Shall Machines Divide the Earth by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (classic novels to read .txt) 📗

Recadat toys with the restaurant’s physical menu, a resin plate where items propel themselves back and forth, jellyfish sentence fragments. “You have this effect; you turn women single-minded. Speaking of which, some of the duelists I talked to fell for their regalia. Ouru too, if you can credit the thought. Must be something in the water, or in the game at any rate. Maybe the Divide module brainwashes us a little bit. Subliminal. How are you with—her?”

“Daji is . . . very.” My mouth twitches. “Does that apply to Balaskas? Falling for her regalia?”

“Who knows? She’s a sociopath.”

“You know that term’s clinically meaningless.”

“Pedant,” she says, smirking. “Anyway, I didn’t get you out here just to lunch and look at plants. I’ve been trailing Ensine Balaskas. She comes here every other day, at around the same time. Nothing if not predictable. Could be that this place reminds her of home, wherever that is.” Recadat nods at the balcony, at the view of the cascading currents below, waters running in shades of dawn.

We don’t have long to wait. The gate between two waterfalls opens and a woman glides in, clad in a dress that appears to have been spun out of smoke, shod in shoes with impractically high heels—from here it seems they taper to near-needlepoint and add at least eleven centimeters to her height. Ensine holds in one hand a thick copper chain. At its other end is a figure in tattered white and gold, their head obscured by a hood and visor. Even from a distance it’s clear that this person is not lucid. They move with a drugged, uncertain gait and Ensine has to jerk the leash to make them turn a corner.

Something about the figure. Familiarity throbs as sharp as a thorn deep in my palm. Adrenaline spikes, prescient, even though I don’t know yet what for.

Pain sears my optic nerves. It takes a moment to recognize this as backlash from the neural link that connects me to Daji. AIs don’t have involuntary reactions—my fox gloves are inert—but something’s wrong. Daji?

Her response is slow to come. Yes.

What’s going on? Upset—she is upset. The sight of the drugged person has gotten under her skin. I didn’t even realize such drastic emotion was possible for an AI. Daji doesn’t answer, though the link stabilizes.

“That’s her human pet,” Recadat is saying. “Makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Illegally trafficked, I’d guess, not that that means anything around here. I have never seen what the person looks like, she keeps them covered up. Thannarat, are you all right?”

My vision rebalances. Recadat noticed my reaction—it must have been visible, a twitch of the head, a pinching of the expression. “I’m fine. You know her habits and likely where she’s accommodated; what’s stopping you from dropping a Retribution strike on her?”

“If she survives, she’ll come straight for me, and I don’t have any regalia left. And I don’t know where she’s based—I only found her here by sheer coincidence.”

I try not to show that I’m attempting to calm down. Occasionally I wish I’d installed an endocrinal control, a switch that would allow me to adjust cortisol and adrenaline levels at will—to mute or bring on the instinct to fight. But you can develop a terrible dependence, and I’ve seen too many police officers or ex-soldiers broken by it, hollowed out to a husk. “Fair enough.”

Ensine Balaskas and her pet reappear once more, a glimpse seen between the metal of a trellis and the shimmering fronds of a palm with low-hanging fruits. She reaches for her captive, removes the visor impossibly gently, and then yanks the hood back with abrupt violence. This time I go cold. This time it is not Daji who reacts.

The slim waist, the rounded shoulders. The face. The face that I’ve seen over and over, near and far, next to me when I went to sleep and next to me when I woke up. Bare or under cosmetics, and once beneath the golden veil she wore at our wedding. Those high cheekbones, that tight nose, that broad plump mouth.

Did you hear about the haruspex program? She was showing me an image: a cyborg with moonstone skin and antlers growing out of their zygomatic arches, shoulders draped in golden scales, arms clad in exoskeleton. They’re so gorgeous, each of them a unique work of art. But you know, if I became one I’d like to keep my face. We could be a matched pair, both with perfectly human faces. We’d stick out like sore thumbs and scandalize them all.

I had looked up, only half-interested; already dismissive because I knew what the initiative entailed, that it was too new to risk. Early adopters never won. And for all my interest in machines, I never wanted to lose my autonomy and volition. You’d become state property of Shenzhen. Is that worth it?

Eurydice gave me a long, sly look. I wouldn’t understand the significance of it until much later. Some things are worth any price, my wonderful wife. Would you bleed for love?

My laugh was short, nearly derisive. Depends. Depends on the person, on the kind of love. Doesn’t that apply to everything?

I was a detective. I prided myself on quickly grasping the hinge on which a person turns, the wet sanguinary core they hide from their family and friends, from the public eye. I could decipher an entire personality—the pattern of action, the decision-making process, the trauma or ease that might have informed them—within an hour of talking to a suspect or witness. How good I was at my work; how inept I was at home. I could not comprehend my wife even though the evidence was there right under my nose. Pages that I never cared to read because in my arrogance I believed I already knew the book inside out.

Ensine Balaskas tugs on the leash attached to the thing that looks like my wife, the puppet shell that might be all that remains of my wife. Ensine laughs, the noise