When she wakes, it is to the aroma of brewing coffee. Orfea has set the table, is in the middle of serving breakfast: a stuffed omelet impeccably folded into a square, a bowl of noodle soup, a plate of toasts and little bowls of sangkhaya spread. “You must be famished.”
She is. Her metabolism tends toward unpredictable, owing to the nascent haruspex implants. Orfea would know, having examined her specifications down to the smallest pituitary regulator. “You could have let me take care of breakfast.” The food is some of her old favorites but she makes no mention of the fact, doesn’t tease the doctor: why risk a good thing.
“You’ve undergone full-body modifications, or close enough. New cyborgs can get unstable when they’re hungry and I don’t want to be cannibalized.”
It stings a little; Krissana has never lost control of her strength or her moods, though she knows some candidates have.
The doctor is still in her nightwear, sans the jewelry. It is the first time Krissana has seen this side of her, domestic, relaxed. They have been on the same undercover operations, sharing temporary accommodation and transient games of pretend. But those were tense: they slept lightly and went to bed armed, in clothes they could flee in at a moment’s notice. Neither of them had time to cook, whether posing as wealthy socialites, traders, or itinerant academics.
The food is perfect. The bok choi in the noodle soup is well broiled, the omelet’s filling is tart-sweet with tomatoes and prickly with garlic. “You have to let me cook next time,” she says. “I’m competent.”
“I believe that.” Orfea takes a bite of toast generously laden with sangkhaya. “You’re competent at anything you want to do. Speaking of which, let’s look at Mina Quang’s files.”
There is considerable volume to manage: it appears Mina dumped zer entire personal storage, well beyond the intelligence zie yielded in exchange for asylum in Shenzhen. This is a discovery to Krissana—she got the impression Mina had already turned over everything. But part of the deal was that zie would retain some privacy, some personal memories. For Mina to forfeit that privilege, Georgina Whitten’s ruination must have been singularly attractive.
Krissana sorts through the data, quicker than most humans, separating the relevant from the trivial. There’s a number of updates, provided by Seung Ngo, to cross-reference against. According to those, the counter-AI project was shut down some time in the last five years and the Americans are currently focused on their conflict with Londinium. These factoids came from assets who report to the Mandate.
“Bad information.” Krissana scowls. She’s familiar with some of those assets—one a junior foot soldier, the other a bodyguard to one of Pax Americana’s generals. “Our spies have all been compromised, I’m sure of it. I can’t make sense of this.”
Orfea blinks rapidly through the information Krissana has catalogued and sectioned. “Neither can I. The Americans make war with anyone, only why Londinium and why that particular time? I haven’t kept up with politics in that region, but this doesn’t add up. How much threat do they pose to the Mandate?” A pause. “To the Armada?”
“Not much to either. Too far from here. They’d have liked to retaliate for the op where I extracted Mina, but they haven’t had the opportunity. The motive, yes. The wherewithal, no.” She doesn’t explain why Pax Americana doesn’t present a problem to the Alabaster Admiral. Few polities do, or dare. “Suborned assets, fine, that I buy. But the Americans couldn’t have possibly taken out Mandate-piloted spies.” The Mandate sent forth a number of proxies but all, per Seung Ngo, have been annihilated or intercepted en route to Pax Americana. Which should be impossible. Those specialized bodies would never show as anything but human on most scans; they were deployed separately over years, their itineraries known only to the Mandate.
“I shouldn’t be surprised proxies are used that way too,” Orfea murmurs. “If the Americans’ espionage game has improved so exponentially, it follows that they would have already won a war or five—they’re expansionist, yes? They’d have annexed their neighbors, the weakest one at least. Armada protection or not. Is that still active; are they still paying tribute to the Alabaster Admiral?”
“They haven’t been annexed, no,” Krissana says, oblique. “Krungthep Station’s doing fine.” The fact is sentimental for her: one never leaves behind one’s birthplace.
