Shall Machines Divide the Earth

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  As soon as I emerge, I shoot almost without looking—I know the other duelist’s exact position. He topples over screaming, one knee shattered. I fire again and he turns quiet. The counter ticks down once more: fifteen.

  Ouru and Ensine Balaskas are the only known quantities here, and I have yet to encounter the latter. I still haven’t seen Ouru, and I’ve expended some scouts; they now cover much less ground. I send the ones remaining ahead of me. Recadat’s bots are a little more sluggish, hovering near the arena’s periphery.

  A different connection blinks on. You pilot these things well, Detective, for a human. A specialty?

  I have a minor affinity for machines. The path is clear for the next couple stairways; good enough. I thought our regalia aren’t meant to interfere or assist.

  Daji laughs in my ear, lover-close. I’m offering commentary, who’ll chastise me for that? My help doesn’t come so easily.

  Get too tart, I tell her, and when I return to the Vimana I’ll chastise you well enough. Because this is what she wants to hear, the expected retort in the script she’s set up between us. Her the petulant, flighty seductress in need of a firm hand.

  Oh, you know just what to say; I’ve picked the right duelist. But don’t let the thought of disciplining me distract you.

  A segment of my swarmbots extinguishes, but not before I catch the visual—Ouru. I don’t have enough scouts left to replace those, but I can now approximate zer location and trajectory. Not coming my way but moving to the center. Ze lacks my recon tools and, most likely, means to find a spot near the gazebo where ze can snipe down any approaching opponent.

  The child stumbles behind me. Hefting her up I put her on my back and say, “Hold onto me. Your legs too.” To my fortune, the child weighs no more than fifty kilos. Practically featherweight and my hands remain free. Still she adds bulk and disturbs my balance. Not my first time with a small person slung on my back, all the same. I keep up my pace, staying beneath the cover of foliage and slanted boulders.

  Recadat’s scouts spot a duelist sighting me down. I duck—the child slides off me; she’ll be safe enough on the ground—and return fire. Bullets ping off stone.

  Ouru chooses that moment to fry my swarmers, shutting down my view of the gazebo. I swear through my teeth, but I’ll soon be there—

  Daji’s roses blaze in the corner of my vision. Detective. Get out of there. Now.

  I don’t ask questions; she would not send a message like this without cause. I hoist the child into my arms and start running back the way I came. A shot cracks above me and another; one grazes my shoulder but I don’t slow down—the time for assessing damage will be later. For now the point is to have a later.

  My trajectory is not ideal. I stare down a crumbled walkway and take a running leap, landing on the other side more heavily than I’d like: the floor dents and the tiles creak.

  I’m clear of the arena, ninety meters out, when light lances down the sky. The orbital strike is surgical. The heat of it singes my cheeks and buffets my hair; when it is over afterimages strobe across my retinas.

  On the ground the child stirs and twitches. It is when her gaze clears and she starts screaming that I realize I have been carrying a flesh-and-blood creature, human and not an AI proxy after all. In the Divide module, the count of duelists has dropped to eleven.

  Wonsul’s Exegesis picked up the child before I departed Cadenza; her parents had agreed, evidently, to sacrifice her to the contest in exchange for accelerated entry into Shenzhen Sphere. So much for the nobility of parental love. Still, the girl’s alive; sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

  Unfortunately the overseer does not agree to hand me an override even if I’m the de facto winner. Recadat is safe, if shaken. Nothing quite like this has happened so far during this round of the Divide. She stayed behind in Cadenza to see if she can find out who engaged the Retribution command.

  The graze on my shoulder proves merely cosmetic, an unlovely scratch on artificial shell but nothing more, and I return to Libretto without incident.

  Once I’m in the Vimana suite I breathe more easily—it is a false illusion, but habit situates the human mind to regard a base, a temporary residence, as refuge. I toss my coat aside and settle down on a divan.

  Daji glides behind me, sliding cool hands onto my shoulders. “I can almost smell your adrenaline,” she says in my ear. “It’s piquant. Welcome home, Detective.”

  I inhale—Daji smells of roses and pomegranates. Olfactory emitters, customizable to any fragrance. From my pocket I bring out the box from the antique shop. “This is for you.”

