Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Numadesi titters at her most high-pitched. “Was that you, Ambassador? Indeed you appeared quite different—my pardon, you cannot expect humans to have memory as accurate as yours! My thoughts so often escape me, my lord frequently chides me for this penchant I have for daydreams. Yes, I think you were much shorter, plumper, a little more ordinary to look at, with black eyes? Is that a drift in fashion in Shenzhen, Ambassador? Oh, I love to hear about fashion. I spend all my time in the fleet, you see, I seldom get a chance to keep up with the latest trends, and by all accounts Shenzhen is the land of tastemakers.”

  Seung Ngo gives her a bland smile. “I’ll be happy to accommodate you once we’ve concluded our business. If you wish I can fabricate a wardrobe containing the most recent haute couture in Shenzhen, my vessel has the equipment. Where might the admiral be, if that is not classified?”

  She simpers. “I think that is classified? Yes, it is rather. But you can tell me what you require, Ambassador. I’m all ears, especially if you do deliver that wardrobe. Mine has become so dull, I just don’t have enough style templates to experiment with. My lord is most loving but she can be so negligent of such concerns, her tailoring is handsome yet not what you might call varied. And should I not look my best for her at all times?”

  “I recall,” the AI says, “that you’re vested with the authority to approve commission requests. What we need is a small escort from Shenzhen to Mahakala—quite a distance—and use of your relays.”

  “I have the authority.” Numadesi beams. “However, I must first consult my lord. Will you be able to wait eighteen hours or so?”

  “Eighteen hours seems an unusual communication lag, Lady Numadesi. Is she so far abroad?”

  “Possibly,” she says cheerfully, “and unlike you we must sleep; even my lord requires it. My constitution is much weaker than hers and I’ve had a long day—you must permit me a little rest. I’m so grateful for your patience, Ambassador.”

  Seung Ngo’s expression does not change. Both bodies are as still and straight as statues; neither has taken a seat. “May I wait here, then? And another, somewhat minor matter. Have you by chance met any Mandate constituent recently?”

  By simply watching her, Seung Ngo will know her denial for a lie: there is no point attempting to dissemble before an AI, but she can prevaricate. “It depends on your definition of recency, Ambassador.” Numadesi keeps her tone light. “We’ve been doing business with you for so long, decades, and in an AI’s eye decades are very recent. In that case my answer must be yes.”

  “Your dedication to specificity is admirable. I will await your convenience.” The AI cranes one of their heads sideway. “If I might ask, what do you think of relations between humans and AIs?”

  “They are what they are, aren’t they? Ideally of course we ought to all be friends.” She considers whether AIs could be provoked; whether they can be driven to irrational anger and so baited into making mistakes. “Speaking of relations, there are rumors that on Shenzhen Sphere, some AIs take human lovers—that seems incredulous, but social mores in such an elevated country must of necessity be . . . unorthodox. I don’t mean haruspices, I mean actual AI proxies engaging in intercourse with humans. Is there any truth to this?”

  Seung Ngo’s faces both turn toward her. “It is sordid hearsay—more so if you believe this normal practice in Shenzhen. Only perverts would agree to such conjugation.”

  “You mean human perverts, Ambassador?”

  “AIs,” they say, voice flat. “Don’t let me keep you from your repose, Lady Numadesi.”

  Numadesi beams at them again and drops into a tiny curtsy.

  For good measure she leaves instruction with the commander of Four of Razors on how to contain Seung Ngo, if that what it comes to. Anoushka maintains cordial relations with the Mandate—most polities and armies do—but she has invested resources into proofing Amaryllis systems against interference and infiltration, to varying results. Testing them out is close to impossible unless they create their own AI, but that crosses the treaty line and is difficult to keep secret.

  She makes her way back to the shuttle that will return her to Seven of Divide, running scans to double-check that all is as it should be. Fatigue tugs at her: it feels like a full week has passed since her lord’s departure, when in truth it has been merely days.

  The shuttle opens. She embarks and comes face to face with the muzzle of a gun. Slate gray, the solidity of it dominating her entire vision. Standard-issue, an Amaryllis pistol whose specifications she knows by heart: what ammunition it takes, its rate of fire, how to field-strip it.

