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

A laugh slips out of me. I can’t quite help it. Daji must have been unusually angry for a new AI, not that I can blame her. “Why?”

“I’m a monogamist. When I want someone, I want them exclusively, and Eurydice paid more attention to your phantom more than she paid me sometimes. Thannarat this, Thannarat that. I couldn’t see what was so grand about a woman who abandoned her like you did—like I thought you did. And . . . ” Daji’s mouth thins. “Before her consciousness gave out under our combined neural stacks, she made me promise to find you. I was to deliver the message that she loved you until the end and that she was sorry.”

For a time I say nothing. After the divorce I had thought our story was over, that what we had was irreparably shattered. Not over a single heinous deed but over small things that accrued into a vast rift. It never occurred to me that it could have been otherwise: I was stoic at our divorce proceedings. She wept, and then she left. Eurydice was always a woman of compromises while I was the selfish absolutist, and I learned nothing after our life together had crumbled.

Daji rolls onto her back, though her hand is still in mine. Small and long-fingered and, it occurs to me, likely designed to fit into mine just so. “Once I’d integrated into my core and gained freedom of movement, I wanted to seek you out to chastise you. Then I changed my mind and plotted revenge—maybe I would appear to you wearing a proxy that looks like Eurydice. Then I changed my mind again and thought I’d seduce you. And then as I reviewed Eurydice’s memories I became afraid.”

“Of me?”

“To most AIs I’m unnervingly . . . other. I’m prone to human-analogous impulses, and even my proxies are more malleable than most, more nanites than solid metals since I want them to easily reconfigure. I was afraid I would fall in love with you and do whatever you asked.” She pauses. “And I was afraid I would drown in the memories I shared with Eurydice.”

“You’ve remained yourself perfectly well.” I almost tell her that I don’t see the problem—to my understanding, AIs can maintain parallel consciousnesses, processing threads and even distinct instances that answer to a single core. They can surely pretend to be multiple beings. But Daji doubts her own parameters, her capacity for sustaining multiple personalities, either because the haruspex process was snipped short or due to another machine quirk. Her relative youth, her specifications.

“Only because I’m fulfilling the function of a regalia. I still can’t believe—well, Benzaiten in Autumn is a meddler. Xe’s always up to no good, you’re going to find out one day that xe used you as a pawn for some convoluted maneuver.”

I slip my fingers into the luxury of her hair, stroking her scalp, finding petals there too. “Are you displeased that xe meddled?”

“No. Only that xe thinks xe knows best and it’s galling when xe is right. Because I desired you on sight, Detective. When I saw you, I forgot that I ever resented you. I forgot how complicated the picture of you in my cortex was. I became my need and all my arrays pointed toward you. Do you understand what that is like for an AI? It was overwhelming, like I was a haruspex again. Love. Love undid me in a single millisecond.”

How can it be love, I think, when there is such history between us; when I cannot tell whether machines feel passion the way I do—or whether I’m even capable of returning what she offers. But I say none of those things: there is no point breaking this brittle moment in pursuit of arithmetic accuracy, of trying to solve this equation with the inadequate tool that is language. I love you. I hate you. In that instant I meant it. “I’m glad that we met,” I say slowly. “I didn’t think I would feel like this for anyone ever again.” Because I have been caught too, pulled into the gullet of this snare, entangled in its briars and sepals.

Her golden mouth widens. “You’re my fairytale, Detective.”

“All fairytales come to an end.”

Daji pulls me to her. “Not this one.”

Can a machine be trusted: I cannot see into Daji’s heart or the many-chambered cortex within her true body—the core of an AI that broadcasts its intent and will, that pilots a proxy like this one. I kiss her and feel a moment of displacement, that I’m in bed with a mirage which merely reflects my fantasies. She touches and pleasures me and soon that thought slips away, replaced by the chorus of lust and flesh, of nerve-endings. This time it is gentle, next to the rawness that we exchanged previously.

As I lie there sweat-soaked, she asks me to tell her a story, any story. “I don’t know any,” I murmur, a little embarrassed; aware that it is absurd to be self-conscious, now.

“You were a child once.” She nibbles on my forearm as if I’m a confected treat. “I know you read books, watched plays and entertainments, listened to songs. Share your favorites.”

Haltingly I tell her that one fable about a bhikkhuni who ate a mermaid’s flesh, became immortal, and spent the rest of her days trying to cure that as though agelessness is a terrible ailment. I found the story ridiculous; why seek a return to mortality when one can be eternal, aloof from the ravages of time. In practical terms, a human cerebellum eventually fails and telomeres cannot be extended indefinitely. All the same I would enjoy my eons, if I can have them.

Daji nuzzles my shoulder. “When we win—and we shall, Detective—I’ll make you as long-lived as that bhikkhuni. I’ll be your mermaid feast. Whatever need you have, I will fulfill it.”

Eurydice liked the story too, I remember, and she also thought the bhikkhuni foolish. “Eurydice—” I hesitate. “Did she die in pain?”

“Not at all. She . . . fell asleep and