Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (e books free to read txt) 📗

their footprint small, Seung Ngo boarded the leviathan with just one proxy, isolated from the rest of themselves—it has a built-in core, so essentially what’s here is a distinct Seung Ngo instance.”

“And you,” Anoushka says, “when did you board this place?”

“At some point.” Xe makes a noncommittal gesture with a gaunt hand. “The timeline’s not that important. Regardless, Seung Ngo’s impediments give us some time. Now, if you could illuminate one point for me . . . Seung Ngo began this scheme well before the sabotage; they probably caused it, actually. But where did Erisant or Seung Ngo obtain the bioaccesses that let them carry out all this? I was under the impression Queen Nirupa guarded them like they were her own vital organs.”

She leans against one of the cracked treatment tanks. Her overlays attempt to analyze the composition of the proxy, getting as far as suggesting a few rare alloys but not much further. “Being what you are, you’ve never felt contempt for your physical embodiments, any of them. Do you imagine Krissana does for the body you created for her?”

“Not as far as I know,” xe says blandly and holds out one insectoid limb, displaying the smooth line of it, the poreless integument. “Oh, fine, she didn’t like it much when she was little, the haruspex implants weren’t mature then and caused a few issues here and there. Motor control, the occasional gastrointestinal distress and pituitary mishaps, nothing worth noting. Might be why she went to Shenzhen to begin with. She’s since had her telomeres extended and extra pairs of tumor-suppressing genes spliced in, she should be perfectly content now.”

Anoushka thinks of Savita, whose body is ordinary enough. But it is a body that the princess has likely never hated, one that she has never needed to transfigure from the ground up. “I was born on the leviathan. You know that. But you wouldn’t grasp the extent of how I was not, on this world-beast, thought of as a person.” Once she starts it is easy to continue, even though this is not ideal: she should be revealing this to Numadesi, the jewel that lies closest to her heart. “Not far from this chamber is the hall where servants are birthed. Royalty and citizens come out of normal womb-tanks, fetuses enhanced with the advantages their parents can afford. Those like me were cloned, equipped with extrasensory organs that let us act as the leviathan’s tools for repairing and cleaning itself. In the beast’s belly, down there, that was where I spent the first years of my sapience.”

The AI’s feet click against the filthy floor. “That part I’ve also been curious about. I thought the ventral servants weren’t made for intelligence.”

“I was part of a test batch. They wanted to see if they could improve the workflow if we were more . . . sentient.” Her tone is dry, nearly without emotion. “But normally, yes, it’s considered less cruel to beat them and treat them like cattle if they can’t hold complicated thoughts, or have reactions more sophisticated than pain and panic.”

“Then you escaped.”

“Security was lax because it was designed to deal with, essentially, human-shaped symbiotes. For that you require only blocked-off paths, the occasional electric shocks. We banded together and hid the extent of our intelligence. We found a way, not that it was easy. I’d say one out of five among us survived and made it to the escape pods. Vishnu’s Leviathan was in real space more those days.” The rest she does not elaborate: the years she spent in hard labor, taking on any work that would give her enough for surgery. One body mod, two body mods, and then the chain of accidents that gained her the attention of an Amaryllis recruitment officer. Her life began to unspool like silk after that. How easy it was to rise through the ranks, compared to toiling in the leviathan’s belly. She was a quick study: she learned about fulcrums and leverage, in people and in battle. She learned how to make an instrument of violence, how to strum it, stroke it, bring it to heel.

“Well,” Benzaiten murmurs, “you’re being very forthright and detailed about all this.”

Like lancing a suppurative wound. “Keeping it to myself gave it undue power. Besides, I don’t think you’ll be spilling it to tabloid networks. You’re too distinguished for such triviality.”

Xer smile is a crescent slit in the glossy, immobile face. Quick to appear, quicker to disappear into the smoothness of the mask. “I’m very good at keeping secrets. Now the bad news. The leviathan entered a relay three minutes and twelve seconds ago, which has cut us off again, and it means I’m separate from the rest of myself. That’s fine—I’m used to it, and my processing capacity is more potent than Seung Ngo’s. This isn’t a boast but an objective fact. Next, your Lieutenant Xuejiao, or rather Captain Erisant, is currently in a reconstruction cradle and so out of the game for—I’d say another hour? What you did to em was quite effective. Your knife intrigues me.”

“We have issues more pressing than my knife. Is the beast’s secondary heart fortified? If not I could capture it and hold it hostage; not as good as its primary but still vital.”

“Spoilsport.” Benzaiten projects a cross-section schematic of the decks, taps on one with a needlepoint finger. “This is where we are, and this is the leviathan’s heart. Seung Ngo could be there or they could be near the brain. They’re rushing their haruspex integration and the stimuli received by the leviathan don’t have equivalents in what we’re used to, I reckon it’s quite queasy, so I’ve been carpeting several decks with little nanite flocks to aggravate the symbiotes into sending nonstop distress signals. If the leviathan were sentient and a willing haruspex partner, it’d just turn off those sensory channels, but since it’s mindless I’m attacking with what amounts to a distributed denial of service. Seung Ngo will overcome it eventually—and will be able to manipulate the bioaccesses—but this