Shall Machines Divide the Earth Read online

  Only one face is recognizable to me, a fellow passenger who arrived with me on the same liner—an androgyne with a security contract here, allegedly not a participant. But one never knows. The rest are nondescript enough, a few showing signs of wear and tear, not in injuries but in bearing. Regalia tend to conceal themselves, and possibly some of what I’m looking at may not be human at all but AI proxies. This is the shifting, difficult nature of the Divide, as much a masquerade as it is a gladiatorial contest. I’ll be better equipped once I acquire a regalia of my own.

  I bring up the images of that red family crest and that bracelet. Septet’s data network is a closed one to prevent information leaks, and that cuts me off from my usual brokers. To prepare for that, I bought an external data unit before I embarked on this journey, loading it with a selection of research libraries: some generalized, others esoteric. Not as good as a live network; much better than nothing. Information is one of the detective’s greatest tools, second only to the persuasive force of the bullet.

  The family crest is easy. It identifies the bearer as the scion of a prominent aristocrat-scholar line from the planet-ship One Thousand Erhus. Next the bracelet—that is harder, as its design is plain, but I match a tiny inscribed insignia from its inside to the Order of Eshim, the internal affairs arm of the Vatican. A runaway enforcer priest, perhaps.

  Judging by the biomass, the corpses I encountered would amount to four or five adults, give or take prostheses and artificial organs. Most of their skulls were methodically shattered, but I could capture here and there a jawline, a nose, intact eye sockets. Forensic modules are a handy thing—I invest in mine, keep them cutting-edge—and I reconstruct the faces. Just three: most were too mutilated. Unfortunately based on their ethnicities, none of them was the girl from One Thousand Erhus or the Vatican enforcer; that’d be too simple. Something to work with, all the same. None of the bodies were regalia. Mandate AIs are particular about collecting their destroyed proxies and not fond of any attempts to capture or reverse-engineer them.

  Detective work is part guessing, part intuition. It is not exploring every possible venue but exploring the right one, following the correct leads and discarding the chaff. Three faces. I select the one that’s about my age, square-jawed with a tapered nose, and eyes that might have been green or amber or brown. My reconstruction can’t account for cosmetic edits and some dermal modifications, but I have already prepared the excuses. Identify the dead and the connected living will show themselves. In this case, I want to smoke out other duelists that could have been this person’s allies or enemies. Someone will react and mark me as a target; someone may approach.

  I flag down a waiter; her public profile broadcasts her gender marker as a woman. “I’ll have whatever is the most substantial dish on your menu.” I give her a bashful smile. “I arrived this morning—ah, that was closer to late noon local time; I don’t travel enough. Say, do you have a minute?”

  Her expression is the perfect smoothness of seasoned customer service. “Absolutely, madam. The Vimana prides ourselves on ensuring our guests’ every need is met. As for your meal, may I recommend the broiled abalone, marinated in our signature sauce?”

  “The abalone it is.” Also one of their more expensive dishes, but now she will feel further obligation to talk. I project the reconstructed image. “Would you mind telling me if you’ve ever seen this person? It’s a cousin of mine and we have an issue with a large inheritance, and I’d like them to be present at the proceedings. Even remotely, but Septet’s . . . insulated.”

  “Madam, I can’t breach the privacy of our guests.”

  Confirmation that this person stayed at the Vimana. I make sure my voice is loud enough for other tables to overhear. “That is a shame. I’ll be about then, in case my cousin happens by.”

  The abalone arrives promptly, accompanied by chrysanthemum tea: hot, unsweetened, contained in a pretty cup—red glaze, capillaried with gold flowers; very traditional. Fine dining on a world like this is surreal, but it seems the Mandate has opted for an illusion of normalcy. The abalone is synthesized—Septet’s oceans are dead—but it is surprisingly good, and the portion size is generous.

  “Thannarat?”

  I look up into a familiar face—she must have entered after I did, and is seating herself now at my table. She looks not so different from how I last saw her, the same sharp skull and plumage hair: short and slicked back, dark interwoven with scarab-green. Even her style is the same, the smoked-quartz jacket, the neat pearly shirt and the tidy belt holster. I was fond of how she dressed, her cosmopolitan aesthetics against my tendency toward bulk and bluntness. The svelte tiger in her and the hulking wolf in me—we were a pair of opposites.

  “Recadat,” I say, the name strange on my tongue now; her parents were never ones for convention—I don’t think there’s any etymology or symbology to it, just what sounded good to her mothers at the time. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” Or anyone from home. Septet is far from Ayothaya. When you arrive on new shores, you reinvent yourself; a clean slate opens up. To be ambushed by a piece of intimate history changes the landscape and trajectory. But then Recadat must have been here first, preceding me by weeks if not months.

  “Like hell I expected to see you, old partner.” She leans forward. “It’s been—how long? A decade. Feels like it’s been a lifetime.”

  In a way it has. We first met in a dark basement that stank of waste and dead children. Recadat Kongmanee, my junior and later partner, had tracked down the perpetrator but was disabled and captured during her attempt to rescue a dying boy. One of my first cases; my colleagues pitied me for it, the poor transfer saddled with this. But I’ve never been squeamish. My wife used to say I was hewn of granite, inside and out. Granite, steel, titanium. In time I was compared to every hard, unyielding thing. “How have you been doing?”

  “How have I . . . Ayothaya’s at war, I’ve been having a bad fucking time; barely made it out.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad you did too, though I shouldn’t be surprised—if anyone’s a walking masterclass in survival, it’s you. The immortal Detective Thannarat. The war is why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  The invasion and occupation of Ayothaya. Her world and mine, the place that gave us birth. “After a fashion.” A catalyst that made me realize there was nothing keeping me on Ayothaya save regret and inertia. “Is that what brought you to Septet?”

