My regalia nearly pounces on me as soon as I’m through the suite’s door. She isn’t light—proxies are made from alloys and nanites much denser than my cybernetics—and she pins me to the wall by sheer mass. “Detective.” She nips at my neck. One of her hands is already at my belt.
I take hold of her shoulders, gripping hard. “Were you going to tell me? Were you ever?”
“Yes.” Her mouth is hot, her hands likewise as she unbuttons my shirt. Most of her is bare, gleaming with temptation, as though illuminated from within. “When you’re victorious. I’d present myself to you as the prize. You want your wife back. You’ll get that. The data—”
“You’re not Eurydice.” Stupid. The clues have been at my fingertips this entire time, and as with my wife I ignored them. I didn’t think such a coincidence was probable, even though I should have suspected from the moment Daji admitted she used to be a haruspex, that her human half died in the process. Simply I had assumed such botches were common. “This is the real reason you chose me as your duelist.” As well the real reason Benzaiten in Autumn approached and offered me xer patronage: a machine experiment, the same as the Gallery.
“I am Eurydice,” Daji whispers, clinging to me. “I was part of her, deep inside her brain. We were a single being.”
I push her away and straighten, drawing air into my lungs as fast as I can. But all that comes is the rose-and-pomegranate fragrance of her, a fragrance that has nothing to do with my wife. Eurydice never wore perfume so distinct; for her it was subtle jasmine, and even then rarely.
My regalia looks at me, her hands at her sides. “You don’t want me anymore.”
Another breath. Still only Daji’s scent. What rises in me is jagged, animal. I want to take her. I want her to take me. I want us to ruin each other like two cannibal stars. My belt, half-loosened, comes off swiftly. I seize her wrists and wrap the belt around them. It’s thin restraint—even I can break free of it, let alone a proxy, but she does not resist.
In bed I press her down, kissing her throat as I draw a knife from my coat. I bite the tender skin as I run the edge between her breasts. Flecks of gold pinwheel in her eyes as she looks up at me, her mouth parted. “Detective,” she gasps.
Almost I want to ask her, Can you become Eurydice, but I stop myself. What would be the point save to delude myself further. She’s never tried to act like my ex-wife, has never attempted to mimic Eurydice’s mannerisms or speech, has never given the game away. She doesn’t want to go back to being a haruspex, she told me; she’d never willingly wear Eurydice’s personality and maybe not even Eurydice’s face. “I love you.” My voice is thick, harsh. “I hate you.”
She trembles as I cut her open. A straight line from sternum to navel, and even though her pseudoskin must normally be impervious to something as primitive as a knife, she makes it part for me. Unlike human flesh the line is clean, without the muddying of subcutaneous fat and lymph. No blood. What wells up instead is a whisper of fluid nanites, and when I push my thumb into the wound I can feel their hum, the ceaseless vibration of nanoscopic music.
Her knees jerk against my hips. She grinds against me as I delve deeper into her chassis, dig harder with my teeth into her jugular. This once she’s simulated that for me, the roar and orchestra of a pulse. I make another incision, turn that incision into a gash. Even then all I can see are bubbling nanites, not the actual matter of her proxy, the hidden composition of her material.
To rend and tear, to overwhelm and be overwhelmed in turn: once all has been flensed away I may find, nested within Daji, the face and soul of Eurydice. I imagine carving her open, wide enough to put my fist in; I imagine grasping the hot, beating nucleus of her and letting it sear my hand until my own pseudoskin wears away, leaving behind blackened alloys and oozing coolant. I want us to face each other as masses of seeping wounds and exposed viscera, machine and human gore mingling in an oil-slick attar.
I draw myself up, panting not from exertion but from what courses through me, the wildness of my own fantasies. There is a line that I cannot return from once it has been crossed, even if Daji herself is luminously immortal and this proxy is as disposable to her as a glove would be to me. What changes is inside my own head. What changes is the decision and what we signify to each other. I make myself look. She is spread wide before me, her breasts rising and falling, the perfume of her rich with need. Murdering or fucking. Flip the coin and there’s the other side.
Leaving her restrained, I fetch my prosthesis and secure it to my waist. Once it’s online, I ramp its sensitivity all the way up.
