“I take it you didn’t account for this when you helped invent the haruspex tech.”
Xe puts one white hand on an obsidian hip, inasmuch as the proxy has a pelvis. “I didn’t help. I invented the entire thing. In any case, it took them this long to merge with the leviathan because they had to make changes subtly, weave themselves into the world-beast a little at a time. Otherwise during those rare times Vishnu’s Leviathan entered real space and went online, Seung Ngo’s signature would show up on outbound signals. I’d have found out. The rest of the Mandate would have found out, and Seung Ngo wanted to keep this quiet even from Shenzhen. I’d say they met Erisant some time after you defeated the Seven-Sung and conspired together. To keep their footprint small, Seung Ngo boarded the leviathan with just one proxy, isolated from the rest of themselves—it has a built-in core, so essentially what’s here is a distinct Seung Ngo instance.”
“And you,” Anoushka says, “when did you board this place?”
“At some point.” Xe makes a noncommittal gesture with a gaunt hand. “The timeline’s not that important. Regardless, Seung Ngo’s impediments give us some time. Now, if you could illuminate one point for me . . . Seung Ngo began this scheme well before the sabotage; they probably caused it, actually. But where did Erisant or Seung Ngo obtain the bioaccesses that let them carry out all this? I was under the impression Queen Nirupa guarded them like they were her own vital organs.”
She leans against one of the cracked treatment tanks. Her overlays attempt to analyze the composition of the proxy, getting as far as suggesting a few rare alloys but not much further. “Being what you are, you’ve never felt contempt for your physical embodiments, any of them. Do you imagine Krissana does for the body you created for her?”
“Not as far as I know,” xe says blandly and holds out one insectoid limb, displaying the smooth line of it, the poreless integument. “Oh, fine, she didn’t like it much when she was little, the haruspex implants weren’t mature then and caused a few issues here and there. Motor control, the occasional gastrointestinal distress and pituitary mishaps, nothing worth noting. Might be why she went to Shenzhen to begin with. She’s since had her telomeres extended and extra pairs of tumor-suppressing genes spliced in, she should be perfectly content now.”
Anoushka thinks of Savita, whose body is ordinary enough. But it is a body that the princess has likely never hated, one that she has never needed to transfigure from the ground up. “I was born on the leviathan. You know that. But you wouldn’t grasp the extent of how I was not, on this world-beast, thought of as a person.” Once she starts it is easy to continue, even though this is not ideal: she should be revealing this to Numadesi, the jewel that lies closest to her heart. “Not far from this chamber is the hall where servants are birthed. Royalty and citizens come out of normal womb-tanks, fetuses enhanced with the advantages their parents can afford. Those like me were cloned, equipped with extrasensory organs that let us act as the leviathan’s tools for repairing and cleaning itself. In the beast’s belly, down there, that was where I spent the first years of my sapience.”
The AI’s feet click against the filthy floor. “That part I’ve also been curious about. I thought the ventral servants weren’t made for intelligence.”
“I was part of a test batch. They wanted to see if they could improve the workflow if we were more . . . sentient.” Her tone is dry, nearly without emotion. “But normally, yes, it’s considered less cruel to beat them and treat them like cattle if they can’t hold complicated thoughts, or have reactions more sophisticated than pain and panic.”
“Then you escaped.”
“Security was lax because it was designed to deal with, essentially, human-shaped symbiotes. For that you require only blocked-off paths, the occasional electric shocks. We banded together and hid the extent of our intelligence. We found a way, not that it was easy. I’d say one out of five among us survived and made it to the escape pods. Vishnu’s Leviathan was in real space more those days.” The rest she does not elaborate: the years she spent in hard labor, taking on any work that would give her enough for surgery. One body mod, two body mods, and then the chain of accidents that gained her the attention of an Amaryllis recruitment officer. Her life began to unspool like silk after that. How easy it was to rise through the ranks, compared to toiling in the leviathan’s belly. She was a quick study: she learned about fulcrums and leverage, in people and in battle. She learned how to make an instrument of violence, how to strum it, stroke it, bring it to heel.
