction, so even if you’re a war criminal they won’t extradite. It’s a handy perk.”
haruspex lifespan tends to be double that of the average human.
Conspiracy theorists make their own pathways from bizarre materials, from hypotheses balanced on the head of a pin.
“Factions in the Mandate,” she says, “disagree with creating new members through haruspices.”
In Shenzhen, response is instant: AI proxies are everywhere, can be dispatched to the site of violence at a moment’s notice. Unless it is Public Safety arresting the American—she consults her overlays, but no alert is active, no warning that civilians should avoid the area.
The AI cuts what is left of McDonald with the same precision that ended him, slicing through his face and levering wide the skull: a crack resounds. They retract their blade arm, returning it to many-jointed digits. With those the AI pries off a piece of brain, a knot of spinal cord, their attached implants. Coolant geysers at each severing, connectors guttering out.
“Mandate AIs can manipulate Shenzhen’s structures at will.”
That’s the only way the suicides were allowed to self-destruct—they’re treasured commodities otherwise.”
Haruspices act as safeguard against apathy. It is easy for us to detach from human concerns, become a world unto ourselves. For now, that position still carries some weight.”
On Shenzhen there is no such thing as privacy. Her overlays alert her that, true to Seung Ngo’s promise, she has been granted further accesses to residential surveillance, to Public Safety channels.
Orfea wasn’t aware haruspices and humans could marry or that a haruspex’s assets could posthumously transfer.
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.
“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. Take this opportunity to rest and reflect, Khun Khongtip. By the time you’re out, it will be all over.”
Realistically she is restricted in what she can do; she is unable to affect the world outside, and it cannot affect or perceive her. 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.
“Humans are autonomous.” Seung Ngo progresses down the avenue, moving between mottled shadows at a leisurely pace, as though they have all the time they require. “Yet you have law, hierarchy, bureaucracy. There are impositions on free will. There are sacrifices to make and costs to account for. A person cannot decide one day that they would upend the order of their world and succeed. Even your Alabaster Admiral must contend with polities great and small, armies equal or vaster than her own. The Mandate coheres by consensus or it would not be the Mandate.”
