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

take me to see such gorgeous things. You’ll clothe me in the finest pearls. But first we get to the perfumer so I can finally buy you that cologne.”

We dress, or rather I do—she, as ever, simply rearranges the outer shell of her chassis. A sheath dress whose skirt is like storm-whipped clouds and whose back gleams with layered steel plating. She mounts the fire opal on her bare bicep, as though to broadcast that she belongs to me.

Our stop at the boutique is brief and expensive; Daji pays and applies the cologne—a dab on my wrist, which she embellishes with her kiss. Her mouth leaves behind a tiny spot of gold. “So any woman who gets a little too close will know you’re taken,” she says, half-seriously.

The aquarium is a tunnel winding through a seascape: first the shallows with their sun-dappled reefs and lustrous schools, then the depths with their sharks and glistening jellyfishes, then the hadopelagic. Here the creatures become deeply alien, serrated and bioluminescent, sharp spikes and curlicue tails. Maws like the space between stars.

At the darkest point in the aquarium, Daji pulls me to her. “No matter how this turns out, I want you to keep a piece of me.” She draws something from within the folds of her roiling dress and puts it in my hand.

It is a knife, a miniature replica of her sword. An odd basket hilt that collapses into a more conventional one at a touch, but which buds with tiny white roses when unfolded. The sheath is carbon-black with tantalizing glimmers of cherry, claret, sangria.

“Gorgeous exactly the way you are.” I raise the hilt and bring the roses to my lips. “I’ll cherish it as I cherish you.”

Her mood lightens as we return to the brighter sections, and she tells me gossip about the overseer Wonsul’s Exegesis. “Here’s something you didn’t know about Benzaiten in Autumn—xe and Wonsul are lovers, on and off. Mostly off, since Benzaiten is on the move so much and he’s so . . . rooted.”

“Not an uncommon dynamic.”

“Nor one I’d tolerate. Wonsul isn’t even happy with the arrangement; he pines professionally. I swear the two of them fetishize being apart.”

“So the reunion would be all the more piquant?”

Daji mock-shudders. “No thank you. I want to be with my beloved as much as possible. Apart when necessary, yes, but otherwise an uninterrupted line—like a necklace, or like a marriage. Not this start-stop business. It’s a miserable state.”

We exit the aquarium into the hot, bright day. Scorching. Daji doesn’t sweat—no damp spots on her dress, all flawless silk. Standing between the aquarium’s shade and Septet’s punishing sun, I imagine showing Daji one of Ayothaya’s great rivers, so big that on the ground you might think you’re looking at oceanic shores.

On that world—my world—the delineation between bodies of water blurs. In monsoon seasons it can feel as though an entire city could be swept away. I often think of it as a battle of attrition, that the rivers must win in the end. Water overtakes. Even metropolises will eventually yield, buildings sinking and sodden, streets drowned. I imagine people growing sleek and scaled, and the planet cleansing itself in an apocalyptic flood. Even before the Hellenes came Ayothaya was not a place of purity. It could be ugly; its people could be hideous in conduct and intent, like anywhere else. I’ve never loved Ayothaya, not really. I joined an institution I believed would serve the public and discovered only filth. Patriotism has never informed my decisions.

But to have a home you regard with ambivalence and to not have it at all are different beasts. You do not expect to lose a world, and I do want to show Daji the places of my nostalgia.

Daji nudges my shoulder with her pointed chin. “Tell me what’s preoccupying you, Detective. I’ve made myself stunning and you’re not paying attention to me.”

“On the contrary, I’m wondering what you would think of Ayothaya. Parts of it are picturesque, parts of it much less so.” I cock my head. “The invasion didn’t help. Some places are in ruins.”

“Cities can be rebuilt, that’s their entire point. And wherever you are is my refuge—my living, walking treasury; you contain all the things I find beautiful.”

She makes it so easy to say yes; she makes it so easy to surrender, to shed my armor—to want to bare myself to her, whole and entire. “You flatter me.”

Daji tucks her hand into the crook of my elbow. “I am an honest AI. Shall we go look for more memories to make before our next battle? There’s a tailor, and while you’re already devastatingly handsome, I have a few cuff-links in mind . . . ”

My appointment with Ensine Balaskas brings me back to the ecodome. Different at night; the waterfalls have been turned off. Quiet reigns in shades of blue and green, in dappled gray.

Balaskas is waiting for me by one of the ponds. She sits atop a boulder, Eurydice’s clone at her feet. Leashed, as before, her stare blank and remote. Its stare—this is not Eurydice, not even a person. Chun Hyang’s Glaive is nowhere in sight.

This time Daji doesn’t react: she is near, our link is stable, and her second proxy—back in fox form—rests quiescent inside my coat.

“No Chun Hyang?” I ask as I approach, my hands at my sides to show that as of yet I haven’t drawn.

“It can wait. Your regalia’s not immediately visible either.” Balaskas strokes the leash, rubbing the clone’s—the puppet’s—shoulder with her knee. “Before I came here I was in employ to the Armada of Amaryllis as a tactical operator. I believe I can offer you valuable perspective when it comes to the application of main force.”

Palm fronds waver gently behind her. I don’t, quite, have a coherent plan. But little by little I get closer, and she does not react to the fact. “What might that be?”

“That violence, on a mass scale, ceases to be evil; it becomes instead a physical phenomenon that satisfies higher goals than ideological conflict