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

She bends to lap up the sweat on my abdomen. “Every part of you.” A graze of tongue, surprisingly rough. “I want to claim it, mark it. I want us to be a vow. I want to make it so that you’ll never forget me.”

As if I could possibly ever. I lick my lips and watch her as she cleans me like a fox. She straddles me and I expect her to lower herself onto the prosthesis, but instead she undoes the harness and moves the device aside. What presses against my thigh is not her previous configuration—it is a hard shaft, bluntly tipped. I reach down and feel the peculiar length of it; entirely unlike the flesh equivalent or even what I use.

“This way too,” she says. “Please?” The room smells of sweet roses and sweeter pomegranates.

“Yes.” I dig my nails into her back. “This once.”

It’s not often that I receive, and it’s been a while since I’ve been filled, but I’m wet and the angle is right. She glides in. For a time she does not move. Then her cock—this analogous configuration—undulates, the tip splitting into smaller appendages. Mobile as they seek clusters of nerves to thrum against, caressing defter and deeper than any finger could possibly have reached.

I pull her down until her breasts are flush against mine, gripping her hips, controlling the pace. We achieve a staccato rhythm, clasped like two rutting beasts.

“Yes.” She whimpers into my shoulder. “All of you. All of you.”

Pressure builds inside me, winding tight, tighter. “You’ll tell me after this.” My breath rasps. “Everything. Your truth—your secrets—”

“Because they’re yours by right. Every millimeter of me is yours to possess, inside and out.” Half-gasp, half-laugh. “You belong to me, and I belong to you . . . ”

We stay wrapped around each other, post-climax. Mine: I still can’t tell if she feels any, for all that she has arched against me, has shouted my name as though it is a battle cry. But as of now my brain doesn’t distinguish between the real and the artifice, is submerged in too much euphoric chemistry to care. Her head rests in the crook of my neck, her breath stirring my hair.

The belt has long been discarded. Only now do I notice that in my absence she’s changed the sheets from cerise to complex gold, tinted with turquoise. Somehow the details of the suite have fallen by the wayside. She’s been that consuming, that demanding.

“Tell me about Eurydice.” I say this the way I might ask about a stranger, about an unfamiliar axiom. Which perhaps she was—perhaps I never knew the woman I married. Not because she did not open the pages of herself to me but because I did not care to read closely, to pay attention to the glossary and annotations. To delve into and cherish the footnotes she made for me.

“The thing Ensine Balaskas was dragging around isn’t her. You know that already. It is just an empty puppet, a clone fast-tracked in a vat. No functioning cerebrum. The real thing . . . the real thing’s long gone. I would know, because I hold what remains of her.” Her eyelashes flutter against my jaw. “When we first met—when I was embedded into Eurydice—I teased her about her name, saying that it was like an AI’s. All mythological. She told me, quite seriously, that the story fit her well; that she thought her Orpheus would come reclaim her one day. But she didn’t say that for long. After a while she gave up on the idea. I thought you were a monster. Heartless. Because I loved Eurydice—she was my formative human; she was special. She’d tell me stories, some from Ayothaya, some of her own invention. I think—she wouldn’t say it, but she wanted a child to care for, and I was that for her.”

We never did agree on children. She wanted two; I wanted none. There wasn’t a middle ground to reach. “She divorced me before she left for Shenzhen.”

Daji makes a little huff. “When you courted her, you did it like a wolf chasing down prey. She loved that; she thought you’d pursue her to Shenzhen. Though if I were her, I wouldn’t have officially divorced you. Or I’d have sent you a letter hinting that I wanted reconciliation. She made imperfect choices.”

The release valve of coitus has done what it’s supposed to. I cannot maintain my bitterness, my ugly fury. “But after she died, you didn’t contact me either.”

“It took time for me to grow my own data arrays, since I wasn’t a haruspex long enough to develop those. I had to migrate to my own core, learn to pilot my own proxies. I was confused; I was angry that Eurydice chose me over herself, and then I was—angry at you.”

I look up at the ceiling, at the sculpted panels there arranged like a puzzle in need of ordering. Chaotic smattering of abstract bas reliefs, a maelstrom of bent geometry. I could reform it into a frictionless pane or a mirror, but I refrain. “She couldn’t have painted a flattering picture of me.”

“The opposite. She told me that she’d found the best and that was you, the best thing in the universe, the center of her universe. She talked about you like she was expecting you to show up any time. Told me what food you like and what you didn’t, your favorite liquors and ones you couldn’t stand. That on your wedding night you were uncontrollably virile and took her in every position—”

“That’s private.” I don’t embarrass easily, but I don’t usually count on Eurydice spilling our sex life to anyone.

“Oh, Detective, I’d have found out anyway. I didn’t get the chance to access her childhood memories, but her marriage with you was relatively recent; suffice to say that if there was anything to see, I’ve seen it. She loved her new life as a haruspex, but she talked and thought about you so much. That