  In an instant the pistol disappears. It falls and clatters; the person wielding it likewise drops as Benzaiten lets go of their throat. The soldier thumps against a passenger seat, neck neatly folded, larynx and bones crumpled.

  “We’ll have to move fast before Seung Ngo notices I am here.” Benzaiten nods at the body. “Let’s get this shuttle out, Lady Numadesi.”

  Her jaw is tight as she authenticates them out of the frigate. Once they pull free, she sets course for Seven of Divide, though already she has to contend with whether she’ll dock into an ambush.

  “Give me piloting access,” the AI says. “I’ll take you to a vessel of mine—it’s not far, this shuttle should see us through. Amaryllis ships mightn’t be safe for you right now, and the admiral’s going to be cross if I let you come to harm while I’m about. But don’t fret, Lady Numadesi. Anoushka just came online and I’m about to make contact with her as we speak. As it turns out, leaving a dormant proxy aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan was a fantastic idea. I hope you’ll all appreciate my foresight and accord me the adulation I’m due.”

  When Anoushka frees Savita from the containment cell, it is clear the princess has been weeping. Anoushka’s first response is contempt—how easily crisis undoes this woman, this sheltered child. She wants to grip the princess by the shoulders, shake her until her teeth rattle. Do you know what it is to be fed to a machine made of teeth? Do you know what it is to have lost a part of your heart? With difficulty she pushes down this urge, this displaced rage. There is no point in lashing out.

  “Princess.” Her voice is loud in the cramped confines. “Do you want to survive?”

  Savita wipes uselessly at her eyes. “What do you want now?”

  “You can force the leviathan into real space.”

  “Not from here I can’t.” The princess’ voice turns acrimonious. “I wish you’d never come. I wish my mother had never . . . ”

  Anoushka does not say that the queen is most likely dead. By this juncture Erisant—Erisant, not Xuejiao, she must mind the fact—would have no use for Nirupa, and would take steps to remove anyone with primary overrides to the leviathan. Savita would be next. “If wishes were starships, every person alive would command their own army. On your feet, princess. Captain Erisant of the Seven-Sung isn’t going to have much use for you from this point onward, and if you help me then I’ll do my best to keep you alive.”

  “Use,” Savita says bitterly. “That’s the only thing anyone can see in me. That I’m useful. That I’m providing a function.”

  “Seeing that your function is to eventually succeed your mother, it seems a luxurious fate rather than one to lament. I’m not going to repeat myself.”

  From the harrier’s storage she retrieves more weapons—devourer swarms, ammunition, an implosive gun, several grenades. After a moment’s deliberation she takes an extra suit of armor and tosses it at Savita. The rest she packs into a valise and hefts it up: slim and dense. Instruments of killing are heavy things.

  Her priority is egress. Unlike most ships of its size and class, One of Sunder can withstand lacunal pressure, but she requires bearings, orientation data with which to navigate. For that, Vishnu’s Leviathan needs to return to real space, even just for mere seconds. Then it will be a matter of destroying her docking berth and drilling her way out of the leviathan.

  The princess is less awkward putting on the armor than she
expected. They disembark from One of Sunder, her in the lead and keeping to the inorganic areas of the corridors. Savita insists Erisant hasn’t seized the digital network, which would make the trams and the rest a marginally safer option.

  “Ey came here five years ago, telling us ey could help us make new leviathans even if we didn’t have any AIs,” Savita says, her voice taut as she runs her hand over the unfamiliar plating, the nanite weave that has spread over her torso. “Just after the sabotage—come to think, ey probably caused that in the first place. I always cautioned my mother . . . ”

  “Five years ago?” Anoushka stops walking. “In person?”

  “In person. Ey’s been here since, as an unofficial guest.” Savita blinks at her. “Do you remember the person handling the swans by the lake? That was Erisant. Ey got cosmetic surgery, I suppose, so you wouldn’t have recognized em.”

