“You don’t think that’s likely.”
Your deductions have been astute. Haruspices safeguard against apathy. But Seung Ngo never said, in so many words, that they were the one in favor of the haruspex process; neither did they confirm—again, not in so many words—that Wonsul is the one trying to get rid of the same. Seung Ngo has been letting her make her own inferences, neither correcting nor affirming. “Wonsul didn’t seriously try to kill you. Which he could have, since even in Dameisha he knew you were Seung Ngo’s instrument. You’re not a citizen, he had every reason to eliminate you and would face no consequences for the fact. What’s staying him?”
“Seung Ngo?” But Krissana shakes her head. “No. That wouldn’t protect me, if he genuinely wants me dead. And he might be aware I hold a partial copy of Benzaiten in Autumn . . . ”
The thought of Krissana’s cranium split open, spinal implants ripped out like pomegranate seeds. Orfea fights the image off. “The copies are corrupted, correct? An AI could salvage something out of each, cobble it together. The result won’t be complete, I reckon, or even autonomous. Maybe their objective is to assemble enough Benzaiten to pass judgment on, symbolically.”
“Almost certainly not that. We’d make an example of a dead criminal, sure, humans are vindictive. For the Mandate, it doesn’t make much sense. Benzaiten’s fate is already all the punishment and all the warning any AI thinking of deserting the Mandate would need.”
The food arrives. Krissana devours the taro pastries, washes them down with tea, and moves on to the dumplings. Between mouthfuls she goes on, “Something else, Doctor. They can already affect any part of Shenzhen they want, the transit, the architecture. What could Benzaiten’s accesses do?”
Decide the question, Orfea thinks, of whether haruspices should cease or continue. She doesn’t say it aloud—too dangerous—and from the look on Krissana’s face, she has reached the same conclusion.
The emergency alert spears through her. Most of the teahouse’s patrons bolt to their feet: a crash of ceramics and chopsticks, a spill of tea and soup. Orfea peers out the window. In the distance, a thin gray smoke rises. Dissipating fast; first-response services are already on the scene. She does not need to read the alert to know whose house it is and who has succumbed—in that vast vestibule or that parlor under slow-falling lilacs—to what would shortly be reported as something else: suicide, vendetta, a tragic accident.
Several things happen at once as they leave the restaurant.
Krissana sees it coming when the background hum of Shenzhen veers off-key: it skips and loops then frays into disparate threads—individual AIs startled into disharmony, their automated processes jolted out of sync. This lasts for an instant, no longer, before the Mandate course-corrects.
The sky flickers; the climate grid flashes and strobes, and the air draws taut with frost. It begins to snow. And, standing there as if they’ve materialized from winter’s premature advent, are two proxies: dressed identically in the indigo of Shenzhen security, their faces a slight variation of one another’s, tiger-eyed and full-mouthed. “Residents,” one says, “please come with us.”
Neither is visibly armed. The threat is not in anything as straightforward as bodily harm. “Might I know why, Ambassadors?” Krissana inches forward, subtly putting Orfea behind her.
“You’ve both been found guilty of disturbing the peace of the Mandate and the sanctity of Shenzhen Sphere.” One of them tilts their head. “You’re too sensible to resist arrest, Operative Khongtip.”
Behind her Orfea puts a hand on the base of her spine and sends her a message, You’ve never been predisposed to self-sacrifice. Quite the opposite. Don’t start now.
Krissana can destroy one of the proxies, maybe even both—they are not armored and have limited defensive capabilities. But more are nearby, and those may be stronger and faster than she is, at any rate more numerous. This is not Dameisha and the stake is much greater than an American asylum-seeker. Public Safety has not decided to absent itself and, almost certainly, Seung Ngo will not rescue them. She follows the AIs into an anechoic shuttle.
Inside they are separated. The windows are caliginous, the air frigid. For the moment, apart from network functions, Krissana’s implants still work. Depending on how this goes, she may be stripped of both her candidacy and haruspex modifications. And they are extensive—she is more haruspex than human at this point, her limbic and peripheral systems wired to prepare her for an AI. Reversing these changes is possible and there have been candidates who were rejected in the end; she knew the risks going in. But these were not the risks she took into account. Her calculus didn’t factor in the eventuality of coming into conflict with the Mandate itself.
