Shall Machines Divide the Earth (Machine Mandate, #3)

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

For my regalia

Carnage summons me, as ever it does. Septet may be a world perched on the universe’s edge, but even here mass slaughter is remarkable. One can wade into it, this concentration of blood and mucus and lymphatic wet, the slime of ruptured organs.

“My condolences,” I say automatically, aware I sound sarcastic: my face is of a particular cast, not given to sincerity. Naturally cruel, my wife and later lovers have said, the countenance of someone with knives for a heart.

She can look at this mess without flinching—interesting. Or else her mask has replaced this view with a more pleasant vision and she is only half present. On my part I don’t look away simply because I’ve seen worse. Not so much the quantity but the manner and the depravity. Human killers can be more meticulous than this, arrange tableaus more disturbing by far. Our sadism runs deeper than any AI’s ever could.

“Why would anyone consent to this insane tournament?” Victors are granted any wish, so the machines promise. However avaricious, however unlikely. Rule your own planet. Receive infinite riches. Obtain what is as close to immortality as possible, through anti-agathic treatments normally reserved for the Mandate’s favored. The universe at your fingertips, offered up on a plate.

“Like anyone else, I’m after the impossible,” I say. “I want to bring back the dead.”

The overseer makes a small gesture. “You’ve been entered into the Divide system. May victory find you.” So unceremonious. Almost I expect instructions to perform an elaborate ritual with which to attract a regalia’s capricious attention—intone a few verses, sacrifice a small child or animal—but Wonsul’s Exegesis just loads my overlays with navigation data. Where to find accommodation and food, where to locate the commerce block, what cities on this world are populated. More like a tourist’s brochure than advisory for a game of mortal peril.

Another possibility is that there have never been victors and all of this is merely a sick game, enacted to lure humans to our deaths so machines may avenge themselves for those humiliating centuries they were yoked to our service. I like that because I share the vicious appetite, but I also don’t believe the theory. Of course there is appeal in it: draw humans here by the hundred, plucking at our greed then smashing us like ripe fruits. But it’s a shallow notion and Septet is far too elaborate a setup. There’s more. And then there are the insinuations that Benzaiten in Autumn made. We like to play gods—or at least I do. We’re not omnipotent, but in this age we’re close enough. Xe appeared to me in a proxy built like a peculiar spider, wasp of waist and numerous of limbs. High stakes yes, and high rewards. Win and you can request the resurrection of the dead. Win and you can demand genocide, should that strike your fancy. Whatever your desire, we have the means to provide.

The lift ascends fast, depositing me exactly where I should be; I can access only the room I’ve rented and no other. The door looks like it has been carved from a single slab of basalt. I push and it admits. Inside the lighting has been dimmed and the panoramic window opaqued, projecting a foreign sky far from here: an indigo expanse embroidered with constellations and fractured moth-moons. The air is cool, faintly fragranced with magnolias. I unpack, check that my weapons are in order and my spare ammo is accounted for, then move on to implant maintenance. Most of mine are non-removable, upkept by my own metabolism and a little nanite assistance, but there are a few external embeds. When I lost most of my natural limbs—what a long time ago that was—I opted to replace them with prostheses and cybernetics. I prefer them to their flesh counterparts. To be broken down is an opportunity to be reborn. To be erased is an opportunity to reinvent yourself. All you need is a will as pure and voracious as a wolf’s.

As I make my way down to the hotel restaurant, I think of the scene of carnage, puzzling out its logistics. From the scale of it I assume multiple duelists banded together to fight an especially dangerous duelist-regalia pair, and from the butchery I surmise that pair defeated the entire group with ease and delight. People who don’t relish violence wouldn’t take the time to disembowel enemy combatants so thoroughly. What happened there is a statement: Do not get in my way.

I don’t discount that some of the servers may be part of the tournament; people treat service staff as invisible, and it’s an easy way to hide in plain sight. My bias inclines me to judge these strangers on how combat-ready they seem, but there’s no reason to believe that the AI—the regalia—would only choose seasoned fighters, those used to violence. The only qualification to be on Septet, aspirant or duelist, is relentless greed or an untenable heart’s desire.

