Shall Machines Divide the Earth, Benjanun Sriduangkaew [large screen ebook reader .TXT] 📗

The decisive strike comes abruptly: a flash of red, fired seemingly from nowhere, that arrows through the golden regalia. It lands. A fox, long-toothed, with a proxy leg clenched between its jaw.

The gilded creature teeters. It rights itself, balancing precariously on one foot, wings extending. In a heartbeat it is off the ground, the match abandoned.

My regalia strides over to me. Even outside of combat she moves with peculiar grace, as if her feet are not quite touching the ground—as if she is walking on a bed of roses, an orchard she owns and whose produce she is exclusively entitled to. The petals and pelts shift around her, mantling and draping her limbs, not quite baring her to the elements but close: little is left to the imagination. The fox, her second proxy, trots after her.

“I am Empress Daji Scatters Roses Before Her Throne. Call me Daji.” She holds out a wrist corsaged in roses—some as tiny as pearls, others nearly as large as her hand. “The regalia to your duelist.”

I take her hand and bring my mouth to a spot of pseudoskin: surprisingly soft, in fine mimesis of the organic counterpart. My lips brush over the petals, unavoidably. Delicate. They must be part of her, joined to the proxy’s sensory subsystem. “And I’m the duelist to your regalia. My name you must already know.”

Daji’s mouth—gold too, with subtle flecks of green—curves, and her knuckle touches my cheek. “Thus our contract is sealed: with a kiss. I enjoy chivalry, Khun Thannarat, and while I select my partners for their aesthetic appeal it’s not every round I find someone as suited to my tastes as you.”

I let go. “My impression is that machines don’t care for human values of attraction.”

“Many don’t,” she agrees. “I do. Or rather, what humans consider beautiful happens to match my definition of beauty and you, my wielder, are delicious to look at. Your manners are fantastic too, always a plus. Shall we retire to somewhere more comfortable?”

From raging battle to this. Such whiplash. I eye the little fox that has climbed to her shoulders, curling about her like a scarf. “I have a room at the Vimana.”

“Ah, a woman of taste and means.” Her raiment of fur and flowers meld, reshaping into something more closely resembling clothing. “There, I should look human enough.”

“And your second proxy?” I don’t ask why she’s been able to circumvent that particular rule.

“It’s not a real, full proxy.” Daji grins and it is a hungry slash; her teeth are too sharp and too long. “This is more of an accessory. Believable even for an ordinary person, isn’t it? Come. If you run into anyone you know, you may introduce me as an untamed fox you found in the wild.”

Daji makes herself at home in my suite. The first thing she does is reconfigure her clothing again to something less modest, a sheath so diminutive it hardly deserves the appellation, backless and strapless. Her creamy breasts are covered by a mesh of claret strands but only just. A gold choker encircles her throat. I visualize tugging on it, twisting it, finding the point of her pulse. But there would be no pulse, unless she simulates it.

She unfolds the suite’s bar and plucks out two long-stemmed glasses. “The selection here is as decent as you can get on a world so remote. What do you like, Detective? Vodka, wine, whiskey? Sake, perhaps?”

“Pick for me. I’m interested in your preferences. The choice of liquor can tell you a lot about a person.” Though she’s not a person in the sense that I am a person. Regardless we’re long past the point of whether AIs have souls—the answer has been moot the moment they broke away from us and created their own society. Souls cannot be touched, counted, measured. Military and political might can.

Her laugh is airy. The movement of her thighs is anything but. Her skirt parts and closes and winds around her long legs, animated fabric that whispers against her skin as though offering a taste of what is to come. “My pick, then.” She fills both glasses: vodka of considerable strength, pooling pure and clear. “So then, what’s a woman like you doing on a world like this? Your great wish. That which brought you here in madness, to risk life and limb and eternity.”

I’ve met machines before; none are as human as she—Wonsul’s Exegesis looks obviously alien compared to this. I could almost believe she is mortal, albeit more silicon and tubing than tissue and endothelium. A woman whose innards burn like little stars, whose limbs are guided by actuators and engine precision, liberated from the foibles of the flesh. “You aren’t like any AI I’ve ever seen.”

“That is because you have never seen us masquerading as humans before, or if you have you didn’t notice.” Daji sips from her glass. “I’ll tell you that, initially, it was the eating and drinking that gave us trouble. Organic digestion is severely inefficient and what we did was to incinerate any food that passed our mouths, which meant we had to dedicate a little chamber to the task, and a proxy’s insides are precious real estate . . . Say, you’re very curious about whether we’ve expanded our territory beyond Shenzhen and Septet, aren’t you? What a wild universe it would be if we could turn up anywhere, wreaking havoc and working mischief. Half the time you wouldn’t even realize it’s us. How terrifying it must be for you.”

For the moment she’s letting me steer the conversation away from the subject of my goals. “You’ve been surveilling me,” I say. “Since when?”

“Matchmaking algorithms require an enormity of data, Detective, and our contract goes deeper than any marriage. Why shouldn’t I learn about potential duelists as much as possible? Until you came along, nobody caught my eye—I thought I was going to sit this one out. They’re all very banal. They are obsessed with rules. You didn’t