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

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

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.