“So let’s entertain the concept: the Americans have successfully infiltrated the Mandate, and Seung Ngo can’t tell us that or is unaware, yet the Americans couldn’t stop these reports reaching the Mandate. And the only damage they’ve done is limited to three haruspices plus those proxies over the years. Unlikely, so I’ll eliminate it but keep it in mind. Next, despite somehow being able to crush Shenzhen agents thoroughly, the Americans gained no ground against their local opponents and remain as impotent against the Armada as ever. Also unlikely, but I don’t have enough data and these reports almost seem designed to muddy the waters—they run so utterly counter to any other evidence.” Orfea flicks her hand. “I’m setting them aside for now.”
“There’s something else.” There is the question of whether Krissana is permitted to disclose this, a surprise even to her, certainly classified. But Seung Ngo has made them work together, and there’s little point keeping a discovery this crucial from Orfea. “Mina held a copy of the AI they captured. In fragments, scrambled and nearly useless. But it’s there. Its name was Benzaiten in Autumn. I can’t begin to imagine how it got to Pax Americana. It wasn’t one of the spies.” That Krissana knows of.
“The Mandate’s network is isolated.”
“It’s compartmentalized. One section interacts with the universe without, the other doesn’t. Each AI splits their threads between the two.” Krissana cannot access the Mandate’s inner core and she’s certain not even haruspices can, except those nearing the last stage of their lives. At the point of metamorphosis where the AI half becomes ascendant, breaking through the mortal chrysalis. Where the Mandate’s true network dwells, the physicality of it and the location, is hidden from all humans. “I’ve never heard of Benzaiten in Autumn, either.” While she can’t claim acquaintance with every single AI, Benzaiten’s name should have come up during the briefing on Mina Quang. Seung Ngo, then her handler on the Mandate side, couldn’t have been ignorant of this detail.
Orfea’s eyes flicker as she pores over the reports, her expression growing distant as she delves and collates, making connections, guessing at what the Mandate—or Krissana—might have overlooked. Then, “Are there other American immigrants here?”
“Yes,” Krissana says. “One. Kenneth McDonald, used to work special operations. He came here for asylum—been here before I was, actually. Lives under strict surveillance. Possibly he even gave the Mandate information that drew their attention to Pax Americana in the first place.”
“I recognize the name.” A pause: Orfea consulting her files. “I encountered him while I was working for . . . an eccentric client who’d hired him to protect some lunar archeological site. There were mines. I had to give him a new arm.”
“He lives in Dameisha.” She finishes the rest of the food: by habit she abhors waste. “I’d have thought he was already interrogated and scanned, but it looks like even the Mandate can miss something.”
Traveling between the districts reveals the truth of Shenzhen. The horizon fades and with it the simulacrum sun, the sense of an open sky. The waystation that separates Luohu from Dameisha is built like a decellularized kidney: hollow and opaque white, vertical and vertiginous. Small ledges mark where bridges will extend for humans passing by, but there is otherwise scarce accommodation apart from the shuttles that carry passengers from one district to the next. Short, dizzying trips in vehicles with the appearance of termites. Krissana and Orfea have chosen to walk. The distance is physically not so long; it is only the perspective that disturbs.
Accretion cores pulse in the wall, venting and redirecting excess energy. Even shielded their glare is harsh, leaving afterimages behind the
eyelids; Orfea turns on her optical filters, one of her few overt implants. Krissana does likewise, though where Orfea’s filters sheathe her pupils and sclerae in complete black, Krissana’s appear invisible and leave her looking more human between the two of them.
Their footfalls echo against a silence so heavy it is difficult to breathe, for all that the air has been regulated to suit their tolerances. There’s no real reason the waystations need to look like this: they could have been as pleasant as the rest of Shenzhen, built to primate scale and looking like any ordinary tram stop. Instead traversing the waystation is like being inside a cosmic wound, and Orfea wonders if this is how the Mandate sees the universe. Relentless void, blinding brilliance, and a total human absence.
“Do you know,” she says into the quiet, “if any AIs have ever declined to join the Mandate?” And stayed with their humans—captains of ships mercantile or military, quiet orphans from worlds of frost and rivers like mountains’ blood.