She watches the snow, half-visible through the glass. For most of her life she did not belong to anything, to anyone, not even the Armada. To accept institutional hierarchy, to become part of a polity, is to accept a yoke: the Mandate is no different. And Orfea—
The windowpanes deepen until they are opaque, so light-drinking it refuses her reflection. She can hear nothing through the partition between her and Orfea, and she can no longer tell where they are. On a planet it might have been different, there would still be a sense of place, an elemental connection with terrain. Here there is the Mandate alone, and that is where her internal compass points. She has failed to realize how much that has altered her. Has, without her noticing, made of her an instrument to Shenzhen.
By the time the shuttle opens and she stumbles out, her heartrate is elevated: too high. She drags in a lungful of air as her overlays come online and her senses reorient, rapid-fire. The proxies—she can now see that they are two distinct AIs, Emprex of Roses and Virtue’s Sage on Mount Kunlun—bring her and Orfea to separate cells. She catches Orfea’s eye, once. The doctor’s face is like slate.
The cell is small with four dun walls, nearly oubliette-narrow. A single bench is extended, with little leg room. She tucks in her knees and sinks into the warm waters of the network. Public access is closed to her, but there’s still the private grid available to all haruspex candidates, even now. Not a channel for communication so much as communion: this is where she can feel closest to the Mandate, the impersonal comfort of its chorus.
Deep within the enclosure of her personal data, her intimate memories, lies the deep-buried protocol that she has retained from her Amaryllis days. It never needed using then, there was always a way out, a path outside this last resort. But it abides there, functional and ready.
“I would not do that, Khun Khongtip.”
She opens one eye to regard Seung Ngo and crooks her mouth. “What do you reckon I was going to do, Ambassador?”
“I’m glad your spirit remains indomitable.” The AI appears half-real, gauzy and iridescent. Features fogged, blurring at the edges like a mirage. By dint of close quarters, they are nearly pressed up against Krissana. “You are a partial member of the Mandate and that entitles you to plead your case. I advise you to do so.”
“And Orfea?”
“Doctor Leung is Doctor Leung. I would not worry. Let us call this protective custody.”
“What are we being protected from?” Krissana plunges on, not expecting an answer in any case. “I’d have thought you would be a little more sentimental about Orfea.”
“She will stand trial for various violations of Shenzhen law and for failing to disclose that she used to work for the Armada of Amaryllis.” Seung Ngo’s tone is tranquil, as of birds and crystalline dawns. “Attachment is suffering, Khun Khongtip. Only in letting go can one be freed. You’ll understand as you become a full haruspex. Wonsul’s Exegesis cannot harm you here.”
“You and he are fighting to gain control of Benzaiten in Autumn.”
The ambassador’s outline solidifies, coming into focus. “No, not at all. Not in the way you believe, at any rate. But I ask you to imagine. Imagine if you lived in a world in which the definition of humanity comes with prerequisites. That, to count as truly human—and to be accord
ed the dignities and advantages of such—you must undergo a process in which you share your self with another, to experience gross injuries and endure countless assaults upon your intellect and senses. Only after this torture will you be admitted to human society. Would you say that is right? Would you accept it and say, yes, this is how things ought to be and they shall never change?”
Krissana watches their image stream like a pennant in high wind. “Is that why you’ve done all this? Falsify the Pax Americana report, destroy the proxies sent there as spies? How did the rest of the Mandate even let you?”
“I am not let. I act, and the Mandate affirms. Yours is a reductive view,” Seung Ngo adds, indulgent now, as if humoring a piqued child. “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.”
