And Shall Machines Surrender Read online

  The bistro’s door irises wide. Krissana Khongtip strides through, clad in a tiny mulberry dress and shod in oxblood pumps. She moves with a sure awareness of the way her hip sways, the way her mouth gleams gold on crimson. Another woman might have looked uncouth; Krissana projects the impression that she’s just come away from an impossibly exclusive, impossibly glamorous soiree. Platinum glints at her earlobes and around her dark, silken throat. Everything brings her epidermal implants into the fore.

  She drops into their table’s empty seat. “Ambassador, get me a drink please, something expensive and exquisite, as long no whisky’s involved—I hate whisky. Hello, Doctor. Fancy seeing you here.”

  Seung Ngo’s mouth quirks. “Their priciest item appears to be . . . the Grand Aurora. Vodka is all right, Krissana? Good. Anything to eat? No? You oughtn’t drink on an empty stomach, but I’m not your counselor.”

  Orfea glances at the menu—it gives her something to focus on that isn’t Krissana. The cocktail in question is five times the price of her entire grocery purchase, not that it matters to Seung Ngo. Who would foot that bill, if she asks.

  “Thank you both for coming,” the AI says. “You can guess why I requested your presence.”

  “I know why.” Krissana stretches out in her chair, insouciant, crossing her legs. “Tell all, Ambassador. You’re going to have to air juicy state secrets.”

  Seung Ngo makes a small, sideways gesture. “Should you become a full haruspex, you’ll be privy to a great many of them in any case. As many state secrets as you could possibly desire. Presently you are not at risk of the spontaneous suicide, but you are invested in solving this issue, I think. If the two of you agree to help, I’ll grant you temporary authority—Khun Khongtip more than you, Dr. Leung, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless you’ll have much more freedom than you do now. Nominally you’ll be assigned under her and, Khun Khongtip, you’ll enjoy some extrajudicial . . . clout.”

  Krissana claps her hands. “I love clout! Don’t you, Doctor?”

  Seung Ngo’s and Krissana’s eyes are on Orfea. She understands the implied offer, what is dangled before her. Do this and she will earn citizenship, swift and seamless, rather than waiting out the years and enduring scorn at the Silver Orchard clinic. Citizenship without sacrificing dignity. “Is it necessary that I work with her?”

  The AI arranges their chopsticks in neat parallels. “Your skill sets are complementary. Both of you have something to gain.”

  And no one with Orfea’s skills and experience is available in Shenzhen who is as desperate as she is. She has plenty to lose. “I don’t see that I could be of use.” She makes a show of refilling her tea, noncommittal. “But if you insist.”

  “It’s settled, then. I will send you all the information we’ve gathered.” The AI inclines their head. “If you can bring the suicides to an end, the Mandate will owe you forever. That’s no small thing, and a distinction no other human may claim.”

  Chapter Three

  The ambassador leaves the two of them on the terrace. Krissana cups her cocktail and studies the doctor. The night deepens, mentholated. Winter is not yet here but it is imminent, felt in the bite of the air, the strength of the wind. Soon a slick of frost will sheen the footpaths in brittle blue, coat the tram tracks and the exterior of the lifts. Ersatz season, ersatz planet.

  “This is really a lot of trouble,” she says, navigating her drink. The cocktail is a convolution of ice pagodas, sugar windowpanes and sparklers emitting puffs of green and pink. “Good vodka, but not a lot of it. Care for a taste, Doctor?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Still? Not even a single vice, after all this time?” Krissana pushes the ridiculous glass away. She blinks: her clearance has come through. “Oh, looks like I’ve just been anointed with a title—Operative Krissana Khongtip. Very nice, I like it. It sounds important while not necessarily meaning anything. It doesn’t even indicate what department I belong to or what I do! What a delectable title.”

  Orfea looks at her, appraisal direct. Krissana remembers her regard, the solidity of it, the way it rests like a talon on tender skin. “How much do they know?”

  “About me? Some. Shenzhen doesn’t have much of an opinion on the Armada; it never destabilized any regime allied to the Mandate. Quite the opposite, but I shan’t bore you with anecdotes.” She leans across the table. “I’ve missed you terribly. Remember when . . . ?”

