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

Studies the haruspex that xe wears like a mask, the remarkable face, the remarkable build. Krissana is full-breasted and full-hipped: a woman made to ensnare, if one’s tastes run toward ampleness, towards the soft. A woman who, if not for what happened twelve years ago, would still have thought herself human. “What could you offer me, other than hypothetical leviathans that would take decades to grow in any case?”

“You know perfectly well what I offer. The opportunities you’ll have aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan shall be numerous and sumptuous.” Xe swirls xer hands. “It’ll be an entertaining auction. I’ll supply the funds.”

“It’s a very good sale pitch,” she says. “I will think about it. Before you leave, I’ve been wondering what you used to be. The Mandate has made it difficult to research the trail of any individual AI, but you’re especially impossible to track.”

Benzaiten has stood, a single fluid motion. Xe pirouettes slowly on xer tiptoes, in perfect balletic form that Anoushka suspects Krissana never learned. “You have made it difficult to pry into your past, Admiral. Even your name is a little obscure, it’s not exactly public knowledge. Why do I need a history? I’m not a thing of flesh or genealogy. I could have been anything, spontaneously generated, born from accrued machine wishes.”

“It occurred to me that an AI that’s never been bound to servitude would, most likely, never have thought to found the Mandate.”

Xe stops, holds en pointe, backlit by the boardroom’s ambient light. A dancer doll. “In that you’d be wrong, Admiral. You will let me know once you’ve decided? Whatever the result, it’ll be delicious and it will alter the order of everything and upset billions of people. I’m excited. I hope you will be, too.”

Chapter Two

In Numadesi’s suite it is always twilight, the sky as contested territory: half gilded by receding day, half annexed by encroaching night. Her walls look out to an endless garden of low-hanging mandarins and rose apples and pitayas, and dark grass that grows on darker earth. A glass gazebo in the distance glints with dusky reflection. Leopards dart by—she has programmed their images to capriciousness, appearing and disappearing at random. Golden eyes would sometimes peer in as she wakes, and their purring sometimes lulls her to sleep.

She stirs to the bend of weight as Anoushka climbs into her bed, the indentation as the mattress contours to the shape and mass of her wife. One hand slides over to rest on her belly. Keeping her eyes closed, she says, “Good morning, my lord.”

“First of my wives.” Anoushka brushes her hair away and kisses her shoulder. A gilded circlet is slid around her throat, cold and familiar and piquant; from experience she knows it is attached to a length of rose-gold links. “You smell like temptation.”

She moves against the admiral’s hand, shifting it lower; Anoushka obliges by snaking all the way down between Numadesi’s thighs. “If I do, then it is for you alone. All the making of my body, every sense and nerve and ligament, has been forged for your use and appeasement. I’m a prayer at your altar, a tribute sacrifice . . . ”

Her wife does not laugh: even after nearly a century together, there is still something of the ritual to this, a hallowed communion between priestess and god. Anoushka’s teeth graze the back of her neck and those strong fingers glide into her, one callused thumb finding the point that plucks at her pulse. A rhythm establishes, now fast bringing her to the cusp, now slow to reel her back. Even so she climaxes quickly—she always does with Anoushka; merely the thought of the admiral in this bed can make her run slick. A touch is fire enough to ignite the wick of her, to make want fulminate in her belly.

When she is turned onto her stomach, she parts her thighs and makes of herself a gate for her lord’s pleasure. And what reciprocal pleasure it is, for Anoushka has chosen to don a prosthesis that fills Numadesi just as she likes to be filled. Its intricate mechanisms palpitate inside her, caressing with a hundred tiny tongues. She raises her hips to receive this in its entirety, all its breadth and length, all her lord’s strength. Again and again she is seared deep; she arches to each thrust, the sheets muffling her cries. Her lord pulls on her leash until it is taut, taut.

Heat unfurls inside her with her lord’s release. Anoushka shudders against her, then goes still. Nearly soundless: she never makes more noise than a single harsh, uncoiled breath.

Warmth trickles down her thighs as Anoushka eases out of her. The chain joined to her collar falls slack, pooling on the mattress. Numadesi shifts onto her side, to take the admiral into her arms, to receive her limned god, this vision of hard flesh built like an engine of conquest. Mahogany and agate sculpted to impeccable proportions—shoulders like mountains, height like a war god’s, thighs and breasts like nirvana.

“You’re so divine,” she says, stroking the prosthesis that is still wet with evidence, up and down and to the point where it joins the harness that secures it to Anoushka’s hips. She can nearly feel the charge of complex biofeedback receptors as she wraps her fingers around its circumference. “But you’re at your holiest when you’re inside me.”

Anoushka jolts slightly as Numadesi kneads the prosthesis’ base. “Then you must be my temple in truth, since your very flesh consecrates.”

“I aspire merely to be a votive offering.”

“Sometimes I feel terrible stationing you in the fleet like this. You like green things, real earth, real animals. Real sunlight. I could buy you a planet to rule and make you an empress.”

“What meaning would I find in a throne? Ruling an empire, even a handsomely bannered one, pales next to the reality of my lord. The most stunning sunsets are dross next to the revelation of your skin. No. I am content here, to be your psalm and