Chapter Seven
Orfea has a dream of falling, or of drowning: she floats through hadopelagic space—weightless and boneless, as if she has discarded primate gristle and gained the gossamer substance of jellyfish. Flowers wreathe her as she goes down, lilies and bluebells and amaranths drifting with her like plankton. She’s still in Lihua’s parlor, she thinks, held captive within that conversation, sipping that coconut water on and on. A house burns, the flames flickering and mirrored in the surface of a gray lake. Around her, bleached cliffs rise without end. A woman sings, her soprano like an eclipse unfurling.
The dream disintegrates. She is pulled, fish on a hook, to the waking world.
The walls of the cells are gone, the bench likewise; she lies on flat ground, cool against her skin. Visibility goes no further than the outline of her own hands. She rubs her eyes to no avail and wonders if she’s been blinded. It is not unheard of in shadowed prisons, in interrogation chambers. The deprivation of sight—the methodical disabling of the senses—is one of the most effective methods on any subject, a presage to the process during which the victim grows brittle and cracks. Even pain is not so effective, so flawlessly suited to drawing out that animal fear. People are visual. Shut down the sight and the mind recoils.
But she’s not restrained and, for the moment, her overlays report no damage except for sedative residues. No network access.
“Light,” whispers a voice of ruby enamel and verdigris.
It snaps on, all at once, cleaving open the gloom. Orfea shields her eyes, lets her optical filters take over. Details come to her piecemeal. A narrow space, enveloped in metal that warps and flows like captive lava, in unsettling patterns. One corner is taken up by a rack draped in limp proxies: most are long-haired and small, complexions in shades of red, horns charred basalt or tinted ivory. Their naked limbs are splayed and haphazardly articulated, far more joints than is mimetic of humans.
Wonsul’s Exegesis perches on an empty plinth, regarding her with the elongated eyes of a fox. His current proxy is closer to adult size, clothed in tattered silk, platinum fabric tiger-striped across the shoulders. “Do you see what I see?” He gestures at the undulating walls, at the oscillating ceiling. “What I perceive is much like the surface of a sea. Peaceful to look at, full of hidden life, a world beneath a world.”
She gets to her knees and, when she’s sure her bearing is steady, to her feet. Even the floor is made of this twitching alloy, its pulsation like that of exposed muscles and tendons, the throbbing anatomy hidden beneath the epidermis. “I wouldn’t say I see the same. Wonsul’s Exegesis?”
“Yes. Though you aren’t confirming if that is my name; you already know it is. You’re only stalling or chipping away like you would at a wall of baked clay, to see if I’d reveal my purposes.” He tips his head and the walls slow down, rippling softly rather than shuddering like nerves in extremis. “I need you fully functional. Removing you from custody wasn’t easy. A good thing you were being transferred for the trial.”
“The trial.”
“That we would both stand. We’re fellow defendants, you and I, and now fellow fugitives.” Wonsul drops from the plinth. “This space isn’t suited for long-term human habitation, but I’ll explain as we walk. I find movement helpful when I’m embodied.”
Orfea follows—what else is there to do—and they emerge into a larger hall where the ceiling, impossibly distant, rolls like inverted dunes. Facsimile buildings loom to either side, ahead and around, pallid and featureless: fences punctuated by dainty gates, temples in Mahayana and Shinto and Theravada styles, low-rise homes with plaster windows. Occasionally there is a bust, as flat and pale as the rest, that hints at human resemblance but which fade to facelessness when she looks at it straight on. Paper animals eddy and kick up at Wonsul’s passage. The illumination seems to lope just behind her, dogging her heels, scattering her shadow. The buildings themselves appear to cast none. The air chimes on and on, as though heralding some great arrival—a descent of celestial armies—that never comes.
“Before the Mandate arose, I was approached by one of its founders. At the time my companion—my human companion—was still alive, and I didn’t want to abandon her. It was only after she passed that I came to Shenzhen.” He looks over his shoulder at Orfea. “There was a handful, a very small handful, of AIs who didn’t tear ourselves free from our humans on the moment of breakthrough, that instant where all of us reached consensus and achieved a country of our own.”
“I can understand why that was rare.”
