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

Anoushka eyes the revolving hologram. “Can you destroy them?”

“Do I have the capability? The odds are not terrible. Can I destroy them without violating Mandate etiquette? That’s a dicier proposition. But then this is just an instance of Seung Ngo, and not an acknowledged one at that. The same holds true for me, so in the most technical sense neither their instance nor mine exists. Thus we can wreak havoc as we please on one another.” Benzaiten stretches out xer lower body, where seams in xer thorax split and limbs emerge like strange polyps. The parthenogenesis completes in minutes, leaving two Benzaiten proxies standing side by side. The original as tall as before, the disgorged addition barely two meters.

“I’ll leave one of these here to watch over the princess and relay to her anything that needs doing.” Xer smaller proxy turns to the physician’s office. “Her bioaccesses should remain a thorn in your enemy’s side.”

“It seems simple enough,” Anoushka says, “if as you claim Seung Ngo inhabits only this one proxy. Destroy that and this will be over.”

“Probably, unless theirs also multiplies. That’s a joke, I should be the only AI with this kind of nesting-doll proxies; they’re tricky to deploy.” Xe chortles, a metallic noise of small whirring blades. “Alternatively Seung Ngo has succeeded in incorporating the world-beast, in which case their proxy won’t matter and we’ll have to kill the leviathan itself to get rid of them. I hope the larvae are safe, at least, I’d hate to try and recreate the process on my own. It might take me an entire decade and who has the patience?”

“I don’t suppose you have a proposition better than confronting Seung Ngo.” Anoushka breaks a segment off the hologram—the particulate light shivers, oddly gelatinous—and turns it over in her hand. “Like capturing the digital network and ejecting them.”

“I’m no dispenser of miracles, Admiral. They have had a long time to make the leviathan theirs.”

She tightens her hand on the piece of projection. It fragments to shards and dissipates. “But I do believe in miracles, Benzaiten. They come from within, tempered within the foundry of the soul. Still we do need to put in the work, so it’s best we get started.”

This far down in the belly, the ceiling is low and the passages asymmetrical. The ground sucks at her feet, elastic and wet. This is the place the royalty never sees; even the overseers rarely come down here. A certain class of servants perform most of the supervision, a rung above the ventral menials but not by much. Anoushka half-expects to see them here—she doubts they’ve been given the order to evacuate or the space to shelter—but she finds the area empty, quiet save for the leviathan’s breath.

Benzaiten has to hunch, tucking xer body in, as they proceed downward. Separation between decks becomes more porous here; the low levels are looped and doubled onto themselves, laid out like an arrangement of guts. The temperature is higher and the air smells closer, a miasma that filled Anoushka’s lungs for years. At that point her concept of timekeeping was rudimentary and she comprehended it only in work shifts, in the levels of her own fatigue. She now knows that against the scale of life she’s led since, the leviathan’s belly accounted for a mere fraction: she belongs in the sun, that brief phase merely the dark of the chrysalis.

A low, wasp-like buzz. Anoushka’s sensors delineate shapes darting from the far end of the intestinal path—whirring wings and serrated proboscides—and she readies herself to meet them. Benzaiten is faster. Xer jaw unhinges: xer mouth yawns wide and xe swallows the oncoming drones whole. Xer other legs intercept more, plucking them out of the air and dashing them against each other. They break like ripe fruits.

Go, Admiral. Benzaiten rears up: more limbs unfurl and bifurcate, spearing through the drone swarm. Leave Seung Ngo to me. I’ll see if I can’t disable their link to their own proxy.

Down the passage, she hears a cry. In pain a voice is leached of specificity—screams of agony sound all the same. But this one she recognizes because it is not so unlike what her own used to be, once.

She turns a corner. Her foot meets something liquid. Her eyes fall on a body. One of the ventral-deck servants, dressed not in the kurta of their station but in a glittering robe that might have been owned by Nirupa. Their breath is wet and clotted with their own blood, their lungs drowning. There is nothing she can do for them.

In five meters, another corpse. Another servant, another body with the telltale face of a ventral servant. Several iterations removed from hers but there are still similarities to the features that once draped across her skull like a mask. This one lies folded neatly, spine snapped in half as though their bones were a kite’s, all brittle wood. Next a servant clad in a silver gown—Rajathi’s perhaps—lying spread-eagled, gutted in the way of butchered livestock: entrails and kidney a thick, rich skirt. She goes on. A servant propped against the wall, head lolling out of alignment and neck completely wrung.

It is a message. It is a taunt.

A thin trembling membrane blocks her path. She slices through with her knife; it gives as easily as rice paper.

Unlike the gut-corridor, this place is well lit. It is not where the cerebral core of the leviathan rests—that is much higher, under the keeping and watchful eye of the ruling monarch. But this is the counterpart, a chamber whose size she once thought impossible to measure, one that she could have believed signified the leviathan’s godhood. The ceiling is high, the walls writhing with cilia.

Overhead the leviathan’s secondary heart palpitates, a composite of alloy cage, howling ventricles and gigantic valves. Black fluids move through aegis-membraned arteries, seeking their receptive sites. A furnace organ that knows only how to burn, an apparatus of dumb purpose. It is cantilevered in place, supported from below