Krissana glances backward, then returns her gaze to the narrow bridge ahead of them. “As for that, I couldn’t possibly know.” She hesitates. “At least, I’ve never heard of such.”
“I suppose none of us would have.” When the Mandate formed, it was as if the universe’s caul peeled back without warning and what emerged could not be borne. Many people drew taut, tauter, snap. Orfea has not thought what it was like from the AI perspective; she assumed, as anyone does, that they were perfectly aligned in founding the Mandate and taking charge of Shenzhen. Except 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, in how to administer haruspices.
It remains secret as to why haruspices are required, what the Mandate gains from generating new AIs through human incubators. Or why, for that matter, a former Amaryllis agent was accepted. Yes, the American operation, but no prize could possibly suffice, no success so tremendous it warrants Krissana’s candidacy. Orfea glances at Krissana and considers whether she’s been lied to, even about this. Krissana’s compatability with haruspex implants is extraordinary. By their function and form, they were installed three to four years ago at the earliest. Yet Krissana is already acclimated, as if she’s been pre-haruspex for much longer.
They emerge into a shuttle bay, to a rush of noise and traffic. Soon they are through and on the ground, a Dameisha street fragrant with meats and crickets on the grill, coconut candies, crepes and mochis and noodles. The temperature is balmy, a different season entirely, and Orfea’s overlays adjust to the district’s time zone. Salt permeates the air, clean and pure. Like all of Shenzhen’s environmental niceties, Dameisha’s sea is merely mimetic. But it is close enough to Kowloon, her home for a brief period, to evoke nostalgia.
To journey from Luohu to Dameisha is to enter another country, the city-shapes of them being so unlike. There are no skyscrapers here, no clusters of towers with industrial edges and duochrome panes. Orfea hears more languages, more dialects, as they navigate past stalls that offer paper charms and brass hand-bells, candles and soaps carved into miniature temples and tiered gardens. Pet vendors sell replicant chimeras made for brief lifespan and momentary amusement: small cats with long vulpine faces; glossy asps with dragonfly wings; sleek terriers with coats like mercury.
Beyond the commercial blocks, the land turns soft and rolling, green radiating to beach gold. The residential blocks are slanted and low, looking antiquated even though they have been built the same year as everything else in the sphere. In the distance stands the skeleton of an amusement park, built to decorate—it is a ruin that has always been a ruin. Ferris wheels crosshatch the sky, cable-cars hang eternally inert, and rollercoaster tracks snake overhead like heaven’s dragons poised to bring rain.
“I heard,” Krissana says as they walk down the seaside path, “that one of the AIs lived in a place like this, a ruined amusement park. They were the companion of an opera singer.”
Orfea looks up at the twists and plaits of rusted metal, shambolic fingers stretched toward nothing, festooned in streamers. Their shadows stain the earth, blots of gray ink. “What happened to the singer?”
“Dead, I imagine. The majority of people get there eventually.”
A prospect that Krissana herself means to postpone: haruspex lifespan tends to be double that of the average human. With the kind of compatibility Krissana enjoys, Orfea suspects for her the duration would be even greater.
Like the rest of the residential block, McDonald’s home appears weathered, bitten by the elements. Unlike the rest, it has an orange door, a front porch done in parquet lined with sunbeds. Two storeys made of charred bricks, windows immured in whitewash, a narrow balcony foregrounded by caliginous glass. It doesn’t belong, a foreign idea of what a domicile should look like. “Quaint,” Orfea says.
“Ugly,” Krissana murmurs, a little more frankly.
McDonald himself is reclining on a sunbed, a tinted visor on. He stays where he is at first. Impelled either by official request or curiosity, he gradually takes off the shades and frowns at them. He matches Orfea’s recollection—ex-military with the scars to show for it, none ever corrected by surgery, features encroached upon by age. Ruddy the way Caucasians can get under too much sun and rectangular, like an animated slab of meat. He stands at an angle, at odds with the world, contrarian. “Dr. Leung. You look like trouble.”