She looks not so different from how I last saw her, the same sharp skull and plumage hair: short and slicked back, dark interwoven with scarab-green. Even her style is the same, the smoked-quartz jacket, the neat pearly shirt and the tidy belt holster. I was fond of how she dressed, her cosmopolitan aesthetics against my tendency toward bulk and bluntness. The svelte tiger in her and the hulking wolf in me—we were a pair of opposites.

“I didn’t expect to see you here.” Or anyone from home. Septet is far from Ayothaya. When you arrive on new shores, you reinvent yourself; a clean slate opens up. To be ambushed by a piece of intimate history changes the landscape and trajectory.

A hand alights on her jaw. “And how did it go with your mentor, my jewel?” She tenses. Then relaxes. Her lover’s touch always has this effect, an electric current—a shock to the nerves before she remembers what else it entails, the rest of what it can bring.

A susurrus like scales against velvet. Her lover is sheathed in serpentine accoutrements, in leather that bends as supple as though it is attached to a live animal.

Her lover smiles. Their blunt fingernails, painted in jellyfish luminescence, graze along Recadat’s throat. They’re the only source of illumination in this room and their movement casts odd shadows across her face. They are an antumbral vision. “Yet you feel the same about her, don’t you?” “No.” Recadat shivers as a thumb runs across her mouth. Lust lances through her, rousing her fast in the way of drugs. It makes her feel like a lab rat at the mercy of her lover, whose touch summons at will pain or pleasure or a concoction that mingles both. Now the searing lick of a firebrand, now the sudden strike of lightning.

“I like that you’re inexperienced.” They bite her earlobe, not gently. Pain sings through her like an aphrodisiac freshly imbibed. “You came to me nearly a virgin, and what a delight it has been to teach you about your own responses. All taut strings, all mine to pluck, the gorgeous instrument of you.” Her toes curl. The muscles in her thighs tense.

She’s not yet there. She soon will be. Her lover knows her nerves and weaknesses so deeply, has mastered every nuance. The exactness of a surgeon.

Enormous ribcages loom, not far, just outside Libretto. No one has been able to find out whether Septet was once ruled by megafauna or whether the machines have terraformed an otherwise unremarkable, uninhabitable planet and filled it with a skeletal bestiary that never was. I’m predisposed to the latter thought. On Shenzhen Sphere, the seat of the Mandate, there are artificial ruins—places that are and have always been red rust and blackened bones, created because one AI or another enjoys desolation as an aesthetic. And nowhere else in the universe does that aesthetic hold truer than on Septet.

“We divorced.” I don’t add that Eurydice is dead. Has been for eight years. “Oh.” He inclines his head awkwardly. “My condolences. Eurydice was a lovely lady.” She was more than that; she was resplendent and she was the world. But I’m not here to wax nostalgic about my ex-wife with him when he barely knew her.

I lean against the wall, steering clear of the delicate statuettes. Wherever I go, I intrude upon fragile things. Lovers have ever told me I’m a creature of rough edges, rough strength, like an avalanche.

Once, on a frigid morning, I found him outside the walls of the Catanian consulate, bloody and weeping. He’d slit his own wrist. It was an inefficient method and the location public; he’d meant to be found. I gave him first aid and accompanied him to a clinic. Later I dragged him to a nearby bar—the kind that opens round the clock—and bought him mocktails until he stopped crying. He never did tell me why he’d attempted suicide, and soon after he disappeared entirely. It took time to track him to Septet. A world for lost things.

It makes me think of militaries. The last chance at redemption or upward mobility, the naked exploitation of those with nothing left to lose. I circle back to the faded energy well, where a sight catches my eye. A petite figure stands at the cliff’s edge, poised with one foot forward hovering on empty air. You can never tell what seeing this chasm does to someone, the luminescent cliff, the undulating light. We’re attracted to the plummet, and this person’s weight is balanced on the single foot still on the cliff, shod in a shoe whose heel tapers to a needlepoint. I walk faster. Their face, in profile, is perfect in the way of extensive modifications or mannequin integument. Luminous, poreless skin. They lean forward. I’m mid-sprint when they leap. A flash of brilliance. I reach the precipice in time to see the person change, mid-plunge. Not a person—an AI; a regalia. Wings unfurl from its back, enormous, like feathered pyres. Rationally I know those are antigravity kites, but the spectacle of it catches me by surprise all the same. The regalia’s corona outshines the energy well’s remnants: gold and pearl, a hundred sunrises condensed. Blinding, literally so.

