Shall Machines Divide the Earth Read online

  “I’ve been worse.” Ostrich crosses his legs, uncrosses them, rearranges them and settles with them akimbo. “Didn’t expect to see you here. Didn’t expect visitors. Septet—terrible place. How’s your wife?”

  “We divorced.” I don’t add that Eurydice is dead. Has been for eight years.

  “Oh.” He inclines his head awkwardly. “My condolences. Eurydice was a lovely lady.”

  She was more than that; she was resplendent and she was the world. But I’m not here to wax nostalgic about my ex-wife with him when he barely knew her. I hold up a card I’ve loaded with a tidy sum. More than he earns here in a month, by my estimate. “Tell me everything you know about the Court of Divide.”

  “You really don’t do pleasantries.”

  “I do them perfectly well with attractive women.” I give him a half-shrug. “I can ask after your health, if you like.”

  He eyes the card. Estimating and speculating how much is in there. The disadvantage of having no overlays. “You wouldn’t care anyway. Are you here for the—because of what happened to Ayothaya?”

  “I have a feeling,” I say blandly, “that what happened will be the only thing people know about Ayothaya for several generations.”

  Those first bombardments, that first monstrous contact when the Hellenic army fell down upon us like ravening beasts. The Javelin of Hellenes is a polity that fancies themselves a nation of warriors and has been known to strike almost randomly, without cause or warning. Still, they pretended at honor, at heeding humane rules of engagement: no targeting of civil centers, medical institutions, aid stations. Who can complain? Plenty of armies would have done much worse. We could have been sacked by the Armada of Amaryllis.

  The entire event—I can think of it with distance, now.

  I angle the card this way and that, watching it glint, watching it catch Ostrich’s eye. “The invasion is someone else’s business—I’m here for a different reason, and I’m a little offended you would assume. My interest in Septet could be academic. Just because I look like a brute doesn’t mean I cannot pursue intellectual passions.”

  Ostrich knows better than to scoff. Instead he moves stiffly to a filing cabinet. Even before the invasion, he was an unusual man: partial to antique means of recording, pen and paper, ink and lamination; even a few nielloware plates that he etched himself. Despite the distance he’s put between his present and former lives, he keeps mementos of his heritage and faith. Crucifixes of various sizes stand in his room, some empty and others burdened by the bleeding messiah. Statuettes of the virgin mother (now possible with womb-tanks; likely impossible during the prehistory of his religious apocrypha) either carrying her dead son or draped in garlands.

  I lean against the wall, steering clear of the delicate statuettes. Wherever I go, I intrude upon fragile things. Lovers have ever told me I’m a creature of rough edges, rough strength, like an avalanche.

  He produces a folder—an actual folder, plastic and aluminum, holding within it a wealth of papers. “Here.”

  Ostrich’s pastime is sociology, and when I learned where he disappeared to, I understood his reason immediately—not just that Septet is out of the way and digitally isolated, but because it is a unique world. Constructed entirely to host the Court of Divide, yet not to function as an integrated state like Shenzhen. Instead it is more of a colony, and not a favored one.

  Many of his notes are on the sociopolitical impact on the population, on how even the most basic elements of the tournament affect everyday life, transforming Septet into an economy of savage needs and carnivorous prices. There is rarely a lull between rounds—as soon as a victor is declared and infrastructure has been repaired, the next one begins immediately. Human residents amount to less than ten million, which makes this 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 ramshackle roof of an old storage. Exposed architecture cracks and dissolves: I determine immediately that the ammunition is large-bore, and that the shot was made by a human. An AI would not have missed and, more importantly, would have struck with something much deadlier and harder to avoid than a conventional bullet.

  Calculations wheel in the corner of my vision as I run through the warehouse—the duelist is a sharpshooter. The vector originated from two and a half kilometers away: decent, nothing remarkable, and they do not have access to anything in the orbit that would have conferred greater range and precision.

  My imaging and the navigation Wonsul’s Exegesis provided let me know that I’m near a mausoleum, one of the larger buildings in this area and which—importantly—has a basement. I review the footage I captured of the fighting regalia, but it is less informative than I’d prefer. At least it doesn’t look like either of them is deploying transatmospheric artillery. That should keep me safe for some time.

  I run up against a corrugated door. There is no time for subtlety. I step back and slam my fist into the lock. It gives in a crumbling of brittle mortar and oxidized metal.

  The space behind it is wide, high-ceilinged, the floor tiled in mosaic the color of antique gold and worn jade. A patina of dust clings to everything as though nobody’s been in here for a long time—possible: this is not a Divide facility, not a place of commerce or accommodation. I wend deeper, looking for the staircase that’d bring me to the basement and from there to the maintenance warren beneath Libretto.

  I pass rows of sarcophagi: some are stone, others milky glass or blackened steel, and none have been disturbed. One exception—a bronze casket with its lid agape, the contents within on full display. Despite my need for haste, I slow down. The corpse is perfectly preserved, pale in the way of new ivory rather than the gray of dead flesh, and drowned in fox pelts: a wealth of blazing electrum and copper, immaculate and untarnished. The body’s mouth is filled with roses so fresh they’re radiant with dew, petals dawn-pink and bruise-red, such a surfeit of them that they spill out. Down the chin, scattered along the throat and collarbones. Whoever it is was buried nude.