  A rustle as she removes it from its paper lining. “Close your eyes.” I comply; after a few seconds she murmurs, “Now open them.”

  I do to the sight of Daji kneeling between my legs, dressed once more in that scantiness of pelts and petals. The fire opal gleams between her collarbones, embedded into her chassis. It looks right at home, complementing the shades of her flower-and-fox raiment. She has placed one of her hands on my thigh. Her other holds a prosthesis—mine; she must’ve been cataloguing the contents of my suitcase.

  “Let me,” she says, “take care of you.”

  My breath hitches. She is right that I’m still fresh from the fight, blood coursing with the near-miss of that orbital strike. To narrowly escape your mortality gives quick spice to the libido, and this would be such an easy way to extinguish those inconvenient embers I carry for Recadat. “You’re a proxy.”

  “That does not mean I lack. Quite the opposite. In me you’ll find all that you need, my duelist.” She leans a little closer. “I’ve been so patient. Should I not be rewarded a little? Should you not indulge yourself so your humors will be soothed, your hungers sated? Then you’ll be ready for the rest. The Divide is a taxing campaign.”

  “And duelist and regalia should be wedded in intent and action, so I have heard.” A split second’s decision that I may later regret. For the moment I can only think of how soft her skin looks, how voluptuous she is, the banquet offered by her breasts. Those indentations of clavicles framing the fire opal. I take off one glove and cup her face, running my thumb along jawline and then earlobe. Utterly authentic. I’d never know I am with a machine.

  Daji grins, her teeth showing sharp and fine and ravenous. She unbuckles my belt then replaces it with the harness that secures the prosthesis to me. I activate the module associated with it, the sensory array that joins my nervous system to the device: a thick length of supple material, done in oxblood. Once it is affixed and online, it rests between my legs, soft.

  Her fingers graze slowly along the shaft, stroking, teasing. It stiffens. “Sensitive,” she says. “This responds to your arousal, doesn’t it? Most appliances of this category are more . . . static.”

  I rub my thumb against her lips. Feels, briefly, the tips of her incisors. Little needlepoints. “This stays hard as long as I have the will.”

  “A lovely function.” Her hand encircles the device, taking hold, running up and down: exploring its contours, its dimensions. She breathes onto its tip. Her tongue darts out, but does not touch. “How virile you are, Detective.”

  My nipples are hard, painful points. Hers too—what she wears does not cover much, though for the moment it gives modesty to her lower half. Her skull feels delicate in my palm, avian, made for a creature of aerodynamics and endless expanses. “Enough talking, Daji. Show me what you’re made for.”

  She places her hands on my thighs and takes the length between her lips, nearly all of it at once. An impossible feat for most human partners, the piece being considerable in dimensions—her mouth is endlessly capacious. She works the prosthesis as though it is her favorite instrument, her attention a thing of arias and complex maneuvers. My breathing serrates as her teeth put pressure on the most sensitive points. My vision brightens. I dig my fingers into her scalp and can tell from her quickened pace that this is exactly what she likes, how she wants to be handled, the fulcrum of her desire. Machine, yes. N
ot without her preferences, all the same.

  It doesn’t take long before I convulse and fill her mouth with a substance the color and consistency of thick wine. Daji swallows it all, lapping it up as though it’s the most precious liquor this side of the galaxy.

  “The profile of good sangria,” she says. “Your taste is good and you taste excellent.”

  I exhale. “We’re far from done.”

  “Yes, I can tell, this is still hard—”

  While I may be no judge of AIs, I am a good judge of women. So I am confident when I yank her up by the hair, close one hand around her throat, and growl, “You do like it rough, don’t you.”

  Her eyelashes beat rapidly. Part black, part gold. Subtly dichroic. “This you call rough, Detective?”

  I use her neck as a handhold to drag her to her feet and fling her onto the bed: enough force to knock the wind out of her, if she was a non-augmented human. She lies very still, her hands flat against the cerise sheets that bunch and crease around her like stricken lilies.

  “I can accommodate any desire,” Daji purrs, her eyes brilliant. “In the most literal sense. My anatomy—it can be anything you want.”