  “I found out about this place a while ago. It sounded like a deranged urban myth, but I had to try. No one’s going to come save Ayothaya, and I’d like to have a planet to go back to.” Recadat adjusts the lapel of her jacket unnecessarily, an old tick. “My performance in the game hasn’t been . . . ideal. And now I run into you, of all people.”

  “How non-ideal?”

  She grimaces. “Ten years didn’t make you any less blunt. Fine. I lost my regalia—my AI partner. It’s left me in a situation.”

  An untenable one. Looking at her again I can see the signs of attrition, the desiccated look that comes with sleep deprivation: she must have been sleeping with one eye open and a gun on the nightstand. When we parted she was young, just thirty-two. Forty-two now; time goes by in a flash. Once I’d have done nearly anything for her, but they’re old embers. Even so I add, “I can’t make promises yet, but I’ll help you as much as I can. There’s plenty we can do for each other.”

  “Yes. And—I trust you. I know you can do anything.” Her voice grows fervent. “It’ll be like old times. Except we’re not solving petty cases, we’re saving the world.”

  The way she looks at me, those bright eyes full of certainty even after this long, as though I haven’t been absent from her life and career for an entire decade. It always surprised me. I never did anything to earn such loyalty.

  By the time I found Recadat in that basement she was in pieces—most fingers on one hand missing, one foot bludgeoned to gristle and pulp, one knee shattered completely. She’d gone in and out of consciousness.

 
The perpetrator had been pursued by public security for a year, and had meant to return her to us as a statement. Back then I did not take interest in the psyche of the perpetrator, why he did not just breach but entirely obliterate the social contract; why he abducted and dissected children, or why he tortured Recadat. I simply shot him in the head, and there was much paperwork to fill after the fact, though Internal Affairs eventually let me off the hook. That night I’d saved very little. I had carried Recadat out as hardly more than a bloodied human torso. Her therapy to get well again, in body and spirit, took close to two years. I visited her every day.

  “Brief me on what you’ve got.” I finish my abalone and drain my chrysanthemum tea. “Just like old times.”

  Recadat enters her suite to find it submerged in gloaming, close to pitch-black. She doesn’t bother trying to access the room’s controls, knowing she would be prevented in any case. The layout is familiar enough, by now, that she is in no danger. In the dark she takes off her jacket, folds it, hangs it on the back of a chair. For a time she sits and closes her eyes, counting her breaths. Any unpredictable event can be met as long as she knows the rhythms of her body; any setback or obstacle can be borne as long as she is anchored by her goals. She thinks of Ayothaya’s riverbanks, their endless flowing wealth. On her world rivers are goddesses and the soil itself deific. Every root and fruit and rice grain bears a fragment of the divine.

  A hand alights on her jaw. “And how did it go with your mentor, my jewel?”

  She tenses. Then relaxes. Her lover’s touch always has this effect, an electric current—a shock to the nerves before she remembers what else it entails, the rest of what it can bring. “As smoothly as can be expected. I didn’t think she would be here. They made the Court of Divide too attractive. Too much carrot, not enough stick.”

  A susurrus like scales against velvet. Her lover is sheathed in serpentine accoutrements, in leather that bends as supple as though it is attached to a live animal. “How much did you tell her?”

  “You know how much. And how much I didn’t tell.” The careful balance. Recadat did not tell a single lie, not exactly. Thannarat was once her world, more than Ayothaya itself, more than anyone or anything else. The intensity of passion she felt back then, the lingering regrets after her partner quit the force and disappeared into the fringes of law. Never quite criminal but on the switchblade’s edge, a margin so thin there was barely any difference.

  “But you didn’t tell her about me.” Their voice is low and amused, not 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 sh
ades 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 levels. Most people don’t live so near the border. Even on this planet, an artificial environment made to support the Mandate’s sport, inequality still exists. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising—Shenzhen is said to be a paradise from the outside, but from the inside it is rumored to be less than perfect.

  The residential blocks here are ramshackle, tall narrow buildings bent by time and corrosive elements. Uneven layers of bitumen coat the roofs. Doors are latched shut by bolts or the rare biometric lock, but by and large anyone can pass through. I don’t call ahead: the person I want doesn’t have the implants necessary for overlays. Has had them excised long ago, unless something’s changed.

  Stepping into this building exposes an unpleasant truth. The Vimana is lavish, contemporary and sanitized. The floor of this place has borne witness to accrued strata of filth, dried blood and effluvia from plumbing failures. Its walls are pockmarked by wear and tear, by sudden violence.

  I knock on a door that is better reinforced than most. It opens just a fraction; I’m let in and the door shuts immediately, as though to prevent the conditioned air inside from escaping. The room’s sole resident double-locks the door, bolting then securing it with a matrix that looks several generations out of date.

  “Detective.” He attempts a stiff smile. “It’s been a minute.”

  “You look well,” I say, though he doesn’t.

  He’s thinner than I remember, loose-skinned, a wattle trembling beneath his chin. Pale to the point of gray, cheeks receded to the outline of his skull. His nose juts oddly as though it belongs to a much more dignified, patrician face. Bulging eyes that always seem afflicted by fundamental tragedy, hair the color of acid-blanched bricks. When he seats himself he does so gingerly, as though he thinks any moment the furniture might turn against him and swallow him whole. His name is Ostrich, the English word for a type of flightless bird—I’ve looked it up; strange-looking creature. When I first heard it, I thought his name sounded vaguely Germanic. In truth he came from the Catania Protectorate, so the name his parents or government gave him was likelier to be Italian. Giovanni or Giovanna or such; I’m not familiar either way.