For a time Recadat doesn’t know what to do, or where to go, at all. She’s well-rested—returning to her own room to sleep seems slothful, and Vishrava’s timetable for her is thin on assigned activities. Back in the prison her time was tightly regulated, none of it her own. Here it is the opposite and she finds herself out of practice. She tries not to think about Zerjic, of having severed her only human connection. For a few minutes she ventures into the Garden’s media libraries, searching for anything pertinent to Mahakala—she can’t let go of how familiar the name sounds—but she can find nothing except minor mentions in documentaries. A remote planet governed by an independent warlord, habitable but otherwise unworthy of remark.
Hunger draws her toward the kitchen allotted to Vishrava’s charges. Bit by bit she’s reduced to animal impulses: sex, sleep, food. Would it be so bad. Maybe that is the point of Vishrava’s program—raze down higher thoughts, reduce each person to their basal urges. Or that is the point for Recadat in particular; she is beyond cure, beyond being reassembled into the person she used to be or even to baseline humanity. She could grow used to it, fucking when she wants to, eating when she feels the need, satisfying her body to the annihilation of thoughts and introspection. There are fringe religions like that, whose doctrines regard such as the natural human state. Curiosity and intelligence as marks of sin, the suppression of base needs as evidence of mortality. To be like beasts is to achieve enlightenment, and thus a place closer to the divine forces that seized the universe in their starry grip and birthed creation.
She enters the kitchen to find Ceres butchering a human carcass.
“Calm down,” Ceres says before Recadat can do more than recoil. “This isn’t a real corpse. It’s synthetic meat that looks like a dead person.”
When she takes a closer look, Recadat realizes the body is much less intricate than it should be. Most of its surface is featureless, absent the complexities of human infrastructure; the limbs are missing elbow joints, the fingers are missing nails, and the wrists look boneless. If anything this simplified mannequin appearance is more disturbing than an anatomically correct one, but it corroborates Ceres. Who is cutting a fatty slice out of one pale, voluptuous thigh. A wet noise. A release of fluids, none resembling blood—much thinner and paler, though they do smell copper-sweet. No lymph.
The slices plop into a waiting bowl, already filled with more flesh and a marinade: Recadat smells fish sauce and garlic, palm sugar and cilantro, several other spices that have been overwhelmed by fresh meat.
She licks her mouth, rapidly reorienting. Reminding herself that in the Garden of Atonement, her sense of normalcy must be able to withstand a state of constant flux. “Is this a hobby of yours, pretend cannibalism?”
“Cooking good food is labor-intensive and I make it for our whole ward. I asked Vishrava to make it a little more . . . engaging. Who do you think has been making your meals?” At Recadat’s expression, Ceres bursts into laughter. “I told you. It’s not human meat—we don’t need prion diseases, do we? Look. It doesn’t even have proper internal organs.”
An open chest cavity verifies the claim. The corpse has been neatly synthesized to maximize edible portions: there are much fewer ribs than there should be, placed for structural integrity more than to mimic a human skeleton. A few bulbous, red-brown organs that Recadat surmises substitute for livers. To distract herself she lets her eyes wander to the face. That at least looks normal, a delicate skull, a wide nose and thin eyelashes. The way the body has been produced prevents death’s pallor from taking hold—the cheeks even seem rosy, the lips full and pink. She tries not to think of what she’s been eating. Her gorge twitches. “The face—is that randomly generated?” Her voice is even. It is not as if gore upsets her, and she’s witnessed her share of autopsies.
“The face belongs to an ex-lover of mine. What can I say, I might as well.” Ceres degloves one hand without resistance. She drops the result, meat and tendon, on a chopping board. “I’m surprised you aren’t throwing up.”
“My stomach is stronger than you think.”
“You don’t look it. Everything about you seems ready to break or bleed; you carry yourself like a victim. Zerjic must adore that. Ey is a sadist.” The kitchen knife returns to the body, filleting off more thigh, effortless. “Do you want to know what ey was like before you came along? Still is. But ey gives you a different façade, yes? Sweet and generous, a little possessive, accommodating. You know ey’s a trained killer though, don’t you?”
She stares at Ceres. “You think I’d care about that.”