  “Give me a cunt,” I say, pulling off the pelt that covers her waist and hip.

  What appears at first blank—mannequin neutrality—shifts and reflows, rearranging itself into that familiar part, one of my favorite sights on a partner. I should be unsettled; instead this thrills me, the strangeness of it, the display of machine finesse. She’s given herself the gorgeous folds of labia, the unmistakable clitoral nub as hard as a pearl. Comprehensive in detail, a locus where basal urges intersect. I can smell her heat, her salt.

  My left hand on the back of her neck. My right on her wrist, wrenching it so far back that on a human her elbow might have snapped or dislocated. But she’s strong, a body of numinous might, impossible for me to damage. Daji is a canvas that will never tear no matter the force of the pen, the searing of the ink.

  I lower myself and push into her with the most minimal of resistance. She is slick, a furnace, far hotter than her mouth. Her inside caresses my prosthesis, nearly as dexterous as her fingers. The world tunnels down to sensation, to the motions of her juddering like a rag doll beneath me, to the bed shaking under us like tectonic prayer. Several times I fill her, flip her over, fill her again.

  When I withdraw from her I am panting, my limbic architecture sundered by the song of her, my mind reconstituting piece by piece. She levers herself up, meeting my eyes, flushed. Her lower lip is swollen and bleeding—she must have bitten it.

  “If we had unlimited time,” I whisper, “I’d be fucking your mouth again.”

  There is no airiness in her laugh: it is deep, smoky, onyx and oodh. “We do have a lot of time. Not unlimited though; who has eternity? Not even the Mandate itself. You were wonderfully rough. A human would be incredibly sore right about now, but I’m not one of those, so we are a most perfect match.” Her hand slides up my thigh, to the silk shirt which has come loose and gaping. “The whole of you makes an interesting artistic perspective from down here. Every square millimeter of you is so pleasing.”

  I drop to the bed; we lie facing each other. My own cunt is engorged, sensitive. “Do you often do this?” I fit my hand into her lumbar curve, half-expecting to find it gone to metal and silicon. But it stays flesh-like, deceptively organic. A few roses susurrate under my fingers.

  “Do what? Have a good time?” Daji rubs the base of the prosthesis. My nervous system rings staccato with each touch. “Tell me, Detective. Does the fact I’m a proxy add to the appeal? Do you find the synthetic fascinating, the alloyed skin more alluring than skin that is not?”

  “You’re well aware that your chosen looks are breathtaking. A woman hardly needs to have such . . . specific predilections to want to push you up against the wall and make you scream.” I pinch one bare breast. She arches into me, as reactive as a taut wire. “But perhaps.”

  Her lips purse on the thumb of my free hand. She talks around it as she might around a cigarette. “I can tell a fetish when I see it—the alacrity of your orgasms. The vigor. Not that I mind; some humans are ashamed of wanting a proxy and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.”

  “So you’ve tried other humans before.”

  “Possessive,” she says, pleased. “It’s just that I don’t enjoy intercourse between my own kind, whereas what we just did together? That’s exactly what I crave. Exquisite. Addictive. And you’re so honest about your wants.”

  I run my nail over her jaw; I suspect that even if I try to break skin, I would leave no marks, or no marks that won’t heal within minutes. My thumb reaches the choker around her throat. I pull. The choker snaps. Beneath it, her throat is a vision. “Is your preference common among AIs?”

  “Not at all, though most of my peers don’t care who I choose to pursue. A few are prudes and would tell you I’m sick. Why, does it bother you that you just fucked a machine pervert?”

  “Hardly. You and I are both perverts.” I kiss the back of her hand, repeating that gesture that sealed our pact. “I assume Wonsul didn’t take issue with you giving me a warning. Seeing that you were able to monitor overrides.”

  “Retribution is a rather blatant command. A human could’ve seen an oncoming orbital strike with the naked eye. Wonsul cannot fault me for using my optics.”

  Except she warned me well before it landed. The Retribution armament, being Mandate equipment, would be cutting-edge. There would have been no telltale prelude to a discharge, and certainly not that far ahead. “How much is a regalia supposed to see into the Divide system?”