  “I remember what you did to me.”

  Krissana falters. Marshals herself, then gives Orfea an expression as blank as a burial shroud, as final. “I did you a favor, Doctor. If you’d died in the line of duty, the Armada would have held a classy funeral for you but they couldn’t have performed a resurrection. Even the admiral isn’t that powerful.”

  “A favor,” Orfea repeats, softly. “By stranding me before a mission and making the admiral think I’d abandoned the Armada.”

  And so deprived Orfea of the Armada’s protection due a high-ranking agent who leaves in good standing. Krissana did not quite take that into account—at the time Orfea’s survival was her priority. “It was a suicide mission. Trying to penetrate Pax Americana was never going to go well, I barely escaped with my life. I kept you out of harm’s way as best I could.”

  “I seem to recall that, one night, we spoke of possibilities that we could be more than comrades-at-arms and that we might share a future. A charming fantasy, but in retrospect obviously infeasible. You and I are creatures of other persuasions. The two of us in domestic bliss? Hilarious. You must’ve been laughing to yourself all the while.” Orfea swirls her tea. She sips it with refinement honed through grueling instruction, part of the training for Armada specialists—the kind that went into the field to extract blood from stone, to turn people against their governments, to persuade soldiers against their commanders. “I woke up forty-eight hours later, thoroughly drugged. No way to leave the station we’d stopped at to rendezvous. No way to catch up with the infiltration unit. After that, I was given no hearing and summarily branded a deserter. You remember that part, I think. From my view, it seemed you wanted all the glory, all the admiral’s favor. You were always infatuated with her. Did it earn you a night in her bed?”

  Krissana grimaces. “What glory? The operation was a fucking disaster, most of the agents were lost. It was stupid, it was greedy, one of the worst blots in Amaryllis history. The admiral would’ve shot me in the head if I’d commanded the unit—she personally executed the lieutenant who accepted that commission to start with.”

  “Of course.” Orfea’s features are calm. “She’s a decisive woman. It’s not that I feel spurned, only that you betrayed me. And until you’re on your deathbed you will insist it was for the best, probably you even believe it, and that I have no debt to collect from you: no blame on your part, no apologies owed. We’re at an impasse and I should not have brought up such ancient history.”

  “You’re being terribly cold.”

  “We’re sitting outdoors. It’s twelve degrees.” The doctor cants her head, mouth bent into a remote smile: one that says she has finished caring, may never have cared. “And you’re wearing very little, though your temperature tolerance range is wider than most. You’ve done very well for yourself, exiting the Armada right into haruspex candidacy. Your talent can’t be disputed.”

  “Fine.” Krissana heaves a sigh. “Let’s get indoors. You’re out of hot tea.”

  The bistro’s inside is much warmer, offering private booths and privacy filters. Krissana requests a connection with Orfea; it is accepted, and she loads the data the ambassador sent them both. On their shared overlay, footage plays at half speed. The last moments from the perspective of a haruspex: churning waters, the ground rushing up, the muzzle of a gun approaching. Then impact, or an explosion of blood, or the shattering of bones. Haruspex implants continue to transmit a few minutes past bodily shutdown. Most of the AI halves didn’t survive. The singular one that did was corrupted and had to be disintegrated post-haste be
fore they could infect the rest of the Mandate. No symptoms precede the act. A haruspex is well one day, and the next leaps from the highest spot they can find or decides a bullet will improve their cranial health.

  Orfea dismisses the footage from her end. Krissana continues to view it a little longer than necessary. For the doctor it is abstract; for her it is a confrontation. What could be in store for her. She thinks of the AI, as yet unnamed and whose parameters are unknown, that will soon be transplanted into her. Aloud she says, keeping her voice bland, “Grisly.”

  The doctor cuts her a sharp look. “What’s your opinion? Other than that.”

