Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (read me a book .TXT) 📕

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.

Ey wrenches emself free,