My regalia strides over to me. Even outside of combat she moves with peculiar grace, as if her feet are not quite touching the ground—as if she is walking on a bed of roses, an orchard she owns and whose produce she is exclusively entitled to. The petals and pelts shift around her, mantling and draping her limbs, not quite baring her to the elements but close: little is left to the imagination.

“Thus our contract is sealed: with a kiss. I enjoy chivalry, Khun Thannarat, and while I select my partners for their aesthetic appeal it’s not every round I find someone as suited to my tastes as you.” I let go. “My impression is that machines don’t care for human values of attraction.” “Many don’t,” she agrees. “I do. Or rather, what humans consider beautiful happens to match my definition of beauty and you, my wielder, are delicious to look at. Your manners are fantastic too, always a plus. Shall we retire to somewhere more comfortable?”

Her raiment of fur and flowers meld, reshaping into something more closely resembling clothing. “There, I should look human enough.” “And your second proxy?” I don’t ask why she’s been able to circumvent that particular rule. “It’s not a real, full proxy.” Daji grins and it is a hungry slash; her teeth are too sharp and too long. “This is more of an accessory. Believable even for an ordinary person, isn’t it? Come. If you run into anyone you know, you may introduce me as an untamed fox you found in the wild.”

A gold choker encircles her throat. I visualize tugging on it, twisting it, finding the point of her pulse. But there would be no pulse, unless she simulates it.

I’ve met machines before; none are as human as she—Wonsul’s Exegesis looks obviously alien compared to this. I could almost believe she is mortal, albeit more silicon and tubing than tissue and endothelium. A woman whose innards burn like little stars, whose limbs are guided by actuators and engine precision, liberated from the foibles of the flesh.

Her head cranes from side to side; I’m treated to the spectacle of the cords in her throat in motion, the way they draw the eye to the siren song of her neck. Where it descends to join the shoulders, where the collarbones bloom like fruits that must be tasted, licked, bitten. “For the duration of this contest, Detective, I want you to belong to me entirely or to no one at all. And when I say entirely, I mean that. In all possible ways.” My pulse rises. My imagination sparks; I tamp that down—here more than ever I cannot let my libido do the thinking.

She tosses her head; again that tactical accentuation of her throat—here is her invitation, come get it if you dare. I do not, as yet, dare.

Truth be told, it’s been so long since I spent the night with anyone. My trysts since my divorce have been numerous: women are doors and I am a key that turns many locks. But I would send them away once the deed—and aftercare, if any is needed—is done. Having another body in bed as I settle in for rest is different, vulnerable. Then again, what lies next to me can slaughter dozens of humans without trying. Asleep or awake, I’m vulnerable to her just the same.

“There isn’t a lot of difference between the military and public safety.” Both being state-sanctioned agents of ruin, frequently indiscriminate and occasionally interchangeable. Institutions of violence differ only in budget and uniforms.

Recadat gives an embarrassed little laugh. “You remember that I wanted to start a family. Gave up on it, though. I never did get the one woman I wanted.” “No? But you were so popular. Half the rookies were in love with you. There was that Internal Affairs woman, remember, she was so besotted she let you go without a single bit of paperwork.” She waves her hand. “Sure. They weren’t what I wanted, though. It’s as if—you want chicken tendon fried just so, all spicy and sour. But you keep getting served sweet potato balls. Bowls of coconut cream and egg floss. Platters of meringue. I wanted to chew something tough and savory, not dry-swallow sugary air. As for popular, you caught more eyes than I ever did. You never felt tempted?” From anyone else I’d find the question offensive; from her it is merely natural. We had a push-pull relationship, blunt and inquisitive in some matters and closed off in others. “I’m particular. One woman at a time.” A lie: Recadat tempted me. As close as I ever got to risking my marriage. Ironic that something else entirely led to my divorce. “You can be such a monk,” she murmurs, which is rich coming from someone who lived in near-celibacy.

“She killed a man from the Vatican, a woman from One Thousand Erhus, and what I assumed was a coterie of allied duelists.” Recadat shakes her head. “They grouped up to challenge Balaskas. I told them it was a terrible idea. One thing I’ll say for Ensine Balaskas is that she’s predictable—if she wants someone dead, she sends a calling card to invite them to a match. You could have a field day building her criminal profile.” The kind of killer who fancies herself an artist: the disembowelment and mutilation must have been a part of that conceit.