  “That’s not possible.” Her stomach turns cold. Even if Erisant is one of the rare humans who can pilot multiple bodies, there would have been enormous latency between Vishnu’s Leviathan and where Amaryllis ships have been in the last five years. Xuejiao was often with Anoushka, or away on campaigns and wide-ranging operations. There was no way Erisant could have controlled both bodies. “This person you believe was Erisant. Did they appear to be lucid and conscious at all times? Able to speak and interact?”

  “Yes? Of course. Ey went about in public, as you saw, it’s just that most didn’t know who ey was. Only myself, my mother and my sister did. Why?”

  Benzaiten in Autumn did not come with her to Vishnu’s Leviathan. At the time she thought it odd but assumed xe did not want to risk the haruspex—Krissana’s body is an advanced cyborg but still primarily human, with the attendant organic vulnerability. But now there is another explanation, one that drastically alters the shape of the game: an AI who got here before Benzaiten did, an AI who could have easily seen through the human half and known the haruspex for what it is. And if that enemy AI infiltrated the leviathan years ago, years during which it hid and plotted on the world-beast, undetected by Benzaiten because Vishnu’s Leviathan spent most of its time in lacunal shifts . . .

  “Fuck.” Anoushka almost startles at her own profanity. She does not often swear: she has no reason to. Most things run according to her schedule; if they do not, she can usually make them. “That wasn’t Erisant. It’s an AI.”

  To her credit, Savita doesn’t waste time asking how Anoushka arrived at that conclusion. “Then it’d have taken over everything else. Nowhere would be safe.”

  “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

  As for why, she has a fair guess: like Benzaiten, this AI requires a human front, a pretext under which to act. Open hostility will bend all of humanity’s resources toward Shenzhen Sphere’s annihilation, whereas a dispute between the Amaryllis and Seven-Sung Fleet is routine—a race for profit between competing armies, destructive but unremarkable, Vishnu’s Leviathan merely another polity sacrificed to mercenary greed. She takes one more look at the public network. The guests’ accommodation appears to be under lockdown, and she judges that few or none have been harmed. The enemy AI will want to minimize casualties in case it ever comes to light that the Mandate had a hand here, and she can take advantage of that.

  On the guest network she broadcasts, This is the Alabaster Admiral of the Amaryllis. Vishnu’s Leviathan has been taken over by Captain Erisant of the Seven-Sung Fleet. I myself have no intention of harming Queen Nirupa or her guests. Should you find your way out of your quarters, the tram cars ought to remain safe for the moment and the docking area is clear.

  Her access cuts off, or else the entire guest’s subnetwork has been taken down. Surprising that it wasn’t made offline to begin with, but while such oversight is possible of Erisant—who is likely preoccupied—she doubts an AI would have missed this glaring error. Either it is inexperienced or limited in some way. Most likely the latter. Mandate AIs may be complex and powerful, but they are not omnipotent. She remembers that Benzaiten in Autumn was trapped and captured once—an AI instance disconnected from the greater Mandate can access only so much processing capacity. Their strength lies in the collective, in the grand sum.

  A muted metallic hiss is her sole warning. She grabs Savita and dives forward, hurling them both out of the path of the falling section barrier. It hits the floor in sync with its counterpart, trapping them in the corridor.

  Savita draws herself up from the floor and jerks a thumb at her collar. “Take this off me, Admiral. I should be able to do something about these doors.”

  “Possibly.” Anoushka opens her valise and produces a devourer array. She releases it from its long, slim tube. The glittering swarm descends on the barrier blocking their path. “I know the approximate location of the nearest control nexus, but that might have moved. How close are we?”

  The princess’ mouth is stiff. “Not far. It’s just before the tram.”

  Her thoughts dart back to Xuejiao. To Erisant. Ey would not be functional yet, if ever again. She imagines em hemorrhaging, going into shock; she imagines em in agony. But all she can see is Xuejiao.

  The swarm finishes chewing through the door. Savita feels her way over the wall and deactivates chameleon layers to reveal a service entrance. With her breath and touch she unlocks a membranous panel—a leviathan implant firing, letting the beast know I am a friend—and takes them into a tight cell that throbs with world-beast hum: an echo of its heart, far deeper beneath.

