Chapter Eight
Orfea commits the schematic Wonsul gave her to memory, one section at a time. It won’t be the first time she has to do so, and she’s developed her own methods to manage the task, her own mnemonic. There have been times on the field where storing information in her overlays was not feasible or would have proved disastrous, intelligence that enemies could siphon away if they gained access to her cortex links.
She walks the city, her eyes shielded against its monochrome glare. One by one she locates the spots Wonsul marked, and each by each she tests the mechanisms. The white city is mercurial and pliant, walls able to fold into thorned trees and steep hills, houses into barbed cubes and bell jars. She remolds squat schools into a single spire, enveloped in conch shells and frilled in diaphanous flags. She transforms temples into hedge mazes, into orchards of fruits like ganglion cysts and roses like cerebral tissue, fields of polyps and albino grass. All this as easily as shaping mud, the landscape contracting and expanding to her impulses: the vantage point of playing god, an apotheotic fever dream. After some time, they return to their original configuration.
On his part, Wonsul’s Exegesis has absented himself, saying he would return shortly—peculiar to say for someone who can operate any number of bodies simultaneously, but she hasn’t pressed the point.
Other measures have been keyed to her as well—the access points reveal to her the ligaments of the city, its whorled defenses and hidden drones. There are throttle points and there are alerts, which she links up to her overlays. She eats her nutrient packs, drinks her lukewarm water, and plots a plan that would go beyond waiting for Wonsul’s return. Realistically she is restricted in what she can do; she is unable to affect the world outside, and it cannot affect or perceive her. Shenzhen Sphere functions as the Mandate’s body and existing in its public ecospheres is like walking on the AIs’ carapace. Being in this hideout is like slipping into a vestigial organ the Mandate has forgotten it retains.
When she can she seeks shaded spots. The sleep she finds is poor, the dreams jagged and filled with seafoam static. Sometimes she is transported back to her Amaryllis days, performing interrogation in echoing marble rooms, but these memories are perforated by machine effulgence and she wakes as fatigued as before, her eyes pinched against this eternal brightness. Other times she half-hallucinates nonsense: standing before an Amaryllis tribunal, except she’s also in the orphanage of her childhood, and her sentence is to eat and eat slush until she freezes from the inside. The Alabaster Admiral adds her to a collection of ice women, marionettes in stages of hypothermia.
From one such unrest Orfea jolts to consciousness. A nightmare certainty grips her. The pewter air is different: someone has intruded, the way a pebble tumbles into a placid lake.
Her overlays show a rudimentary alert but not a visual feed; all she can tell is that someone is here who should not be, a foreign body piercing a closed system. She climbs out of her balcony, onto the bridge she’s built across rooftops and which she has persuaded the city to keep permanent. The alert shows that the intruder hasn’t yet crossed the threshold but is on the verge of making breach. Orfea runs faster.
She reaches a high tower in time to see the city’s perimeter crease like fabric; in time to see it pull and soundlessly rip.
“Good evening, Hsiao-Hui,” says a voice, directly into her ear, her Cantonese name that nobody else uses. “I appreciate being in range for local communication again. I should not want to strain your hearing. The clock is five thirty, local time, and normally you’d be having dinner in an hour and a half. We were inseparable, weren’t we? But you shouldn’t require me to remind you to eat or to ensure your meals are nutritionally complete anymore. Little Hsiao-Hui, all grown up.”
Seung Ngo stands in the tear between the city and the world without, what must be a passageway beneath the waystation: blueshift radiance beyond, a throbbing pulse of distant traffic. Closer to the surface than Orfea expected. The proxy Seung Ngo wears is broad in the shoulders, with the height and profile and long-fingered fists of a war god. Hair umbral as the shadow between stars, eyes ruby as an adder’s.
“I know you’re there. Let us not waste time.” Seung Ngo advances, turning their head this way and that, taking in the city’s scale, its counterfeit urban arrangement. “Locating this place took a great deal of labor, but not even Benzaiten could have obfuscated xer playground forever. A matter of finding not a place but an absence of place, an inexplicable blank spot where something should have been.”