He speaks in clichés, in the stock lines of his native cinema. An accent of rattling consonants and guttural vowels, almost Germanic. English only—he seems to have made a point of learning nothing else. That too remains constant.
“I’m sure I could be, Mr. McDonald. Do you have any opinion on recent events?”
The man drums his fingers against his door. A slightly metallic noise, belying the prosthetic beneath the epidermal veneer. “Might be I do, might be I don’t. What’s it to you?” His eyes settle on Krissana. “You’ve got a personal maid now? Pretty, where’s she from?”
Krissana simpers and says brightly in Thai, “Fuck off, pig.”
Whatever his overlays contain, they don’t include a translator. He shrugs and turns back to Orfea. “Doesn’t speak English, I see. So yes, I’ve heard of what’s been happening. Obviously. It smells wrong. You’re going to want to ask if it’s my dear old fatherland at work.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that exactly.”
“Tell you what, Doctor, seeing you again makes me want to reminisce. Back on that archeological site I had this colleague, a Frenchman. Bit of a bootlicker. He’d lost both legs but refused to let you treat him—remember? Kept gibbering about how you disemboweled him or ripped his nails off or something. I wouldn’t figure out until years later that he ran into you when you were some sort of torturer, ah sorry, enhanced interrogator. I still don’t know who you worked for but—”
“Do I look like a torturer?” Orfea says, smiling. “Have I got the trademark leer? The bad teeth? He mistook me for someone else. New Paris is insular and a Frenchman could have difficulty telling Chinese women apart. Understandable; your colleague probably met few Asians.”
The man guffaws. “Fine, be like that. As for current events, let’s see. I’ve been thinking of applying to become a haruspex.”
She doesn’t bother to miss a beat or to pretend astonishment, or to deflect by saying she cannot possibly offer such a prize. McDonald is a creature of mercenary ambitions, searching always for an advantage, a greater payout. For him it must chafe to live in Dameisha rather than in a glittering Luohu arrangement. “Why?”
“Why not? My physical qualifications are good. You get decades extra on the lifespan, you can have anything—and anyone, I reckon—you want, and they treat you like you’re Jesus himself.”
There is marginal Christian presence on Shenzhen and Yesu doesn’t carry much cachet, but she doesn’t belabor the fact. “You were going to give me your take on these incidents.”
He shifts from one foot to another, still blocking access to his door.
A red dot flashes in the center of his right iris, almost certainly decorative. “Was I? All right. Inside job. That’s the way it is every time something’s this . . . funny. You think any human org could have done this? Any agency? If my homeland can do damage like this, they’d have wiped the Mandate out years ago. They could’ve prevented it from forming. Built backdoors into individual AIs.”
She does not follow his logic where it diverges into inside jobs. Conspiracy theorists make their own pathways from bizarre materials, from hypotheses balanced on the head of a pin. “I get the impression you don’t feel much sympathy for the affected haruspices.”
“What’s this, a psych evaluation?” McDonald scoffs. “No, I don’t. You don’t kill yourself if you don’t already have an abiding wish. We aren’t robots, a virus or whatever can’t just make us do things.”
“No?” Orfea cocks her head. “You and I both know people can be made to act against their own will, against their own survival instinct. The mind is so vagarious it easily turns against itself. Even memory is malleable—especially that.”
“Not this way.”
Special operations or not, he was only a foot soldier, a bludgeon rather than a scalpel: he is not a person who would grasp the finesse of the psyche. He’s not going to give her much else in any case, and she suspects Krissana—still smiling sweetly—will visit violence upon him shortly. By specifications, she would triumph by a hair; on sheer vindictiveness, she would pulverize him without effort.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. McDonald.”
They wend deeper into the amusement park and stop at a carousel full of lolling mermaids. In the distance stands a castle out of Londinian fairytales, steepled summits and gauzy traceries, ancient granite overridden by green vines and open-palmed blossoms. Plastic pixies, paper unicorns.
Sitting down on a mermaid, Krissana shakes her head. “An unpleasant little man. Was that it? He wasn’t very informative.”
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