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

world essentially deserted. Most were selected from migrants aspiring to enter Shenzhen; they have been promised life in the Dyson sphere once they’ve served their time here. Septet as a halfway house with every inmate held to strict demands of conduct: perform as props for the Court of Divide and eventually earn admission to utopia.

Out of this population, some have themselves entered the game; plenty have ignobly perished. It is an exploitative equation, not that the Mandate requires Septet residents to participate. But consent given in desperation—to be out of here and in Shenzhen Sphere—is hardly true agency.

All this I already know. What I’m after is his case notes. Fortunately I learned his handwriting while he was on Ayothaya; his scribbling is difficult enough that it comprises encryption all its own. I flip through and find records of precedents where regalia killed their own duelists or where duelists destroyed their own regalia. The kind of information off-world Divide aficionados could not have found out, since what transpires on the ground is so secretive.

I scan the pages, collating them and setting the file aside in my overlays, then hand the folder back to Ostrich. “You must make a decent living selling this to new duelists.”

“I get by.”

“Is Septet,” I go on, “truly the Mandate’s only territory outside Shenzhen?”

His head jerks as though he’s been stung or slapped. “I can’t answer that, Detective. I don’t even know. Do you think the AIs come over here and tell me all their political decisions? Give me a roadmap of where they’ll set up shop next?”

Fair enough. “Did you ever see any of these people?” I present to him the reconstructed images. “Plus a woman from One Thousand Erhus—aristocratic, likely, well-bred and used to comfort? And an enforcer from the Vatican?”

“I’ve met them.” He names all but one as well as their regalia. The entire time he eyes the crucifixes nervously as though he hopes they could fold into an armored fort around him, a Catholic protection from the capricious universe.

“One last question. I’m given to understand that a regalia is limited to a single proxy and once it’s destroyed, that’s that for the AI and they’re out of the game. Is this a hard-and-fast rule?”

Ostrich’s exhalation is ragged, adrenaline and remembered pain. I’m not the first to have asked him dangerous questions. “Not always,” he says at length. “There are game rules and then there are Mandate laws. One flexes, the other doesn’t. You better stay on your toes, Detective.”

Once, on a frigid morning, I found him outside the walls of the Catanian consulate, bloody and weeping. He’d slit his own wrist. It was an inefficient method and the location public; he’d meant to be found. I gave him first aid and accompanied him to a clinic. Later I dragged him to a nearby bar—the kind that opens round the clock—and bought him mocktails until he stopped crying. He never did tell me why he’d attempted suicide, and soon after he disappeared entirely. It took time to track him to Septet. A world for lost things.

“Always.” I hand him the card. “Thanks, Ostrich. I’ll come back if I need anything else.”

Chapter Two

Good sense would direct me back to the Vimana, but the truth is that the hotel offers no more safety than anywhere else: outside the Cenotaph, all refuge is illusory. I instead choose to wander a while near the residential block, noting as I do how few people there are, how unnatural the demographic distribution is. Since I’ve arrived, I have seen few children and no elderly, nor have I observed any apparent family. Those who have volunteered to live here must be primarily unattached or have forsaken their previous lives, or they’re criminals removed from their original societies. It makes me think of militaries. The last chance at redemption or upward mobility, the naked exploitation of those with nothing left to lose.

I circle back to the faded energy well, where a sight catches my eye. A petite figure stands at the cliff’s edge, poised with one foot forward hovering on empty air. You can never tell what seeing this chasm does to someone, the luminescent cliff, the undulating light. We’re attracted to the plummet, and this person’s weight is balanced on the single foot still on the cliff, shod in a shoe whose heel tapers to a needlepoint. I walk faster.

Their face, in profile, is perfect in the way of extensive modifications or mannequin integument. Luminous, poreless skin. They lean forward.

I’m mid-sprint when they leap.

A flash of brilliance. I reach the precipice in time to see the person change, mid-plunge. Not a person—an AI; a regalia. Wings unfurl from its back, enormous, like feathered pyres. Rationally I know those are antigravity kites, but the spectacle of it catches me by surprise all the same. The regalia’s corona outshines the energy well’s remnants: gold and pearl, a hundred sunrises condensed. Blinding, literally so.

My optical filters adjust. When my vision clears, I see a second figure rising out of the chasm, meeting the winged regalia blow for blow. They’re fast. I’ve seen combat of all kinds, the meticulous and the spontaneous, between trained soldiers and between criminals tutored by the streets. None of it was like this. The regalia fight with weapons too large for any human to wield, glaive against spear, the blades of them flowing and reflowing as they make contact. The second AI is a creature made featureless by their armor—a sheath of fluid black, oil-sheened, that absorbs each strike it receives and instantly reforms. A complex type of ablative protection, visually obfuscated by its own rapid phase-shifts.

Abruptly I realize I’m in too open a space. This is not an entertainment put on for me to safely watch. My sensors detect no immediate threats, but I don’t have access to municipal or satellite surveillance the way I did on Ayothaya. Ostrich’s block isn’t far and I am nearly there when my overlays flash a warning vector.

I dive under the