“Violence is attractive when it’s presented to you as a source of protection. And that’s what you want out of em, isn’t it, to help you survive this place. Maybe it even looks like healing; maybe ey makes you feel complete. You might be so infatuated you’d like to wake up next to em for the rest of your life. How pleasant that would be. Everyone should get to dream.” She sprinkles more pepper into the marinade bowl and adds more palm sugar, then stirs. Her head tilts—the mass of her hair has been piled high on top, sealed inside a net. “Zerjic is a warden’s pet. You do know that? Vishrava’s preferred tool.”
Recadat waits the woman out. By now she’s calmed herself. The pseudo-corpse is unnerving but no worse than any crime scene. She looks for more discrepancies—cataloguing things soothes her. No toenails, no tibia, flat arches on the feet. It’s never been built to stand on its own strength, designed entirely to be prone, convenient to break open and converted to calories. She wonders what the flavor and texture profile is based on. Poultry, likely. Most of her meals have tasted like it.
Ceres peels off her gloves and steps over to a sink, washing and sanitizing her hands. “Have you heard about the evening prayers? But you wouldn’t have, being so fresh an arrival. You should feel lucky I like to be informative. It’s a grand spectacle that happens every few months. Everyone attends. Ask Zerjic about it—ey plays the lead role.”
She has no intention of asking, if only because Ceres has goaded her. And there’s no telling whether Zerjic will even want to speak to her again. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You sound steadier now. Fascinating. I’d like to see how long you last.” Ceres taps her knuckle against the cheek of her ex-lover, lightly stroking, down the chin until she reaches the throat. There her hand closes, first loose then garrote-tight. “Who knows? You might surprise me. Now let me finish this. It’ll be your dinner, after all.”
The next time Qualia flows over her, Recadat is in the middle of morning orisons.
Over the past few mornings Zerjic has kept eir distance, and though it’s left her isolated it has also made her more grounded: removed from someone who intoxicates her, who is to her an exquisite agony. In eir absence she feels sober and sane. She can view the Garden of Atonement with clarity, learn its schematic and visceral equations. The kitchen encounter broke her out of the spell. Something to the meat, the seasoning, the act of observing a knife disassemble flesh. At once mundane and surreal. That evening she ate dinner with a voracious appetite that startled Ceres.
Recadat listens to the call-and-response, still not joining in; no one has admonished her for it. Around her there is a circle of empty lotus seats, as if there exists an aegis about her that forbids human proximity. She wants it to last, and when she feels the tug of the virtuality she at first thinks to reject it. But today the intoning is extended, and what could the wardens chide her over—it is a meditative program, put there for her to use; they have not disabled it during prayers.
She falls in. Each time is easier than the previous.
Mentholated light. A ceiling as translucent and frictionless as an iceberg. She is strapped to an operating cradle, a comfortable one but she is restrained all the same. Medical monitors hum around her, relaying the secrets of her intestines, the peristatic push of her cardiac muscles, the cartography of her nerves and limbic responses. Her line of sight stretches to the window, floor-to-ceiling, at the moment halfway opaqued. Glimpses of a cityscape far off. She knows she is not on a ship. This is a world, with true gravity beneath her and a true atmosphere above.
A woman leans over her. Fair skin, high cheekbones, a razor mouth: the mien of a falcon. Her hair is the shade of frazils under a moonless dark, cut in an elegant bob, long in the front. Recadat has never seen her before but knows she is a doctor. Half-remembered fragments of small talk, faultlessly polite: I specialize in cybernetics, but I no longer practice as such. One stays up to date of course—getting rusty is embarrassing. You no doubt keep up with criminology?
Recadat twitches. She’s never had that conversation.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asks, her voice smooth in the way a knife on silk is smooth. Recadat does not associate doctors with power, as such. Medical authority, yes. This woman though is different. The way she speaks with ease, all the confidence in the universe, far beyond what she wields in the operating room.
An answer leaves Recadat’s lips without her volition. She does not catch it. Her own words dissipate like morning haze, unconnected to the rest of her, or to her memory.