  “Walls are permeable things. For any destination there are a hundred thousand roads to it. Every rule is made to be bent. That’s how the game is played.” Daji taps my nose. “Now, the real reason you joined the Court of Divide.”

  Sex where I don’t need to hold back has a strange effect on me. The aftermath of it wildly varies; for intimacy to be its immediate consequence is rare. I might tell her anything. “I came from Ayothaya.” Her weight shifts on the mattress as she twines herself closer to me, one thigh slipping between mine. As if she can’t get enough of me, or a good pretense of such. “My life there was unremarkable—I worked as a detective with public security and went freelance after I realized the force inflicted violence to the guiltless more than it prevented. Not because I’m some altruist. I dislike senselessness.”

  “When we shear the world in half, we demarcate with great precision: those who wield themselves like a knife and those who wield themselves like a whip.” She nods.“This is an inexact quote—it comes from a meditation on violence, a text one of my duelists liked. You belong to the taxonomy of the blade; violence may excite you, but you don’t strike indiscriminately.”

  My mouth quirks. “I don’t know about that. In any case, I could find all the thrill I wanted working for myself and did well enough at it to prosper. During all this I had a wife, and our marriage . . . There was a gulf that kept widening until we could no longer bridge the difference. It wasn’t the nature of my job—that never bothered her. But she felt I lacked . . . that I couldn’t show properly that I loved her, to the point she couldn’t tell if I loved her at all.”

  Her hand slips under my shirt and comes to rest on a breast. One of her roses caresses my stomach; I was right that they’re part of her, appendages as mobile as her fingers. “I disagree. You’re perfectly good at showing how you feel.”

  “No, Eurydice had the right of it. I was a fool. And then she caught wind of the haruspex initiative.” Haruspices: the composites that live on Shenzhen Sphere, sacred cyborgs who are half human and half AI—two beings, one body. “She had a lifelong fascination with machines; we had that in common. Once the haruspex initiative opened to outside applicants, she divorced me and left for Shenzhen.”

  “Heartless,” Daji whispers.

  “She did what was right for herself. I was—” Disconsolate, because I was selfish; because I wanted
things to continue as they were, comfortable for me and unbearable for her. “A few years later, I was contacted by the Mandate. Their representative let me know that Eurydice had listed me as her next of kin and that the haruspex process had failed. That nothing of her was left except a copy of her neural stacks and genetic information. The day after, a queen’s ransom materialized in my account. I was going to send it back, but it turned out there was no source. The money just showed up as though it’d always been there, as though that was any kind of compensation. The Mandate didn’t respond to my demands for Eurydice’s data. I never heard from an AI again.”

  “Until you met Benzaiten?”

  “The Hellenes decimated our military, executed our commanders and ministers, and charred a good amount of our infrastructure. There’s a Hellenic governor installed there now, sitting in our capital. Citizens are interdicted from leaving—I got out because I had the means and the contacts and the wealth. Most didn’t.” My mouth twitches. Not exactly a smile, more a rictus. “Benzaiten came to me while I was on a ship, bound for nowhere important. Xe told me about Septet, knowing that I’d be motivated to enter the Divide either way—by the invasion or by the . . . by what happened to my ex-wife. Why xe singled me out I wouldn’t begin to guess. Some machine caprice.”

  Daji drums her fingertips on my nipple. Her roses tickle my ribcage. “I’m a machine and I’m capricious, so I shouldn’t take offense. Well, which is it? The Hellenes or your ex-wife?”

  “Eurydice,” I say at once. For so long I’ve mourned her. Grief is an irrevocable beast: it can eat and eat until the meat and gristle are cleaned from the bones, and then it’ll crush the bones and swallow them down. I’ve fought it for years. I intend to conquer it at last.

  She stiffens. “You’re a woman motivated by passion above all. I shouldn’t be surprised. The subjugation of your homeworld doesn’t offend you?”

  “It does. Who knows—before the end I may change my mind.” Recadat’s idealism against my self-interest.

  “If you choose war, Detective, I’ll personally accompany you to Ayothaya and settle the score. A whole warship of me. Their troops will fall before me like walls of dust.”