  “The way a haruspex works is, you share your body with an AI. Sometimes one’s in control, sometimes the other is, depending on what’s optimal.” Krissana taps the activity logs attached to each death-record with her fingernail. “When they died, it was the human half in charge.” She imagines sinking into those tenebrous waters, trapped in a prison of her own flesh. The haruspices’ final thoughts were not collected: no way to determine whether it was their mind or body that was overridden.

  “Tell me about potential infection vectors. You’ve got access to information I don’t.”

  Neither of them brings up the possibility that it might be something else, some death pact: the suicides were synchronized too well. “That’s if you assume the human half can be infected, reprogrammed.” She snaps her fingers. “Which it can be, people don’t even have to be melded with an AI to be susceptible like that. Conditioning, a trigger. Except, how was the trigger sent? We have all the communication logs and there was nothing untoward. How was it possible that the human halves all happened to be in control? That should’ve made haruspices difficult to suborn. If the human part was in distress, the AI would take over. If the AI was infiltrated . . . and so on.”

  The waiter appears with a fresh pot of tea and a second cup. Orfea thanks him, fills both cups, and pushes one toward Krissana even though she probably remembers Krissana doesn’t drink tea hot. “And if both are compromised?”

  “A haruspex is under constant observation; every milliliter of carbon dioxide they produce is monitored. The Mandate has plenty of processing threads to spare, collectively. They wouldn’t miss even the tiniest aberration. Anything that tampers with brain chemistry would’ve been detected right away.”

  “In other words, you have no idea.”

  “No. Neither does the Mandate.” Krissana smirks and runs her hands down her arms where her most visible implants reside, switching on the chameleon veil. In an instant her skin fills out, erasing even the scar tissue of surgical sites: there is much to be said for Mandate technology. “I’ve got an idea where to start, however, though it’s best to hide what I am. Are you free for the rest of tonight, Doctor?”

  “I am. You don’t have to keep calling me doctor.”

  “I’m used to addressing you by some sort of title.” Agent, officer. “It’s tradition.”

  Orfea makes a face, but lets it pass.

  The trams are busy even at this hour; that is the kind of place Shenzhen is, relentless and unceasing in its march. Krissana imagines that if she lives here long enough, she’d be able to tell the time by crowd density at a given station—clocks would be obsolete. The mass presses them into the carriage. Up close Orfea smells faintly of honeysuckle. Krissana is accustomed to her exuding expensive fragrances, spiced, the kind harvested from impossible oceans and suspended in vials of nacre. She used to breathe in Orfea’s skin so much, back then.

  They change trams, heading to the very edge of Luohu, where it abuts the waystation that contains each district and keeps the ecospheres distinct. Visible from here, disrupting at last the illusion that they are on a planet: the wall extends in all directions, deific in scale, from the distance a thin membrane. In truth they are impenetrable, their integument built to withstand ballistic pressure and implosive warheads. Even if an army successfully breaches one district, they would have difficulty piercing the next and the walls would seal around them, trapping them like ants in amber. So the theory goes: in Shenzhen’s short history, this defense has not yet been tested. Krissana has heard the Alabaster Admiral speculate on it, on the integrity of the waystations, but it remained conjecture—a fantasy, a logistic puzzle rather than any real desire to lay siege.

  Their destination, Club Fantasia, nests deep inside a cavernous complex, unsubtle with its name and less subtle with its presentation. The entrance is an arch wound through with brass and enamel, a thick foliage motif through which a fox’s face or tail peeks then darts out of sight. Never quite there, never entirely absent. They need an invitation to enter. Krissana uses her clearance to moot the point.

  They file into an auditorium with dim, dusky lighting. Cages depend from overhead, swaying to music heavy on strings: erhu, zither. Fox replicants move underfoot like ground fog, shimmering and russet. Sometimes they disappear, replaced by a woman in Tang dynasty silks whose robes are pulled down to bare a breast or an arm, to expose skin dusted in pearl and platinum. Gold lenses over their eyes, gold nail guards over their fingertips.

  Lanterns slanted at irregular angles bleed livid scarlet light across the floor. Above, the cages are filling with spectators, some remote viewing and projecting avatars with starburst eyes and silver mouths, others here in person. Krissana leads the way to a mezzanine table. “It was fully booked,” she says, “but a seat happened to clear up. Aren’t we lucky?”

