Shall Machines Divide the Earth by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (list of e readers txt) 📕

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