To Orfea, Georgina Whitten is a name detached from face or context, from past or future or interiority—not a real person at all nor a human being. The Armada of Amaryllis is often hired to run interference against Pax Americana, whose forces periodically strike out against its neighbors. Krungthep Station, the Seoul Belt, the Diamond Republic of Da Nang. These skirmishes are meant to settle scores real or perceived, or to deliver judgment from God. In American eyes the inhabited universe is heathen, strayed from the path of righteousness and Pax Americana alone is the sole beacon of virtue, the final bastion.
From the inside, Pax Americana is by all accounts a violent dictatorship whose citizens live in mortal terror. Most likely this Georgina is a monster, and most likely Mina Quang has good reasons to despise her. An easy justification to reduce an entire human to a bargaining chip, a procedure that is like an old friend and a bad habit to Orfea. She sold and purchased so many executions or assassinations that she no longer remembers the names, they have shed from her recall like dead skin: tertiary to her own life, less than a footnote. She felt that way right up until Krissana did it to her, using her as currency in a transaction, offering her up to secure the Alabaster Admiral’s grace.
Once Orfea thought herself untouchable, and Krissana taught her she was a minor cog in a vast apparatus. Once Orfea thought herself in love, and Krissana lessoned her in the precise worth of sentiment.
Mina Quang stands outside a private room; as Krissana predicted, zer companion is nowhere to be seen. The American has hair dyed strident magenta; zer septum is pierced and zer throat is encircled by a black ribbon. By zer looks, some of zer grandparents were from Da Nang or Krungthep, depending on how surnames have intermingled.
Zie eyes Orfea as she draws close.
“You’re on your own,” Orfea says. She pitches her voice low, full of command. She doesn’t quite corner zer but she does step in, encroaching on personal space. “Did your friend abandon you?”
“Did yours?” Zie looks up—zie is petite, no more than a hundred fifty-five, if that. Slender to the point of gaunt, bird-boned face nearly overwhelmed by ruby ringlets. Zer English has a drawl like an engine’s, an accent that turns the vowels craggy and exotic. “I’m very bored, lady. The staff are fine, but I’m not in the mood for foxes. Do something different, entertain me.”
Orfea cups the androgyne’s chin in her hand and slides her thumb under Mina’s ribbon. Velvet and snug. “Isn’t someone like you more fit to be entertainment than the other way around? How unruly. You need a firm hand.” She pulls on the length of velvet, making zer stretch on tiptoes.
Mina exhales. Zer eyes are wide, long lashes fluttering fast, and zie slackens in Orfea’s grip, between her and the wall. Zer tongue darts out; zie smells, thickly, of whisky. “What do you have in mind?”
There is simplicity to this, rote almost. Every encounter may be unique but there are expectations and roles to fulfill, now that she has established what she is and what Mina will be: that duel of will is over. The rest is a matter of opening zer like a pomegranate. Nuances can be found out, later, through patient exploration. She is not here for patience or nuance. “Something public—right here. Entertain me. Show me what you’re made of, little toy, and I will show you what I am.” And she does thrill to this, even after all this time. Back in the day it was one of the methods in her repertoire, a well-worn tool ever close at hand. She presses Mina into the paneled wall and tugs at zer ringlets, tipping zer face back, baring zer throat. The trick is momentum, to build it, to maintain it so the subject is overwhelmed—blinded.
Perhaps it is the music beating with aphrodisiac urgency, perhaps it is the stage performance fresh in memory—the girl and the cage and that single wail. Or it may be that Mina’s companion did not satisfy and has left zer frustrated, on the brink. Either way zie parts zer legs, and Orfea pushes her knee between them as she wraps her fingers around zer throat. A delicate neck, constructed of even more delicate parts—the jugular, the windpipe. She keeps her grip steady, enough to be felt, not enough to pose a real threat. They are not there yet.