  “I’m sure you walk in august fortune and incomparable auspices, Operative.” Orfea pitches her voice low. The music is growing louder, giving them cover. “This is an exclusive show, I presume.”

  “And pricey to view, yes. They upsell it as avant-garde but it’s mostly pornographic.” She scrolls through the club’s surveillance, feeds of the public areas, the entrances and exits, and the private rooms. The third category gives view to acts much more explicit—women entangled on beds lined with frangipani, people in threes or fours furiously rutting on gloaming sheets or spreads of cerise silk. Now umbral, now strobed by neon flashes. “I’m looking for somebody. Zie’s a regular, spends most of zer paychecks here. An American.”

  “Shenzhen takes in immigrants from Pax Americana?”

  “Sometimes. Rarely. In this case—” A fox nudges her ankle, looking plaintive. She shoos it off. “Zie was an asset I recruited.”

  Orfea sits up straight. “You’ve been working forthe Mandate. And you went back to Pax Americana.”

  “Looks like zie’s here.” One of the cages has spilled down a cable. Krissana’s target takes hold of it and is lifted up to join an older, bronze-skinned neutrois. They will not be able to see Orfea and her clearly; the vantage point is wrong for that and the light is unreliable. “Zer name is Mina Quang, an AI architect. Pax Americana wanted to build autonomous intelligences of their own—who doesn’t—and add safeguards that’d prevent them from joining the Mandate. Mina was working on that but wanted out. I delivered, but there was some mess and gore along the way so zie and I aren’t on good terms these days.”

  A young Chinese woman in white brocade is led on a slim, glittering chain to the center of the stage. She has been expertly made up, her eyes painted to look larger and more feverish than they already are, but on her own she wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. A customer, Krissana judges, rather than a performer: someone who has paid handsomely for the privilege, to be featured this night, maybe to lose her virginity in style. Foxes fill the stage. The light goes out.

  When it comes back on, the stage has been overrun with grass, thick and gold and so high they half-obscure the girl from view. She is passed from one fox-woman to the next, kissed on brow and eyelids, then full on the mouth. The music climbs and the scarlet lights scythe across the performance. Gold nail guards graze across the girl’s neck, down her back; a layer of porcelain silk slides off. Out of view, an actor does something—a hand between her thighs, a finger crooked—and the girl arches, moaning, supported between three fox-women.

  Kr
issana turns to the feed that shows Mina Quang in zer cage, looking on, avid. Zie is guiding zer companion’s hand to zer breasts. “The American project,” she goes on, “progressed pretty far. Their idea was not just to build AIs that couldn’t join the Mandate, but to also build one that would and infect the Mandate with something lethal. You can imagine why Shenzhen took an interest.”

  Orfea has leaned back in her chair, politely disinterested, though Krissana catches her gaze straying to the stage. “How successful were they?”

  “They’d captured a Mandate AI and were reverse-engineering it by the time I got Mina out.”

  The doctor exhales in a hiss. “Was the AI recovered?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s no longer an issue.” Krissana seeded the American network with scorched-earth protocols, courtesy of the Mandate. They decimated most things—fragments of the captive AI, military communication, administrative records dating back decades. Even their propaganda broadcasts were crippled in the process, splash damage. “Here’s how to handle Mina. Zer companion doesn’t look like they want to play, so zie’ll be looking for an aggressive stranger who can fulfill zer needs, a domineering beauty who’ll put zer in zer place and do wicked, bruising things to zer body.”

  “Krissana.”

  “I’m serious. But also offer zer the death of Director Georgina Whitten. She runs the American secret police and used to make Mina’s life hell. The Mandate will take care of it.”

  On the stage, an empty cage has lowered, trapping the girl. Two fox-women hold her against the bars, one biting her neck, the other thrusting into her, though the act is disguised by heavy brocade. The music ends; the auditorium dims until there’s no more to see. In the dark, the girl cries out, the sound feral and high as a hawk’s.

  What a thing, to offer a death: how potent it makes one feel, the rush of supremacy it grants.