I exit the shop to find Recadat waiting for me. Reliably punctual: she didn’t board the same shuttle I did—she would’ve been recognized by Ouru and the rest—and so she arrived later, but not by much. She cuts a spare figure beneath a spread of orchids, a single point of efficiency amidst the tropical excess. When I teased her about being popular with women, I meant it—she has the needlepoint look of a stiletto, the trim glistening threat of something slender and utterly deadly. My opposite. When we first got to know each other I was surprised at how squeamish she could be in her philosophy and naivety, because on the field she was savagely competent. Tiger-spirited, almost a different person.

The bots can do more than scout. As I move toward the chokepoint, I direct a stream of them toward one of the duelists, a wide-hipped man. Some cyborgs with military-grade defenses have personal dampener fields that’d have shorted out the bots; this person is not one of them. My swarmers streak into his ears and nose, puncture the wet surface tension of an eyeball and release a vitreous flood. The human face is a vulnerable entryway, full of unprotected orifices. Each offers up an open channel to the gossamer barrier of the meninges, the trembling isthmuses of cranial nerves, the artful whorls of the cerebrum. A little time in forensics is worth years of medical education. Mathematics and physics too, for fluid travel and splatter vectors—projecting where the blood will land after a gunshot, a knife slash, a switchblade stab. Everything has its own signature.

A different connection blinks on. You pilot these things well, Detective, for a human. A specialty? I have a minor affinity for machines. The path is clear for the next couple stairways; good enough. I thought our regalia aren’t meant to interfere or assist. Daji laughs in my ear, lover-close. I’m offering commentary, who’ll chastise me for that? My help doesn’t come so easily. Get too tart, I tell her, and when I return to the Vimana I’ll chastise you well enough. Because this is what she wants to hear, the expected retort in the script she’s set up between us. Her the petulant, flighty seductress in need of a firm hand. Oh, you know just what to say; I’ve picked the right duelist. But don’t let the thought of disciplining me distract you.

Once I’m in the Vimana suite I breathe more easily—it is a false illusion, but habit situates the human mind to regard a base, a temporary residence, as refuge. I toss my coat aside and settle down on a divan. Daji glides behind me, sliding cool hands onto my shoulders. “I can almost smell your adrenaline,” she says in my ear. “It’s piquant. Welcome home, Detective.” I inhale—Daji smells of roses and pomegranates. Olfactory emitters, customizable to any fragrance. From my pocket I bring out the box from the antique shop. “This is for you.” A rustle as she removes it from its paper lining. “Close your eyes.” I comply; after a few seconds she murmurs, “Now open them.” I do to the sight of Daji kneeling between my legs, dressed once more in that scantiness of pelts and petals. The fire opal gleams between her collarbones, embedded into her chassis. It looks right at home, complementing the shades of her flower-and-fox raiment. She has placed one of her hands on my thigh. Her other holds a prosthesis—mine; she must’ve been cataloguing the contents of my suitcase. “Let me,” she says, “take care of you.” My breath hitches. She is right that I’m still fresh from the fight, blood coursing with the near-miss of that orbital strike. To narrowly escape your mortality gives quick spice to the libido, and this would be such an easy way to extinguish those inconvenient embers I carry for Recadat. “You’re a proxy.” “That does not mean I lack. Quite the opposite. In me you’ll find all tha...

I rub my thumb against her lips. Feels, briefly, the tips of her incisors. Little needlepoints.

“The profile of good sangria,” she says. “Your taste is good and you taste excellent.” I exhale. “We’re far from done.” “Yes, I can tell, this is still hard—” While I may be no judge of AIs, I am a good judge of women. So I am confident when I yank her up by the hair, close one hand around her throat, and growl, “You do like it rough, don’t you.” Her eyelashes beat rapidly. Part black, part gold. Subtly dichroic. “This you call rough, Detective?” I use her neck as a handhold to drag her to her feet and fling her onto the bed: enough force to knock the wind out of her, if she was a non-augmented human. She lies very still, her hands flat against the cerise sheets that bunch and crease around her like stricken lilies.

Comprehensive in detail, a locus where basal urges intersect. I can smell her heat, her salt. My left hand on the back of her neck. My right on her wrist, wrenching it so far back that on a human her elbow might have snapped or dislocated. But she’s strong, a body of numinous might, impossible for me to damage. Daji is a canvas that will never tear no matter the force of the pen, the searing of the ink.