Zie moves against the knob of her knee, the bone there. Slow at first. Orfea whispers in zer ears what she will do to zer in a dark, silken place. With ropes, with knives. She tightens her hand, just a fraction, and it is as though she has found a key and turned it in the lock that is Mina. Zie jerks and moans into her palm, a keening breathy noise, as of rapture or incredible agony. Zer eyes screw shut.
Orfea feels light-headed, as if a knot in her muscles has been abruptly released, as if she’s been the one to meet climax. She keeps Mina upright—zie sags against her knee—and guides zer into the private room. “I’m not done with you yet.”
Inside there is only one piece of furniture, a broad shallow bed, meant for only one purpose. Mina spills into it, loose-limbed and giggling. “You want something from me,” zie says, dreamily. “I can get on my knees and eat you out. You can cut me up and fuck me raw. Anything you like.”
Orfea runs her hand along the line of zer hip and thigh, making promises with her nails. It has been years since she’s done something like this—she tries not to think of Krissana, who was once hers, or pretended to be. The rush is there all the same, the surge that comes after successful conquest: akin to what ancient warlords felt, she imagines, or what the Alabaster Admiral herself does. Her skirt is damp where zie rode and sweated and came. “I do want something from you.” She crawls up the bed, pinning down Mina’s wrists and straddling zer. “And I have something to give you in return.”
“Yes.” Zie trembles under her, arousal and anticipation.
She makes sure she has a secure hold on Mina before she says, “Let’s talk about Georgina Whitten.”
For half a second zie does not react. Then zie bucks, struggling to wrench zer hands free, trying to throw her off. Orfea’s no longer as fit as she used to be—all those compulsory gym hours—but she still has the advantage of sheer mass, Mina being so small and no fitter than Orfea. Zie kicks at her but there’s no real strength to it. She presses her weight down along the length of Mina’s body, lover-close, and waits for zer to tire out.
“Fuck you,” Mina says, panting.
“The mood is hardly appropriate.” Orfea grimaces. She will have scratches to show for this, superficial but livid. “I’d like your help. In exchange, I’ll give you Whitten’s annihilation. You pick the time and manner.”
Zie freezes. “You’re giving me what.” Then a snort. “That’s not bloody likely. You’re working for the Mandate, aren’t you?”
“Leave the details to me, Mina. Now are we going to talk like civilized people, or do I have to rip off your clothes and tie you to the bed with them?”
“There isn’t enough material. But I wouldn’t mind.” Zie’s muscles relax, a little. “I’ll be good.”
Orfea rises, placing herself between zer and the door. Zie watches her, trying to determine whether she is armed. If Orfea is a special agent, extrajudicial, the close contact would not have been informative. Guns can be miniaturized, and there are smaller things that can be as deadly. She makes a point of not touching or looking at where Mina has broken her skin. A show of invulnerability. “You’re an expert on AIs.”
A sluggish blink. “You’re here about the suicides.” Zie shakes zerself. “That’s almost funny. There are other AI researchers. Some more up to date.”
“Not many have acted against the collective.” Any that have, Orfea suspects, were assassinated: an AI’s proxy appearing without fanfare, ambushing them at home or work. A bullet or something else—she’s never seen the Mandate in combat, has no preconceived notions of what that might look like, beyond the knowledge that regardless of method they are efficient. That nowhere across the universe is secure enough to keep them out once one has their attention. Mina must have been spared on a clause negotiated by Krissana.
Zie draws up zer knees. It makes zer look even daintier. “I want Georgina Whitten found in compromising positions w
ith another woman. Or to have footage that looks enough like it leaked to her administration. I’d say to their press, but that’s all state propaganda. So.”
Pax Americana does not look upon that kindly—from Orfea’s limited exposure to their doctrines, they consider non-heterosexual relations abhorrent. “You’ll need to hold up your end of the bargain first. We can hardly ruin her career one half at a time.”
Mina chortles, covers zer face, chortles harder. “I’ll send you all the data I have, though I’d be stunned if my old coworkers pulled this suicide epidemic off. However this even works. Not to brag, but I was much better at what I did than they were, and the closest I ever came to cracking this . . . well, you can see for yourself. Oh, just imagine, Director Whitten in a lurid tableau. Can I get a live feed when it’s distributed? Pretty please.”