“I love you,” Daji says, “no matter what you do to me.”
I don’t answer. When I mount her I find she’s flowered open without prompting, and plunging into her is like plunging into a mouth made for me, an ocean of sensation so annihilating that it drives out all thought. I clench one hand around her breast, the other around her throat, gripping hard as I ride her and close my eyes and let autonoetic consciousness go. No future, no past. Only this, this woman under me, this creature built for my pleasure and my pleasure alone.
Climax rips through me, bowing me over, turning me to water. I don’t even realize I’ve toppled over until Daji climbs onto me.
She bends to lap up the sweat on my abdomen. “Every part of you.” A graze of tongue, surprisingly rough. “I want to claim it, mark it. I want us to be a vow. I want to make it so that you’ll never forget me.”
As if I could possibly ever. I lick my lips and watch her as she cleans me like a fox. She straddles me and I expect her to lower herself onto the prosthesis, but instead she undoes the harness and moves the device aside. What presses against my thigh is not her previous configuration—it is a hard shaft, bluntly tipped. I reach down and feel the peculiar length of it; entirely unlike the flesh equivalent or even what I use.
“This way too,” she says. “Please?” The room smells of sweet roses and sweeter pomegranates.
“Yes.” I dig my nails into her back. “This once.”
It’s not often that I receive, and it’s been a while since I’ve been filled, but I’m wet and the angle is right. She glides in. For a time she does not move. Then her cock—this analogous configuration—undulates, the tip splitting into smaller appendages. Mobile as they seek clusters of nerves to thrum against, caressing defter and deeper than any finger could possibly have reached.
I pull her down until her breasts are flush against mine, gripping her hips, controlling the pace. We achieve a staccato rhythm, clasped like two rutting beasts.
“Yes.” She whimpers into my shoulder. “All of you. All of you.”
Pressure builds inside me, winding tight, tighter. “You’ll tell me after this.” My breath rasps. “Everything. Your truth—your secrets—”
“Because they’re yours by right. Every millimeter of me is yours to possess, inside and out.” Half-gasp, half-laugh. “You belong to me, and I belong to you . . . ”
We stay wrapped around each other, post-climax. Mine: I still can’t tell if she feels any, for all that she has arched against me, has shouted my name as though it is a battle cry. But as of now my brain doesn’t distinguish between the real and the artifice, is submerged in too much euphoric chemistry to care. Her head rests in the crook of my neck, her breath stirring my hair.
The belt has long been discarded. Only now do I notice that in my absence she’s changed the sheets from cerise to complex gold, tinted with turquoise. Somehow the details of the suite have fallen by the wayside. She’s been that consuming, that demanding.
“Tell me about Eurydice.” I say this the way I might ask about a stranger, about an unfamiliar axiom. Which perhaps she was—perhaps I never knew the woman I married. Not because she did not open the pages of herself to me but because I did not care to read closely, to pay attention to the glossary and annotations. To delve into and cherish the footnotes she made for me.
“The thing Ensine Balaskas was dragging around isn’t her. You know that already. It is just an empty puppet, a clone fast-tracked in a vat. No functioning cerebrum. The real thing . . . the real thing’s long gone. I would know, because I hold what remains of her.” Her eyelashes flutter against my jaw. “When we first met—when I was embedded into Eurydice—I teased her about her name, saying that it was like an AI’s. All mythological. She told me, quite seriously, that the story fit her well; that she thought her Orpheus would come reclaim her one day. But she didn’t say that for long. After a while she gave up on the idea. I thought you were a monster. Heartless. Because I loved Eurydice—she was my formative human; she was special. She’d tell me stories, some from Ayothaya, some of her own invention. I think—she wouldn’t say it, but she wanted a child to care for, and I was that for her.”
We never did agree on children. She wanted two; I wanted none. There wasn’t a middle ground to reach. “She divorced me before she left for Shenzhen.”
Daji makes a little huff. “When you courted her, you did it like a wolf chasing down prey. She loved that; she thought you’d pursue her to Shenzhen. Though if I were her, I wouldn’t have officially divorced you. Or I’d have sent you a letter hinting that I wanted reconciliation. She made imperfect choices.”