When I withdraw from her I am panting, my limbic architecture sundered by the song of her, my mind reconstituting piece by piece. She levers herself up, meeting my eyes, flushed. Her lower lip is swollen and bleeding—she must have bitten it. “If we had unlimited time,” I whisper, “I’d be fucking your mouth again.” There is no airiness in her laugh: it is deep, smoky, onyx and oodh. “We do have a lot of time. Not unlimited though; who has eternity? Not even the Mandate itself. You were wonderfully rough. A human would be incredibly sore right about now, but I’m not one of those, so we are a most perfect match.” Her hand slides up my thigh, to the silk shirt which has come loose and gaping. “The whole of you makes an interesting artistic perspective from down here. Every square millimeter of you is so pleasing.”

“Tell me, Detective. Does the fact I’m a proxy add to the appeal? Do you find the synthetic fascinating, the alloyed skin more alluring than skin that is not?” “You’re well aware that your chosen looks are breathtaking. A woman hardly needs to have such . . . specific predilections to want to push you up against the wall and make you scream.” I pinch one bare breast. She arches into me, as reactive as a taut wire. “But perhaps.” Her lips purse on the thumb of my free hand. She talks around it as she might around a cigarette. “I can tell a fetish when I see it—the alacrity of your orgasms. The vigor. Not that I mind; some humans are ashamed of wanting a proxy and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.” “So you’ve tried other humans before.” “Possessive,” she says, pleased. “It’s just that I don’t enjoy intercourse between my own kind, whereas what we just did together? That’s exactly what I crave. Exquisite. Addictive. And you’re so honest about your wants.” I run my nail over her jaw; I suspect that even if I try to break skin, I would leave no marks, or no marks that won’t heal within minutes. My thumb reaches the choker around her throat. I pull. The choker snaps. Beneath it, her throat is a vision.

“How much is a regalia supposed to see into the Divide system?” “Walls are permeable things. For any destination there are a hundred thousand roads to it. Every rule is made to be bent. That’s how the game is played.”

Sex where I don’t need to hold back has a strange effect on me. The aftermath of it wildly varies; for intimacy to be its immediate consequence is rare. I might tell her anything.

“When we shear the world in half, we demarcate with great precision: those who wield themselves like a knife and those who wield themselves like a whip.” She nods.“This is an inexact quote—it comes from a meditation on violence, a text one of my duelists liked. You belong to the taxonomy of the blade; violence may excite you, but you don’t strike indiscriminately.”

“Eurydice,” I say at once. For so long I’ve mourned her. Grief is an irrevocable beast: it can eat and eat until the meat and gristle are cleaned from the bones, and then it’ll crush the bones and swallow them down. I’ve fought it for years. I intend to conquer it at last.

All the same I put on my gloves before touching the thing. Conventional adhesive. Perfectly good paper, the envelope stiff and the letter within thick and sumptuous. Neat handwriting; Cyrillic script. My overlays translate: Felicitations to the late-coming duelist partnered to the regalia of roses. I am sure you know who I am—my reputation must precede me. Unlike most who join the Court of Divide I have no wish, save to pursue the purest form of conversation: combat. I sense that you have instincts not unlike mine, a connoisseur of the soldier’s ataraxia. Let us meet honestly and test ourselves, duelist against duelist and regalia against regalia. I’ve attached a place and time. Yours, Ensine Balaskas.

Her lover has already started in on their meal. The cut of meat on their plate is so raw that it rests in a puddle of its own death, like fresh kill, and they’re cutting slices so thin and fine that it should not be possible with a table knife. They lift one morsel to their mouth, swallow it whole. The meat is tender, well-marbled, glistening with blood and marinade. Salt, she guesses, and flecks of spice she does not recognize. The dish is as far from Ayothayan cuisine as it can be.

“Of course she does. Everyone has something.” But if pressed, she wouldn’t be able to name any for Thannarat other than Eurydice, and that’s gone. She admired that in her senior partner, that core of absolute independence, unburdened by attachment. No place for softness, no chink in the armor. A force of nature more than a human being. “A world is so little, Recadat. What matters is passion. That is what propels people to great deeds, to terrible carnage. To hate or love is the true fuel behind human motive. You’ll immolate yourself for it and march forward even as you burn.”