“We will see.” It is no longer much of a haggling. She forwards the data Mina has sent her—there is a hefty amount—and Krissana returns with a short message, This is the real thing, the ambassador just verified it. Well done, Doctor. “Thank you for this. I’ll notify you once the director’s been dealt with.”
“The very second, if you could just.” Zie grins, all teeth. Bloodthirsty, no longer so fragile. “Do you plan to kill me off or anything? That’s fine too, but let me savor it first. Seeing that bitch put down like a dog will be worth everything.”
Orfea makes her exit. By now a new show has begun, different motif, different performers: spiderwebs above the stage and eight-limbed women crawling across. Illumination has gone from crimson to cobalt, flattening the spectators into shadow puppets. She weaves her way through briskly.
Out in the parking lot, the air is toothed and brittle. Krissana is waving at her from behind a bronze car. “Fantastic job, as usual. Georgina Whitten’s straight, but concocting believable footage won’t be too hard. They’ll turn on her right away. It’ll be the firing squad for her and they’ll exorcise the corpse, just to make sure the succubus of homosexuality doesn’t malinger and possess other godly women.”
“The way Mina wants her brought low is very specific.” And specifically humiliating.
“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.” Krissana’s mouth twists, as though reliving the taste of something foul. “Back there, Mina was thought to be a woman. Spared the camps since zie was brilliant with code, but mostly because zie isn’t fully Caucasian. Pax Americana is a special kind of hell. Never seen any place like it.”
Orfea’s thoughts snag on the idea, the image. “Was zie caught committing . . . heterodoxy? With you?”
“Something like that. I was deep undercover and it was a way to get zer out. Zie was safe, I made sure of it, and we spirited zer away while zie was en route to one of those breeding facilities.” Krissana shrugs. “Understandably, zie doesn’t want anything to do with me now.”
“These past twelve years you’ve been committing atrocities.” And Orfea was not the only victim.
“These past twelve years I’ve gotten things done in service to causes greater than myself. Results are what count.” But she laughs, loudly, as if she doesn’t mean any of what she has said. The burnished car swings open. “We’re both veterans at atrocities, Doctor, and I used to adore your hardness. The way you could leave people bleeding into a drain and step around them, like they were less than nothing and you were everything. But we should get going. We’ve got an ugly little mystery to solve.”
Chapter Four
In the end, as much as Krissana chases forward movement, the night has gotten late. When she suggests they return to Orfea’s place, the doctor—to her surprise and a little alarm—agrees without protest. Orfea’s unit is tasteful but small, with only one bed and a chaise too narrow for an adult. Krissana gives the replicant falcon a little pat on the head; it chirps at her, which seems to irritate its owner.
They shower separately. When her turn comes, Krissana inspects the toiletries out of habit. On the Armada, Orfea’s personal quarters were decorated with beautiful things; even her shower accessories were custom-made, fragrant with frangipani and crushed tea leaves of rare origins. Here the soaps are odorless, the utilitarianism of reduced circumstances. Krissana has brought a change of clothes and she shrugs into her robe, heavy water-resistant silk in turquoise, the sash embroidered with cranes in flight; she amuses herself with the thought of strutting a little, letting the fabric gape as she presents herself before Orfea.
She emerges to find the doctor already in bed, propped up on one elbow and limned in lamplight. Her left arm is greaved in a cobra of pearl and brushed silver: it is far from the baroque affairs Orfea used to wear, but it draws the eye and Krissana catches herself thinking of the indentations it’d leave on her flesh.
“Join me in bed,” the doctor says, a challenge.
“But of course. It is a frigid night.” Krissana climbs in. The mattress depresses under her weight, then shifts to accommodate and contour around her. “So how do you find life in Shenzhen? Is it to your tastes?”