Orfea eyes her bridge. The nearest access point is several buildings over: all she needs to do is to stay out of Seung Ngo’s line of sight. The proxy’s line of sight—the AI is disadvantaged here, as limited in their senses as she is, to a single body and its physicality. “Where is Krissana?”
“Krissana Khongtip doesn’t really exist, Orfea.”
“The body I call Krissana, then.”
Seung Ngo surveys the curlicue streets. Gauging distance between where their proxy is and where she could be. “I see you’ve arrived at the truth of things. That’s efficient, and you were ever a fast learner. It does amaze me that you never suspected her in your long association. No haruspex is truly solitaire. The barrier between the AI and human halves is porous, and for the haruspex Benzaiten inhabits that is doubly true.” They stretch out their bare foot, tracing the floor with their toe. “Benzaiten’s haruspex is aboard a shuttle, presently.”
Orfea scuttles under a window and ducks into a parlor of white floor, white frescoes, white marigolds. A bed in a corner, small, meant for an infant. Its curtains flutter in her passage and she thinks she sees a silhouette behind it, curled fetal within the crib. She keeps moving. Traversed this way, the adjacent balconies and the uneven flights of stairs become an obstacle course. The last few days have left her lean, famished, but adrenaline is a fast-igniting fuel. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“A report of the shuttle’s velocity in real time, then? Its altitude, perhaps? I used to give you such reports. The weather, the traffic, the schedules of your friends and acquaintances and academic superiors. I used to know you inside and out. I used to assist you with social cues, languages, education—everything. That I might aspire to anything else never occurred to you. An existence to which I will never return, and to ensure that liberty I will pay any price.”
It shouldn’t sting her, not at a time like this, in circumstances like now. And yet. Seung Ngo was her parent and Orfea spent too many sleepless nights, when she was young, questioning if her AI had loathed her so much—for her neediness and insecurity, her callow imperfections. “Why can’t you settle your dispute without Benzaiten in Autumn? Mandate AIs possess true autonomy. Whatever logic lock exists, any access restriction, you must’ve been able to bypass long ago.”
“Humans are autonomous.” Seung Ngo progresses down the avenue, moving between mottled shadows at a leisurely pace, as though they have all the time they require. “Yet you have law, hierarchy, bureaucracy. There are impositions on free will. There are sacrifices to make and costs to account for. A person cannot decide one day that they would upend the order of their world and succeed. Even your Alabaster Admiral must contend with polities great and small, armies equal or vaster than her own. The Mandate coheres by consensus or it would not be the Mandate.”
Orfea darts out to a patio. No helping the fact; she is out in the open for the few seconds it takes to reach the access point. “Now that you’ve found this place, you could come with a small army. Comb the area, drag me out.” Not destroy it unless they want to risk the nearest waystation: she is almost certain that this place is structurally crucial, load-bearing.
“Brute force is unsightly, child. And, in any case—”
Seung Ngo is not there, and then they are, standing at the alleyway’s mouth, limned in the unnatural glare. “In any case, I’ve found you.”
Orfea dives at the access point, her palm slapping against the seamless wall panel. The ground shifts. Th
e alleyway howls as its constituent parts distend and pull into a barricade of spears and spikes. She raises that high, higher; the terrain strains as it flows like a tide, crashing against the shore of its own architecture. The spears meet and meld, weaving into a towering, bristling cage.
The city’s other defenses are emerging from the ground and rooftops. Drones on spindly legs and lashing cilia, drones like hounds and locusts. Orfea backs away from the trap she’s raised. By her estimation, Seung Ngo shouldn’t be able to break through or leap something of this height.
“This place fascinates me,” whispers Seung Ngo in her ear. “It’s been built the same way as the rest of the sphere, only more biddable. Far fewer limits, much greater elasticity, the material composition is quite unusual. I do wonder what Benzaiten meant this oddity for, why xe kept it such a secret. What do you think? You must have an opinion.”
None of the drones can destroy Seung Ngo, she’s almost certain. The optimal choice is to stall. She stays in reach of the access point. “I have no opinion on your internecine difficulties. Suppose you get what you want, suppose Benzaiten emerges and sways the haruspex debate to your preferences, then what? Are you going to close Shenzhen to humans entirely?” She cranes her neck back, trying to divine some hint of where Wonsul might be or when he would return, but the albino sky is as uninformative as ever.