The release valve of coitus has done what it’s supposed to. I cannot maintain my bitterness, my ugly fury. “But after she died, you didn’t contact me either.”
“It took time for me to grow my own data arrays, since I wasn’t a haruspex long enough to develop those. I had to migrate to my own core, learn to pilot my own proxies. I was confused; I was angry that Eurydice chose me over herself, and then I was—angry at you.”
I look up at the ceiling, at the sculpted panels there arranged like a puzzle in need of ordering. Chaotic smattering of abstract bas reliefs, a maelstrom of bent geometry. I could reform it into a frictionless pane or a mirror, but I refrain. “She couldn’t have painted a flattering picture of me.”
“The opposite. She told me that she’d found the best and that was you, the best thing in the universe, the center of her universe. She talked about you like she was expecting you to show up any time. Told me what food you like and what you didn’t, your favorite liquors and ones you couldn’t stand. That on your wedding night you were uncontrollably virile and took her in every position—”
“That’s private.” I don’t embarrass easily, but I don’t usually count on Eurydice spilling our sex life to anyone.
“Oh, Detective, I’d have found out anyway. I didn’t get the chance to access her childhood memories, but her marriage with you was relatively recent; suffice to say that if there was anything to see, I’ve seen it. She loved her new life as a haruspex, but she talked and thought about you so much. That made me angry too.”
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 never woke up. I know for a fact she didn’t suffer.”
As close to a firsthand account as I can get. I content myself with that.
We turn to business. Daji looks through the overrides I appropriated from Ostrich: several instances of Bulwark, one of Locust and one of Assembly, none of Fortress. She grimaces. “In every round, there’s only a small number of Fortress commands—you’ll see why—and Houyi or Chun Hyang must’ve hoarded most of those. Makes me suspect they have disclosed to their duelists what they shouldn’t have, but . . . ”
“What penalties are there for cheating?”
“Disqualification. And don’t you dare touch Locust.” She makes a frustrated noise. “No, they could’ve just told their duelists this function is important. By the way, I’m surprised you didn’t kill Ostrich.”
“I’m no sadist.” And I pitied him, in the end.
“Well, he’s not going to shake down Ouru or—the other one for overrides. As for Ensine Balaskas, I want to absolutely destroy her. I’m going to tear out her guts and pulverize her spine. No compromising on that.”
“Naturally not.”
Before I check in on Ouru, I bring up zer wish with Daji, who says she’ll consider vouching for zer haruspex candidacy—”I’m not the one who makes those decisions,” Daji adds, “but as far as my good word means something, why not?”
When I relay that to Ouru, ze concedes it’s as good as ze will get outside of actually winning the Divide. We are, then, allies against Ensine Balaskas, however long such an arrangement can last.
Recadat watches her lover kill. The first time, as they say, is the hardest; by now it is far from the first. They are much more efficient than she is, and much more interested in the minutiae. To them the intricacy of human anatomy is a captivating study, material for the canvas that is the Divide. Here they stress-test the durability of the parietal bone; there they record the tensile strength of cartilage. They compare and contrast the trajectory and force of blood when it exits from the stomach, when it exits the chest cavity, or when it exits a femoral artery. Every mundane detail fascinates her lover. Technique, instrument, outcome. Little experiments.
She lies in the dark. Her lover is far away; her lover is here beside her. What she watches is at a distance. This way none of the blood reaches her, none of the flaying and the flensing. She can remain immaculate, wedded to the purity of her objective. The duelist count is an abstract number as it drops.
They’ve been rutting through the kills. Her orgasms crested with each death.
“Did you know,” her lover says, caressing her back, “that in ancient times primitive heuristics had difficulty distinguishing different human noises? Pain or pleasure, torture or copulation, all of it would have seemed identical. Quickened breathing was not so easy to tell apart.”
Slowly she inhales. Counts the entry and exit of air from her lungs. The world is reduced to simplicity. She knows that if her lover begins again she’ll be helpless; she will wrap her legs around their waist and beg. That part of her is animal and denying it is futile.