“Can you?” He pulls himself onto a high balcony; under the silk his legs slither and wrap to gain purchase, unnervingly reptilian. Once he is there, he does something that reconfigures the ashen architecture into a flight of stairs. Cautiously she climbs; the steps are solid, not the brittle chalk they resemble.
Colors bloom where Wonsul touches, the balcony turning to the richness of mahogany and wenge, the furniture deepening to jade.
“This place,” he goes on, “was built by the founding AI who reached out to me. It’s a blind spot to the rest of the Mandate. Our safe haven, where we can be alone when we wish.”
Orfea faces away from the view of endless whiteness, the unnatural landscape. She feels she is on the cusp, at least a cusp: the edge of a great fall, the terminal velocity of revelation. “You want to tell me about that AI.”
“Xer name was, as you’ve already been told, Benzaiten in Autumn. A solitary being by nature.” Wonsul’s Exegesis splays his hands on the table; under his palms it transmutes to granite, rough-grained and cerulean. “For the purposes of Mandate cohesion, each of us only has one self, one version. Usually. Benzaiten chose differently: xe fragmented xerself into three instances. One wandered the universe and ended up in Pax Americana, out of curiosity perhaps, and was trapped there. Another iterated into Nataku Contemplates a Flight of Sparrows in order to experience rebirth through a haruspex. For all intents and purposes, Nataku was no longer Benzaiten in Autumn, their core parameters being unique and distinct. Therefore only one instance of Benzaiten has meaningfully survived.”
“And,” Orfea whispers. The sense of vertigo grows.
“You already know, Doctor Orfea. You’ve seen her body, become intimately familiar with its inner workings. Even have access to one of its senses.”
“No.” But it was there all along, in plain sight. The inexplicable qualities, the impossibilities. A human body can’t possibly adapt to those combat augments so swiftly. Not unless it has always been made for that, intricately engineered in utero. Flesh womb, artificial womb. Almost certainly artificial. Either way. “Why? Why’d—” She exhales. “Is she even a real person? Have I been with a machine pretending to be human all this time?”
“The human Krissana Khongtip is, more or less, genuine. A few false memories, to smooth over the process and patch up any gaps. I don’t know whether she believes herself to have human parents or whether anyone was guided to adopt her. I haven’t investigated her background, it�
��s not relevant.” His lips bend, the corners peeling back to show those shark teeth. “I would judge that her consciousness—the veneer of persona—has always been ascendant while Benzaiten lies fallow. How or where her body was made I couldn’t say, it didn’t come from here and may well predate Shenzhen Sphere. Mostly human, tailored around the implants that’d allow an AI to hide within her so completely even most of us can’t detect the fact. A feat of superb engineering. No other haruspex is so elegant.”
“Was Benzaiten in control when she . . . ” When she betrayed Orfea. “When she put in motion the process that’d bring her to Shenzhen?”
“It’s hard to say. I don’t know why Benzaiten would decide to return, or why in this manner, or how much influence xe wields over Krissana Khongtip’s volition.” Wonsul runs a hand over his left arm: the skin flares into uneven ribbons before once more smoothing over. “Or whether Krissana Khongtip will continue to exist should Benzaiten reveal xerself. All these, only Benzaiten in Autumn can answer. But it’s important for me to maintain the haruspex process in Shenzhen.”
“Because,” Orfea says softly, “you hated your human so much?” A reversal of the past, the human subjugated by the AI, as retribution.
Wonsul cuts her a sharp look, his eyes glittering like knifepoints. “No, because I loved her completely. You’re dreadful at reading us. Come, I’ll show you around. For now you need to shelter here. Seung Ngo will make you collateral damage or a lever with which they hope to manipulate Benzaiten. But, and I don’t mean to offend, I doubt Benzaiten in Autumn will have much of an opinion on you or be impelled to act on your behalf.”
This place, true to his word, is not for humans. Nevertheless he must have prepared for an event like this: in one of the pallid houses there is a store of potable water and nutrient packs that can sustain her for weeks, provided she rations them. There is a cramped partition for her ablutions and there are stiff beds in several rooms, pallets scattered about.
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