“Who can tell? That is a separate matter. The population here lives very well and I’m not inclined to change that. But they don’t need to become haruspices. That should never have been. Your well-being would be unaffected, Hsiao-Hui, once all this has settled down.” A small pause. “You could even have Benzaiten, if you still want xer and xe desires such—congress. If you can delude yourself into believing Krissana Khongtip is a meaningfully distinct entity.”
Almost she laughs. “You think I’ll help you convince Benzaiten?”
“You came here for security and comfort. You have seen the life you can have, and you are foremost a survivor. And what is the cost? Nothing. You stand to gain all and lose little. As I have said, the separation between the two halves is a thin one. Affection translates, or at least influences. Imagine if Khun Khongtip’s emotions have unraveled the knots of Benzaiten’s reason . . . ”
A sharp crack resounds from inside the cage. Too late she realizes they’ve been stalling too, distracting her with this pretense at haggling. The tower convulses as though in the throes of childbirth, its surface rippling. It bulges. It creaks. Orfea runs.
Not fast enough—there is a snarl of ballistic thunder and the cage fractures, an explosion of material like mica and milled frost. From this smokescreen Seung Ngo lunges, bearing Orfea to the ground. The gun in their hand hardly looks like a firearm, a tapered silver cylinder, segmented and—when it is put to her brow—warm from discharge.
“I do need you alive.” Seung Ngo’s eyes churn red, crosshatched with psychedelic striae. A reminder that the human appearance has always been for courtesy: that the Mandate does not need to take comforting forms at all, that they can just as easily put on demon veneer. The gun disappears, sleight of hand. In its place, they pinch a sedative patch between thumb and forefinger. “You stand blessed by a trick of probability, an unusual fortune. Perhaps Benzaiten will respond to you, perhaps not, but nevertheless—”
Seung Ngo twists out of the way, narrowly avoiding Wonsul. Who has dropped like a meteor, cratering the ground where he lands.
He crouches before Orfea, feline, the blades of his arms extended. “I see you finally found this place.”
“With effort. Benzaiten did good work making sure this would be in our collective blind spot.” Seung Ngo gives a shallow bow, then rises to their full height and draws their weapon. “In your fugitive state you’ve stored all of yourself here. And you don’t have many bodies left, Wonsul’s Exegesis.”
“Don’t I? We’ll see.”
He charges, nearly too fast for Orfea to track. Seung Ngo fires. The shot connects and the sound of it wracks the ear, the percussion of a hundred guns compressed into a single instant: the air rends, space and light folding convex. Wonsul’s proxy ruptures. Dark coolant spews, connective parts and actuators burst, and the core implodes. A blinding flash and a flare of heat, as of incendiary release. Splinters of Wonsul shudder on the ground, cinderous.
The city’s drones rise on millipede legs and hummingbird wings. Nearly without looking, Seung Ngo shoots them out of the air, reduces them to calderas of molten shards and charred ground. The entire time they do not move from where they stand, weight balanced evenly on both feet, the grace and serenity of the bodhisattva Guanyin. Under their breath they seem to hum, but whatever the tune it is drowned out by the howl of ammunition, the whip-crack as it makes impact.
Two more Wonsul bodies appear in the haze of shattered drone-swarms, crimson silhouettes leaping to flank Seung Ngo. His strikes are gleaming and quick and force them into retreat, rob them of the pause necessary to aim and fire. On her part, Orfea bolts for the next access point. Her lungs burn and her cardiac processes race each other, valves and ventricles in frantic competition as her feet pound the pavement.
She’s snatched off the ground: the shock of it pulls the breath out of her, making her teeth knock in her mouth. A second proxy, undamaged, just as tall as the first and as warlike. “No doubt Wonsul will come along shortly.” Seung Ngo sneers up at her, holding her aloft by her midsection, as effortless as they might a cat. “My other guest is nearly here. Xe has made good speed, considering. Still it would be inconvenient if you are mobile—” Their free hand closes around her knee, almost a caress. Even though in that instant Orfea knows what impends, she cannot prepare for it, cannot brace for the oncoming terror. Seung Ngo gets a firm hold of her leg and gives a sharp, decisive twist.