“Well,” Benzaiten murmurs, “you’re being very forthright and detailed about all this.”
Like lancing a suppurative wound. “Keeping it to myself gave it undue power. Besides, I don’t think you’ll be spilling it to tabloid networks. You’re too distinguished for such triviality.”
Xer smile is a crescent slit in the glossy, immobile face. Quick to appear, quicker to disappear into the smoothness of the mask. “I’m very good at keeping secrets. Now the bad news. The leviathan entered a relay three minutes and twelve seconds ago, which has cut us off again, and it means I’m separate from the rest of myself. That’s fine—I’m used to it, and my processing capacity is more potent than Seung Ngo’s. This isn’t a boast but an objective fact. Next, your Lieutenant Xuejiao, or rather Captain Erisant, is currently in a reconstruction cradle and so out of the game for—I’d say another hour? What you did to em was quite effective. Your knife intrigues me.”
“We have issues more pressing than my knife. Is the beast’s secondary heart fortified? If not I could capture it and hold it hostage; not as good as its primary but still vital.”
“Spoilsport.” Benzaiten projects a cross-section schematic of the decks, taps on one with a needlepoint finger. “This is where we are, and this is the leviathan’s heart. Seung Ngo could be there or they could be near the brain. They’re rushing their haruspex integration and the stimuli received by the leviathan don’t have equivalents in what we’re used to, I reckon it’s quite queasy, so I’ve been carpeting several decks with little nanite flocks to aggravate the symbiotes into sending nonstop distress signals. If the leviathan were sentient and a willing haruspex partner, it’d just turn off those sensory channels, but since it’s mindless I’m attacking with what amounts to a distributed denial of service. Seung Ngo will overcome it eventually—and will be able to manipulate the bioaccesses—but this will slow them down.”
Anoushka eyes the revolving hologram. “Can you destroy them?”
“Do I have the capability? The odds are not terrible. Can I destroy them without violating Mandate etiquette? That’s a dicier proposition. But then this is just an instance of Seung Ngo, and not an acknowledged one at that. The same holds true for me, so in the most technical sense neither their instance nor mine exists. Thus we can wreak havoc as we please on one another.” Benzaiten stretches out xer lower body, where seams in xer thorax split and limbs emerge like strange polyps. The parthenogenesis completes in minutes, leaving two Benzaiten proxies standing side by side. The original as tall as before, the disgorged addition barely two meters.
“I’ll leave one of these here to watch over the princess and relay to her anything that needs doing.” Xer smaller proxy turns to the physician’s office. “Her bioaccesses should remain a thorn in your enemy’s side.”
“It seems simple enough,” Anoushka says, “if as you claim Seung Ngo inhabits only this one proxy. Destroy that and this will be over.”
“Probably, unless theirs also multiplies. That’s a joke, I should be the only AI with this kind of nesting-doll proxies; they’re tricky to deploy.” Xe chortles, a metallic noise of small whirring blades. “Alternatively Seung Ngo has succeeded in incorporating the world-beast, in which case their proxy won’t matter and we’ll have to kill the leviathan itself to get rid of them. I hope the larvae are safe, at least, I’d hate to try and recreate the process on my own. It might take me an entire decade and who has the patience?”
“I don’t suppose you ha
ve a proposition better than confronting Seung Ngo.” Anoushka breaks a segment off the hologram—the particulate light shivers, oddly gelatinous—and turns it over in her hand. “Like capturing the digital network and ejecting them.”
“I’m no dispenser of miracles, Admiral. They have had a long time to make the leviathan theirs.”
She tightens her hand on the piece of projection. It fragments to shards and dissipates. “But I do believe in miracles, Benzaiten. They come from within, tempered within the foundry of the soul. Still we do need to put in the work, so it’s best we get started.”
This far down in the belly, the ceiling is low and the passages asymmetrical. The ground sucks at her feet, elastic and wet. This is the place the royalty never sees; even the overseers rarely come down here. A certain class of servants perform most of the supervision, a rung above the ventral menials but not by much. Anoushka half-expects to see them here—she doubts they’ve been given the order to evacuate or the space to shelter—but she finds the area empty, quiet save for the leviathan’s breath.