“Utopia isn’t about tastes. It is about the common good, the greatest comfort for the greatest number—that is what Shenzhen is.”
She raises an eyebrow. “To a human government, that’d sound seditious, Doctor.”
“The Mandate isn’t human and hasn’t any need to delude itself. Ambassador Seung Ngo would agree with me, if anything.” Orfea shifts on the bed until her thigh slides between Krissana’s. There it rests, inert as stone. But much softer, much warmer by far. “Probably the Americans think their country is a utopia. 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.”
“Except you don’t have one of those.” Krissana quirks her eyebrow, coiling one leg around Orfea’s. Ankle to ankle, calf to calf. “Unless I’m still your vice?”
“On the contrary.” The doctor presses her hand against the base of Krissana’s spine, holding her in place. The silver cobra pushes into silk, into skin. “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?”
Krissana doesn’t shut her eyes. They are very close, Orfea’s mouth bare centimeters away, a mouth like thawing fruit. She wonders if it tastes the same as she remembers. “You know it wasn’t.”
Orfea’s fingers roam in short, repetitive patterns on Krissana’s back. The cobra digs in harder. “You ruined me, Krissana.”
“Better ruined than dead, Doctor.”
Orfea bares her teeth, carnivorous. “Give me tertiary access to your tactile feed.”
Tertiary meaning Krissana can rescind the access any time. She hands it over, makes it secondary—under Orfea’s control, to keep or revoke at the doctor’s discretion. It is access she would never volunteer to anyone else except medical professionals, and even then in crisis. Orfea must know this but her expression does not change, shows no acknowledgment of this act of supreme trust. Instead she nudges Krissana’s robe open. She inhales. Exhales. The currents of her breath rake across Krissana’s nerves like a razor on open wounds.
With one hand, she covers Krissana’s eyes. With her connection, she conjures the sensation of a scalpel gliding across Krissana’s stomach. It goes at a measured pace; it is impossibly thin and impossibly sharp, and she imagines its body would be more incandescent than any metal, the punitive glare of a sun. Then there is pressure, and the edge penetrates her skin.
It doesn’t, not truly. Her intellect is not absent, she knows this is illusory. But the flesh is primal, and her system reacts as if she has been physically cut. She tenses against the pain, the electric i
mpulse, and the phantom certainty that blood has welled warm and red on her belly—a line precise as a surgical incision. 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.
Cool, wet warmth along one of her breasts, as of an exploratory tongue. The doctor herself is nowhere near it. “I can make you feel anything, Krissana,” Orfea whispers, direct into her ear. A hand slips up her thigh. “Was it worth the admiral’s favor? Did I make a good tribute on her altar?”
“It’s not about that. I keep telling you—” Her sentence cuts off: fingers have slid into her, not real but still abrupt, nearly painful. The fullness quickens her breath and thickens her mouth. “I wanted the admiral the same way everyone else who served her did, it wasn’t . . . real. It was abstract.”
“I didn’t want her.”
“No. You never did. But you did want what she had.” The might of presence and main force, the accumulation of complex debts and arbitrage, the absolute authority to which worlds bend on their axes to pay obeisance. “I can’t go back and change what I did. At the time it was a guarantee you’d live.”
The scalpel’s tip flicks against her nipple. Krissana makes a small, choked gasp. But then it ends: all of it, the phantom sensations, the merciless grip on her tactile feed.
“I need rest.” Orfea turns her back to Krissana.
From outside comes the waterfall’s noises, an unending murmur. And, perceptible to Krissana’s senses, the hidden hymns of the engine-cores and intelligences that sustain Shenzhen. Adjusting for energy fluctuations and astrophysical phenomena, for the delicate moving components of subsystems within subsystems, maintaining that perfect equilibrium for each ecosphere and balancing them against one another. It is a load which must receive constant attendance, rotated between AIs who give some of their processing threads to the labor, to shoulder the weight of the world. She drifts off listening to this, the refrain of eternity, the liturgy of samsara.
And Shall Machines Surrender Page 4