  A roar like muted thunder. The mausoleum’s wall falls apart in a shower of smashed stone and riven reinforcement. Behind it is the regalia with the gold wings and the glaive, their expression as serene as a bodhisattva’s.

  I’ve faced death before: I’ve learned to keep moving, to not freeze up, as I clasp eyes with what might be the last thing I ever see. I have kept one step, two steps, ahead of my mortality. To do otherwise is to die like a dumb beast.

  But at this moment there’s nothing I can do, no action I can take to avert what is about to fall. No bullet is fast enough, and fleeing is futile.

  My overlays light up and roses suffuse my vision. A voice whispers in my ear, You only get one chance to answer, duelist. Do you belong to me?

  “Yes,” I say, on sheer instinct.

  A flood of song: for a moment I can’t tell whether it is virtual or exists as a physical fact, the percussion that vibrates through my bones, the high ringing notes that fill my skull. A new module registers in my overlays, bannering a short message. Duelist acknowledged. Welcome to the Court of Divide. To victory eternal.

  The golden regalia strikes. Its glaive is caught by a crimson sword, broad, the edge of it faint blue-black. I observe every detail—the intricacy of each regalia’s weapon: how well made both are, how thoughtfully fashioned, the etched motifs. In such moments the world is written out with stunning clarity.

  What I thought a picturesque corpse stands tall before me, a splendor of petaled pelts and precious metals. Now animated and acutely alive, long-backed and wide-hipped: beautiful in the way of water’s mirage in the desert.

  It—she—glances over her shoulder, meeting my gaze. Then she turns to the other regalia and says, “It’s indecorous to pick on an unarmed human, don’t you think?”

  The other regalia doesn’t answer. It adjusts its glaive, folding its wings into its back. Its next blow carves the mosaic open and splits the tiles. The rose regalia—mine—guards against it almost without effort, holding her weapon one-handed. She pushes the enemy back, and back again, driving it out of the mausoleum. Dust rises in spumes.

  On my feet, I keep to the cover the shattered wall provides; what little visibility I have I use to scan for the next attack from the duelist who shot at me. Nothing yet. I draw my gun, clasping the cold weight of it and contemplating the ammunition with which it is loaded. An AI proxy built for combat—and all of them would be, on Septet—is a potent weapon, obliteration incarnate. Not invulnerable, however; nothing is. Weapon labs across the galaxies have dedicated themselves to designing anti-proxy armaments. Of course they’re as destructible as anything else, but most people can’t carry around artillery of the appropriate caliber. An AI usually keeps its core somewhere safe while its physical representation is deployed on the field. What gunsmiths focus on, obsess over, is how to snip the link between proxy and AI.

  The two regalia are more like phantasms than reality, palinopsia of gold on red, too fast for me to track. But optical assists allow me to distinguish between them, enough to sight down and fire. The range isn’t so terrible.

  Show me some trust, duelist. The same voice as before, sonorous, operatic. A music of lily and bergamot. What good am I as a regalia if I can’t fend off a little thing like this?

  From my perspective the golden regalia is hardly little. Petite-figured, but so is the rose regalia, who moves like a fox’s poem. I lower my gun. It is not a good time in any case. This is too early to show two AIs that I possess anti-machine weaponry.

  The decisive strike comes abruptly: a flash of red, fired seemingly from nowhere, that arrows through the golden regalia. It lands. A fox, long-toothed, with a proxy leg clenched between its jaw.

  The gilded creature teeters. It rights itself, balancing precariously on one foot, wings extending. In a heartbeat it is off the ground, the match abandoned.

  My regalia strides over to me. Even outside of combat she moves with peculiar grace, as if her feet are not quite touching the ground—as if she is walking on a bed of roses, an orchard she owns and whose produce she is exclusively entitled to. The petals and pelts shift around her, mantling and draping her limbs, not quite baring her to the elements but close: little is left to the imagination. The fox, her second proxy, trots after her.

  “I am Empress Daji
Scatters Roses Before Her Throne. Call me Daji.” She holds out a wrist corsaged in roses—some as tiny as pearls, others nearly as large as her hand. “The regalia to your duelist.”

  I take her hand and bring my mouth to a spot of pseudoskin: surprisingly soft, in fine mimesis of the organic counterpart. My lips brush over the petals, unavoidably. Delicate. They must be part of her, joined to the proxy’s sensory subsystem. “And I’m the duelist to your regalia. My name you must already know.”

  Daji’s mouth—gold too, with subtle flecks of green—curves, and her knuckle touches my cheek. “Thus our contract is sealed: with a kiss. I enjoy chivalry, Khun Thannarat, and while I select my partners for their aesthetic appeal it’s not every round I find someone as suited to my tastes as you.”

  I let go. “My impression is that machines don’t care for human values of attraction.”

  “Many don’t,” she agrees. “I do. Or rather, what humans consider beautiful happens to match my definition of beauty and you, my wielder, are delicious to look at. Your manners are fantastic too, always a plus. Shall we retire to somewhere more comfortable?”

  From raging battle to this. Such whiplash. I eye the little fox that has climbed to her shoulders, curling about her like a scarf. “I have a room at the Vimana.”

  “Ah, a woman of taste and means.” Her raiment of fur and flowers meld, reshaping into something more closely resembling clothing. “There, I should look human enough.”