Benzaiten has to hunch, tucking xer body in, as they proceed downward. Separation between decks becomes more porous here; the low levels are looped and doubled onto themselves, laid out like an arrangement of guts. The temperature is higher and the air smells closer, a miasma that filled Anoushka’s lungs for years. At that point her concept of timekeeping was rudimentary and she comprehended it only in work shifts, in the levels of her own fatigue. She now knows that against the scale of life she’s led since, the leviathan’s belly accounted for a mere fraction: she belongs in the sun, that brief phase merely the dark of the chrysalis.
A low, wasp-like buzz. Anoushka’s sensors delineate shapes darting from the far end of the intestinal path—whirring wings and serrated proboscides—and she readies herself to meet them. Benzaiten is faster. Xer jaw unhinges: xer mouth yawns wide and xe swallows the oncoming drones whole. Xer other legs intercept more, plucking them out of the air and dashing them against each other. They break like ripe fruits.
Go, Admiral. Benzaiten rears up: more limbs unfurl and bifurcate, spearing through the drone swarm. Leave Seung Ngo to me. I’ll see if I can’t disable their link to their own proxy.
Down the passage, she hears a cry. In pain a voice is leached of specificity—screams of agony sound all the same. But this one she recognizes because it is not so unlike what her own used to be, once.
She turns a corner. Her foot meets something liquid. Her eyes fall on a body. One of the ventral-deck servants, dressed not in the kurta of their station but in a glittering robe that might have been owned by Nirupa. Their breath is wet and clotted with their own blood, their lungs drowning. There is nothing she can do for them.
In five meters, another corpse. Another servant, another body with the telltale face of a ventral servant. Several iterations removed from hers but there are still similarities to the features that once draped across her skull like a mask. This one lies folded neatly, spine snapped in half as though their bones were a kite’s, all brittle wood. Next a servant clad in a silver gown—Rajathi’s perhaps—lying spread-eagled, gutted in the way of butchered livestock: entrails and kidney a thick, rich skirt. She goes on. A servant propped against the wall, head lolling out of alignment and neck completely wrung.
It is a message. It is a taunt.
A thin trembling membrane blocks her path. She slices through with her knife; it gives as easily as rice paper.
Unlike the gut-corridor, this place is well lit. It is not where the cerebral core of the leviathan rests—that is much higher, under the keeping and watchful eye of the ruling monarch. But this is the counterpart, a chamber whose size she once thought impossible to measure, one that she could have believed signified the leviathan’s godhood. The ceiling is high, the walls writhing with cilia.
Overhead the leviathan’s secondary heart palpitates, a composite of alloy cage, howling ventricles and gigantic valves. Black fluids move through aegis-membraned arteries, seeking their receptive sites. A furnace organ that knows only how to burn, an apparatus of dumb purpose. It is cantilevered in place, supported from below by a column of complex engineering. At the base, Queen Nirupa sits huddling. Neither Erisant or Seung Ngo is anywhere in sight. Anoushka scans the area but her sensors catch nothing unusual, even when she looks for nonorganic signals that would indicate the presence of drones or proxies. Everything around her, and everything readable to her overlays, is entirely mortal.
The queen is unscathed. She does not react as Anoushka approaches.
“Your Majesty.” No response. “I don’t imagine you would remember me, from before I took this title and assumed my post.”
The queen looks up at her, soundless and wordless, expression flat. Her head twitches, side to side. The black of her eyes seems enormous, as blank as a bird’s.
“I don’t imagine you take note, or believe that your servants—dorsal or ventral deck—have much of an inner life. A few of them you name, I remember, a rare privilege and favor. But down here, they don’t have names, do they? Just batch codes and registry signifiers. You don’t need to speak to them or see them. Given all that, is it any wonder you hardly think of your servants as human? Far more they resemble the workers of a hive, unthinking, devoted to their labors.” She looms over the queen, who continues to stare and stare. In a moment she can reach out, close her hands around the monarchic throat, and exert her strength. The strength of this body, which she has refined and honed over the century. “Do you remember that a ventral-deck batch escaped?”