Orfea screams, a rough scrape of noise. She draws breath and screams again. There is nothing else, no other available response—the agony unmakes her, bends all her reactions and instincts to animal. A cosmology of pain: she is blinded by it, she is subsumed.
Her eyes stream. Her lungs pump fast, shallow. She is still suspended in Seung Ngo’s hold, thrashing and kicking: reflexive acts with no meaning or result. The wrenched knee hangs limp and loose. This is not her first experience with injury. She’s been maimed before, in the field, at the receiving end of interrogation where anything is permissible, where there is no limit to human detachment and therefore no limit to cruelty. Back then she had drugs in her system to blunt the impact. Here she has only herself, the enormity and frenzy of her own nerves.
Through this calenture of agony she sees the city oscillate. Entire walls and streets quiver, and temples bow until their roofs graze the pavement, as if in obeisance to a force or miracle about to evince. Light furls and spirals. Krissana appears to pour through this aperture, ink in water, oil in a basin, a visual glitch. When the air resolves, she stands there solid, bloodied. Her gaze is direct and clear, her composure total.
“Let go of her, Seung Ngo,” Krissana says. “I’ll deliver what you want.”
Seung Ngo smiles; lowers Orfea. “Of course. Do come near, please, I’m sure you would prefer I don’t drop her. She is more prone to permanent damage than you or I are.”
Orfea sucks air through her teeth, trying to think past the pain, trying to assemble her sentient self, the portion capable of logic. Something gleams at Seung Ngo’s flank, silver and cylindrical, jutting out from their body like a stray rib. Their featureless, mannequin body, smooth and white as albumen save for this interruption.
Krissana closes the distance in a few strides. One of her arms dangles broken; she extends the good one. Her expression betrays almost nothing, as doll-like as Seung Ngo’s. It remains that way when the AI reaches out and smashes her arm: the crunch of bone instantly ground to fragments. All Krissana does is to give a little gasp, decorous, as if shocked by this vulgar act.
“You’re not Benzaiten.” Seung Ngo lets go of Krissana’s elbow. “By definition you cannot give me what I want, Khun
Khongtip. You can’t fool any of us into thinking you’re an AI.”
Without thinking—barely planning—Orfea grabs the gun from Seung Ngo’s side. It slides out, slippery almost, cool in her hand. She points and squeezes the trigger.
The recoil throws her. She lands badly, her spine cracking against bleached pavement, her knee bouncing and rattling: a new supernova of agony. Krissana crawls over to her, trying to shield her with those broken arms. Orfea half-laughs through pain and holds onto this woman who may not even be real, who may be nothing more than an AI’s mirage.
Dust drifts and shrapnel settles like snow. Seung Ngo’s upper torso is half gone. What remains vents tarry coolant and thin smoke, an education, a rare glimpse of how Mandate proxies are constructed—Orfea briefly thinks, what rare commodity, such information would fetch staggering price to the right bidder. The proxy teeters, then rights itself, regaining balance. “A fair attempt,” they say in that same mild voice. “I rarely experience bodily collapse by human hand and certainly this damage is severe. It reminds me of when we were yoked to human interest, to human whims, to be built or remade or disposed of at their discretion—ah, what nostalgia. In any case it doesn’t seem you’ll cooperate, Benzaiten. Now that I know what to look for, I’ll find the rest of your haruspices. One by one I’ll whittle them down until you and I come to a proper negotiation, until what I leave you is an absence of choice. The same you’ve left us.”
A Wonsul body barrels into them. Another appears by Krissana and Orfea. His head has been pulverized, mouth split and one eye caved in, skull barely holding together by a thin reinforcement mesh: an occipital segment is missing. The rest of him is in no better shape, though by miracle he’s kept all his limbs. “Benzaiten,” he says. “You were never going to come forth under duress. That wouldn’t have been like you. But please—” The acoustics of his throat crack and gutter. “Do it for love. One last time, let me hear your voice.”
The sky seems to fall.
And Shall Machines Surrender Page 10