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

As close to a firsthand account as I can get. I content myself with that.

We turn to business. Daji looks through the overrides I appropriated from Ostrich: several instances of Bulwark, one of Locust and one of Assembly, none of Fortress. She grimaces. “In every round, there’s only a small number of Fortress commands—you’ll see why—and Houyi or Chun Hyang must’ve hoarded most of those. Makes me suspect they have disclosed to their duelists what they shouldn’t have, but . . . ”

“What penalties are there for cheating?”

“Disqualification. And don’t you dare touch Locust.” She makes a frustrated noise. “No, they could’ve just told their duelists this function is important. By the way, I’m surprised you didn’t kill Ostrich.”

“I’m no sadist.” And I pitied him, in the end.

“Well, he’s not going to shake down Ouru or—the other one for overrides. As for Ensine Balaskas, I want to absolutely destroy her. I’m going to tear out her guts and pulverize her spine. No compromising on that.”

“Naturally not.”

Before I check in on Ouru, I bring up zer wish with Daji, who says she’ll consider vouching for zer haruspex candidacy—”I’m not the one who makes those decisions,” Daji adds, “but as far as my good word means something, why not?”

When I relay that to Ouru, ze concedes it’s as good as ze will get outside of actually winning the Divide. We are, then, allies against Ensine Balaskas, however long such an arrangement can last.

Recadat watches her lover kill. The first time, as they say, is the hardest; by now it is far from the first. They are much more efficient than she is, and much more interested in the minutiae. To them the intricacy of human anatomy is a captivating study, material for the canvas that is the Divide. Here they stress-test the durability of the parietal bone; there they record the tensile strength of cartilage. They compare and contrast the trajectory and force of blood when it exits from the stomach, when it exits the chest cavity, or when it exits a femoral artery. Every mundane detail fascinates her lover. Technique, instrument, outcome. Little experiments.

She lies in the dark. Her lover is far away; her lover is here beside her. What she watches is at a distance. This way none of the blood reaches her, none of the flaying and the flensing. She can remain immaculate, wedded to the purity of her objective. The duelist count is an abstract number as it drops.

They’ve been rutting through the kills. Her orgasms crested with each death.

“Did you know,” her lover says, caressing her back, “that in ancient times primitive heuristics had difficulty distinguishing different human noises? Pain or pleasure, torture or copulation, all of it would have seemed identical. Quickened breathing was not so easy to tell apart.”

Slowly she inhales. Counts the entry and exit of air from her lungs. The world is reduced to simplicity. She knows that if her lover begins again she’ll be helpless; she will wrap her legs around their waist and beg. That part of her is animal and denying it is futile.

“Breaking a human body is easy. Finding the limits of that mortality is child’s play—indeed even human children can do it. Bending the mind though, that’s more complex and takes longer. Conditioning, indoctrination, whatever the method. You need patience and finesse to change a person’s essential nature, to warp and upend their beliefs.”

Recadat digs her nails into the sheets. “Haven’t you warped me enough?”

They chuckle, low, against her nape. “You? You remain as pure as new-made silicon, as lustrous as a fresh-captured void pearl. My beautiful thing, sublimated by her purposes. But let me tell you about how machines may mimic humans. Given enough data, any person—however complex, however contradictory—can be modeled and then emulated. In this way you can obtain the doppelganger of any person you like, and it’d behave indistinguishably from the genuine article.”

She stares up at the faceted ceiling. “I’d know it’s not the real thing.” She does not know, quite, where the conversation is heading. Or she knows but does not yet want to acknowledge it, to think of the direction and endpoint.

“Then another option can be offered. The genuine article, the very real thing, can be modified. Just slightly. An addition to the neural stack, a chip gently and surgically inserted that would take hold of the amygdala. Then a person would do anything you desire, their wants and preferences molded to match yours. What do you think of that?”

“That’s sick.” But her voice is soft, without conviction. The thought both nauseates and compels her. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”

Her lover pulls themself up, straddling her. “No? Very well then. Perhaps you think that once you and she return to Ayothaya together as the great saviors, she’ll begin to look at you differently. See you the way you want to be seen. Oh, how proximity will change the circumstances, the currents of what lies between you; how being celebrated together as heroes will cement your bond. Is that the case? Is it what you believe, my jewel?”

“If that happens, it’ll happen. If not, then it won’t.”

“Recadat, beautiful Recadat. You had the will to reach Septet and the resolve to come this far. Yet you’ll leave your heart’s desire to chance and her caprices? She may never change. You may never have what you want. She is a monogamist, isn’t she? What if already she loves another, has entwined herself with—”

“Stop it.” She wants to turn away, wants to shove them off her, wants to never seek their touch again. If she can give up Thannarat, can accept that her old partner and she have a common goal in Ayothaya’s liberation and thus that must suffice; if she can change who she is and forget their history. All of that and she’d be free. It should be easy. People are disappointed in love all the time, a small grievance, petty in the grand scheme