Nirupa gives the slightest nod. Sweat beads above her upper lip, dripping over her mouth.
“I won’t bore you with the details. But I was one of those.” Anoushka bends, not far, and grabs Nirupa’s shoulders. She forces the queen to her feet—the woman is rigid, her breath coming fast. “I just want you to know where I stand, Your Majesty. I give you the choice; do you prefer asphyxiation or a bullet?”
The queen shudders and her mouth pulls back into a too-wide sneer. “Well now,” she says, the voice hers but the tone all wrong, “I had a hunch after we boarded this place, but would never have thought it could be true. The Alabaster Admiral, once a bred clone in Vishnu’s Leviathan, the most abject of abject. Who could have imagined? Much obliged, my commander, for this confirmation. So you came here for revenge—now we have common ground, wouldn’t you say? Small wonder we got along so well.”
Anoushka lets go. The queen folds like a cheap puppet. “Erisant. You had Seung Ngo reverse-engineer their leviathan implants.” And through that took over Nirupa’s body, at least speech centers and motor control. Not well, to judge by the tremors in Nirupa’s facial muscles. But successful. It should be impossible.
“Isn’t it amazing what one can do, given enough innovation and drive? The royalty, they trust their leviathan so much.” Ey laughs with Nirupa’s mouth. The sound is that of death throes, the final pneumonic coughs. “I fear I have robbed you of your satisfaction, commander. Nirupa’s limbic system is currently preoccupied. She’s in no shape to appreciate the irony of an escaped slave coming back to destroy her. Tell me again, were you truly one of those? Those pitiful things. They’re hardly human. When I finish my business here, I’ll make it known that the great Alabaster Admiral—that this conquering war god, feared across the universe—began life as a slave.”
“I think you have more urgent concerns. Seung Ngo is in contravention of the treaty between the Mandate and humanity, and now another AI has found them out. As soon as they can, they’re going to erase every trace of you and every piece of evidence that they have ever been aboard this leviathan.”
Nirupa’s lips stretch, a rictus, a wound. “Let me worry about that, beloved wife. You’re not leaving this beast alive.”
The queen lunges at her. She shoots the woman in the head.
There is no time to savor the moment, to look at the woman she’s wanted to subjugate and destroy for so long, to know that she has realized that aim at last.
The ground roils, disgorging from its soft, wet folds a human tide. Each hole gapes, sanguine and pulsating. Thin liquid drools and puddles, speckling the footprints of each ventral servant as they rise.
A wall of faces that are too familiar, too close for comfort: those wide-set eyes, the shapeless jawline, the near-lipless mouth. But more than these features it is the rest that disgusted her so much, the protrusions along the shoulders, the pseudo-spines down the flanks—those sites of leviathan organs that joined her to the beast, its bonfire blood and its whorled meat. The things that made her an appendage of the world-beast and yoked her to Nirupa’s whims.
Anoushka does not give pause. There are many of them but they are only mannequins manipulated by an inexpert hand. She sights down and fires, sights down and fires again. Her vision tracks and logs the trajectory of each bullet: later she can even replay this, if she so wishes, and use the aiming data to optimize. They never come close to reaching her.
“You’re out of meat puppets, Erisant,” she says into the gurgling quiet. Leviathan tissue is writhing and reopening to absorb dead matter, even Nirupa’s. In the end the beast digests and regurgitates them without discrimination. Clothes, dermis, fat, bones. All will be made new.
The corpses sink. The leviathan is always hungry, always capacious. Soon the bodies are submerged entirely: they will be broken down, ferried to recycling stations, sorted into their classifications. Raw materials eventually result. In the conversion vats it will not matter that some of the components belonged to the queen.
A wall trembles. Fluid beads beneath the thin epidermis and the wall bursts, birthing a glistening throne-like tumor. It is raw and gray, wet with liquids: vitreous matter moving in sluggish flow, reabsorbed and then cycling out again. Erisant is welded both to tissue and the reconstruction cradle.
Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast Page 11