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

honey but something that moves slower, sweeter and more fatal. Sugar of lead. “Why not? Don’t you trust her?”

“Been ages since we worked together. She must’ve changed plenty.”

Her lover smiles. Their blunt fingernails, painted in jellyfish luminescence, graze along Recadat’s throat. They’re the only source of illumination in this room and their movement casts odd shadows across her face. They are an antumbral vision. “Yet you feel the same about her, don’t you?”

“No.” Recadat shivers as a thumb runs across her mouth. Lust lances through her, rousing her fast in the way of drugs. It makes her feel like a lab rat at the mercy of her lover, whose touch summons at will pain or pleasure or a concoction that mingles both. Now the searing lick of a firebrand, now the sudden strike of lightning. Her nipples have pebbled to little points, dark ink against the white of her shirt.

“Don’t lie to me, Recadat. I dislike that—your truth belongs to me, and she’s the only one from Ayothaya you ever deign to mention.” Their fingers circle her throat like a choker, a collar. “Detective Thannarat was your ideal, the plinth on which you rested your beating heart. You told me how masterful you found her, how handsome, how . . . exciting.”

“That was before.” But her voice is short. The count of her breaths has gone astray.

“Was it, my jewel?” The hand lets go. “Stand up.”

She does. Disobedience is not an option. In so short a time they’ve trained her well, and she both wants and fears what they have to give. Her lover steers her to a full-length mirror. One of the lights snaps to life, the fluorescent cut of it like a whip. She blinks rapidly, disoriented. Her lover has undone her belt, taking off her holster and her gun, knowing that the lack of sidearm makes her feel naked.

“Detective Thannarat,” they say against her earlobe. “Do you wish to have what she has, or do you wish to have her?”

“I wish for no such thing. And she was monogamously married when we worked together so there was never a possibility. We have—” Her breath stutters. “We’ve work to do. An occupying army to repel. Fights to win. She’ll cooperate, she has no reason not to.”

“Your innocence carries its own appeal, Recadat. What an unblemished gem that is.” Her trousers have been slid off. They stroke her inner thigh, hooking into the dip between that and her cunt. She watches their fingers: if she shuts her eyes, they’d make her open them. “You believe in such simple things, hold on to such noble goals. Why not fantasize? When you’ve got what you want and arrive home the hero of Ayothaya, what shall you ask for? Your world will owe you everything; you can demand it all.”

“I’m not demanding anything. The point is to have Ayothaya safe, that’s what I . . . ”

Their thumb rubs. Their fingers delve. She arches against them, nearly on tiptoes, helplessly watching her own reaction in the mirror: her flushed cheeks, her trembling thighs, her hands scrabbling for purchase. One on the glass, the other on her lover. They are steady the way marble columns are. She clenches her teeth as one finger disappears into her—the wet noise so loud and shameful—and a second follows.

“I like that you’re inexperienced.” They bite her earlobe, not gently. Pain sings through her like an aphrodisiac freshly imbibed. “You came to me nearly a virgin, and what a delight it has been to teach you about your own responses. All taut strings, all mine to pluck, the gorgeous instrument of you.”

Her toes curl. The muscles in her thighs tense. Her mind races ahead, to the point post-climax where she’s limp and can barely stay upright, convulsing and clenching down on her lover’s fingers. She’s not yet there. She soon will be. Her lover knows her nerves and weaknesses so deeply, has mastered every nuance. The exactness of a surgeon.

“With all the pleasure I’ve shown you, you’d still return to your world an ascetic. So tragic. Don’t you want to experiment with what life can truly offer?” A knee nudges her thighs open further. One hand has snaked into her shirt, taking hold of a nipple, twisting it. “Don’t you want to do something about Detective Thannarat? Settle your feelings once and for all. Be free.”

Free. She’s never been that. The map of her life is constrained by obligations, even the matter of Thannarat, the matter that she had to let go or risk her career. Recadat’s hands close into fists and finally she shuts her eyes as she imagines that instead of her lover it is Thannarat’s fingers in her, Thannarat’s voice at her ear. On and on, relentless, a tide that sweeps through and shatters her without end. She’ll be as glass, broken to fragments and the fragments broken once more until all that remains is scintillating dust in Thannarat’s hand.

The sky is lavender tinged in yellow, a peculiarity of the atmosphere, though the air is clean, more than breathable: nearly untouched by industry of any sort. Enormous ribcages loom, not far, just outside Libretto. No one has been able to find out whether Septet was once ruled by megafauna or whether the machines have terraformed an otherwise unremarkable, uninhabitable planet and filled it with a skeletal bestiary that never was. I’m predisposed to the latter thought. On Shenzhen Sphere, the seat of the Mandate, there are artificial ruins—places that are and have always been red rust and blackened bones, created because one AI or another enjoys desolation as an aesthetic. And nowhere else in the universe does that aesthetic hold truer than on Septet.

Libretto’s outskirts overlook an exhausted energy well, where the earth has been carved so deep that this part of the city is a cliff, stark and jagged and stained so many shades by the reinforcements and harvest operations that it is luminescent, falsely beautiful. A chasm of oil-slick radiance and murmuring engine wrecks.

My overlays report elevated radiation and toxin