  The control nexus is a mound of tissue barely distinguishable from the rest of the cell. When Savita grazes it with her palm, it extends a stalk: strong and prehensile, muscular. This appendage forks, one end slipping into her ear, another slipping into a tertiary port tucked under her clavicle. Both would interact with neural and optical extensions, showing the princess a rudimentary interface and giving her a look into what the symbiote network has gathered from countless pairs of eyes—simple or compound, depending on the symbiote—and woven into a format compatible with the human brain.

  “It’ll take me a while,” Savita says, staying quite still, her eyes shut and twitching beneath the lids. The umbilici joining her to the nexus throbs. “We aren’t exiting via a relay, so we could be colliding with anything. A station. An asteroid. Some moon.”

  “We don’t have much time, princess. Vishnu’s Leviathan has survived so long exactly because it is able to calculate spatial relations between real and lacunal, so I trust you won’t bring us into a blackhole. Can it reenter lacunal space on its own or does it need a relay?”

  “It depends.”

  On the astronomic conditions, on the proximity to the nearest relays and the gravitational pressure they exert. That has not changed; Anoushka files that thought away—she would have expected that aspect of it to be iterated upon, improved, but the world-beast has organic limitations. Perhaps that is one of the upgrades that will go into the larvae, another reason Nirupa bred more than one. “The AI that told you it was Erisant, did it seem sound of mind? Rational?”

  “Yes. A little quiet but—please don’t distract me, Admiral.”

  She pulls up her harrier’s feeds. Its sensors reach no further than just outside its bay but she should have some idea if Nirupa’s other guests have successfully escaped their suites and reached the dock. Many will not, suspecting her message for a trap. Some will attempt it and that should keep the enemy AI from doing anything drastic, like destroying the bays or cutting off airflow. Her armor can double as an environmental sheath, but she’d rather not wade through toxic fumes or rely on a finite oxygen supply.

  “One more question,” she says. “Did the AI attempt to integrate into the leviathan? Did you notice any system irregularities in these last five years?”

  “Not that I could tell, but I’m not an engineer. What do you mean integrate?”

  “Nothing.” Yet the thought, once it’s latched on, will not leave her. A haruspex is the union between AI and human, but there’s no reason the organic half couldn’t be so
mething else. The leviathan is not sapient but its brain is huge in size, decently plastic. A human may take a decade or more to acclimate as a pre-haruspex, adjusting to the new neural stacks and preparing for the load of a second mind. Entire systems shifted, a limbic revision. But an AI wouldn’t need to be delicate with a leviathan, might only require five years to complete the change. And this would be a surefire method to commandeer both the present world-beast and any future ones. Benzaiten, for all xer guile, may have been too late. Far too late.

  “We emerge into real space in a hundred twenty-seven seconds,” Savita says, her head jerking slightly. “Accounting for margin errors.”

  Anoushka makes a guess at the computations required to make that judgment. Significant, especially given the network nullifier on Savita; the leviathan itself—she is fairly sure—doesn’t offer such assistance. “You’re much better at piloting the leviathan than most, aren’t you? A real affinity for it. That’s why you are the successor and not Rajathi.”

  “Mother’s love revolves around this particular talent, yes.” The princess gives a little laugh. “She’d have designated me the crown princess even if I were a complete sadist who has the servants drawn and quartered for entertainment, as long as I show aptitude with the leviathan.”

  “An aptitude your sister doesn’t share.”

  “Thirty-three seconds,” Savita says flatly.

  She keeps her own countdown. It ticks forward, both too fast and too slow for her liking. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten.

  Her overlays come online. A flood of information, messages and alerts and notifications, Amaryllis channels coruscating across her senses. She filters them out, tunneling down to priority communiques. Frantic messages from Numadesi. She reads them and replies with, I’m as safe as I can be, under the circumstances. Yes. Xuejiao turned on me—she was Erisant’s disguise. A moment’s pause before she composes the next part. If I don’t contact you within forty-eight hours, muster all available troops that you can trust and destroy Vishnu’s Leviathan. Track it through relays if you must. I want it in cinders.