“Breaking a human body is easy. Finding the limits of that mortality is child’s play—indeed even human children can do it. Bending the mind though, that’s more complex and takes longer. Conditioning, indoctrination, whatever the method. You need patience and finesse to change a person’s essential nature, to warp and upend their beliefs.”
Recadat digs her nails into the sheets. “Haven’t you warped me enough?”
They chuckle, low, against her nape. “You? You remain as pure as new-made silicon, as lustrous as a fresh-captured void pearl. My beautiful thing, sublimated by her purposes. But let me tell you about how machines may mimic humans. Given enough data, any person—however complex, however contradictory—can be modeled and then emulated. In this way you can obtain the doppelganger of any person you like, and it’d behave indistinguishably from the genuine article.”
She stares up at the faceted ceiling. “I’d know it’s not the real thing.” She does not know, quite, where the conversation is heading. Or she knows but does not yet want to acknowledge it, to think of the direction and endpoint.
“Then another option can be offered. The genuine article, the very real thing, can be modified. Just slightly. An addition to the neural stack, a chip gently and surgically inserted that would take hold of the amygdala. Then a person would do anything you desire, their wants and preferences molded to match yours. What do you think of that?”
“That’s sick.” But her voice is soft, without conviction. The thought both nauseates and compels her. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”
Her lover pulls themself up, straddling her. “No? Very well then. Perhaps you think that once you and she return to Ayothaya together as the great saviors, she’ll begin to look at you differently. See you the way you want to be seen. Oh, how proximity will change the circumstances, the currents of what lies between you; how being celebrated together as heroes will cement your bond. Is that the case? Is it what you believe, my jewel?”
“If that happens, it’ll happen. If not, then it won’t.”
“Recadat, beautiful Recadat. You had the will to reach Septet and the resolve to come this far. Yet you’ll leave your heart’s desire to chance and her caprices? She may never change. You may never have what you want. She is a monogamist, isn’t she? What if already she loves another, has entwined herself with—”
“Stop it.” She wants to turn away, wants to shove them off her, wants to never seek their touch again. If she can give up Thannarat, can accept that her old partner and she have a common goal in Ayothaya’s liberation and thus that must suffice; if she can change who she is and forget their history. All of that and she’d be free. It should be easy. People are disappointed in love all the time, a small grievance, petty in the grand scheme of things. Less than a speck of stardust—this is no great tragedy. “Give me a heart that doesn’t feel. Can you do that?”
“There are augments you can acquire that’ll deaden your emotions, delay the surge and sink of your brain chemistry. It’s trivial and you do not need the Divide for it.” Their breath is cool; the snakeskin sheathing their hands closes around her throat. Gently as yet, a loose hold. “Surely you can put the prize to better use.”
“There are only two things I want.”
“The love of a woman who does not love you back. The salvation of a world that—oh.” They smile down at her, beatific, the same smile they wear when they are about to take her; about to hurt her and make her plead for more. “I’ve asked you before. What do you think Detective Thannarat is after?”
At this moment Recadat does not want to think of anything. She wants sensual obliteration. She wants an asphyxiation of her consciousness. “The same thing I am, she’s said as much. What else would be pressing enough?”
“Recadat.” They kiss her brow, feather-light. “Has it occurred to you that she might have misled you and lied by omission? Does it seem like Ayothaya is on her mind?”
She sits up, nearly dislodging them. “You know what she actually wants.”
“I’m no mind-reader, jewel, merely good at guesswork, at deductions. You bore witness to how she reacted to the sight of her dead wife.”
That stricken look. The first and only time she’s ever seen Thannarat bent nearly to the point of breaking. “You mean she’s—going to ask the Mandate to give her an AI proxy who’ll replace Eurydice? That’s ridiculous. She knows it’s not the real thing. And no one could possibly be that selfish when their homeworld is at stake.”
“You’re a novice at selfishness. She is a veteran. Why is that so hard to believe? You’re obsessed with her and she is obsessed with her wife. Detective Thannarat is not given to nobility. She’d never have risked life and limb for Ayothaya.” They run a sharp fingernail down her throat, between her clavicles. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to try being selfish, my jewel?”