“Yes. I’ve prepared your neurology as well as I can, but this is experimental so there’ll be . . . collateral damage, internally. The payload is inside your implant stems—nobody ever checks those, and the code is chameleon.” A smile lifts one corner of the woman’s mouth. “You don’t have to do much, this has been built to perform autopilot when you access a specific node in their network. When it happens, don’t fight it.”
Recadat moves her mouth. Again no sound comes out, or it does but she can’t hear it, deaf to her own voice. As if she’s in a fugue state. She catches a sentence fragment that swirls within her skull even though it cannot possibly be connected to the conversation: I don’t suppose Mahakala’s warlord . . . ?
“You’re not going to remember most of this. That’s intentional. You’ll be frequently disoriented and your sense of self will be unstable. Personally I wouldn’t volunteer for it, but you seem to want to destroy machines very badly, and the Garden of Atonement is unique for how few AIs inhabit its local network, how insular they are. They hardly communicate with Shenzhen except for the bare necessity. And,” the doctor adds, an afterthought, “you may not survive this.”
“I’m fine with that,” Recadat finds herself saying. “Life is a series of assumed risks. As long as you can guarantee they’ll die.”
“Chun Hyang’s Glaive isn’t in that place, but I appreciate that you are feeling indiscriminate. Of course if we succeed here we can try this elsewhere, though the problem is that the Mandate is good at adapting, whereas customizing one of these takes years . . . ” The woman flicks her black-gloved fingers. “Fortunately we’ve got expert help.”
She opens and closes her hands. “Get on with it, Doctor. I don’t need to get conversant with the technicalities.”
“It’s true, the less you know the less you can remember, and the less compromised you could be. But I was trying to be reassuring—I’m told I should do that more with my patients. Bedside manner and so forth.” The doctor leans closer. “I’m going to put you under now. Your brain is going to be in a state, when we’re done. Not even the best neurosurgeon in the universe could preserve it flawlessly, after all this. Expect false memories.”
Recadat shuts her eyes. Her body drifts, heavy, sinking into sedation’s undertow.
A voice, from beyond her line of sight: “Orfea?” But she knows nobody called that. What an odd name, she thinks as she fades. Orfea. Orpheus. Another Hellenic one or at least derived from it.
The Qualia session ends. The auditorium is empty, every lotus-chair vacated. Not even Mahiravanan in eir colossal proxy remains.
Her senses coil tight. She whips around and there is the familiar figure at the door, its back to her, about to disappear again. This time she does not waste the seconds. She starts running.
Thannarat waits for her, this once. The far end of the corridor. The next corner over. Always a little ahead. She gives chase—once she could run forever, tiger-fleet, down labyrinth streets and beneath honeycomb bridges. In this way, through motion, she will remember who she once was.
A corner, and then a dead end where the hallway has tapered to a narrow intersection of floor and wall, black striped in gold. Thannarat is almost a trick of perception, nearly blending in.
“You didn’t run away from me this time.” Recadat pants as she approaches, her heart percussive behind her sternum.
Thannarat’s smile is faint as she extends her hand. “I want to show you something.”
Recadat takes her old partner’s hand, hyper-aware as she does how much larger it is than hers, how it makes hers look small—delicate. Mutely she allows herself to be led into a wall that has become a door, the shapeshifting architecture of this place, the dizzying fluidity of it. Vertigo pulls at her gut.
They pass through lightless sections, the air frigid, their footfalls echoing strangely: the acoustics of a scar’s interior. Recadat does not let go of Thannarat the entire time, even if she expects the hand in hers to vanish, or for Thannarat to turn into something else—into a featureless mannequin, into an artificial corpse like what Ceres cut up and cooked, into Zerjic. Or to simply evaporate in the way of mist.
Within minutes—or hours, her sense of time turning liminal—they emerge into a ledge. Beyond it a vast gulf yawns, sheer empty space: black, bottomless. Unfinished or else intentionally empty because it is hidden from human view.
“Hold onto me,” Thannarat says and gathers Recadat into her arms.
She doesn’t break into a run. Simply she leaps off the edge.
Recadat’s breath suspends. Her eyes squeeze shut. The pit of her stomach plunges.
And then they land, soft as dandelion on grass. She opens her eyes as Thannarat sets her down and a wall rises behind them, sealing off the chasm. The chamber is hexagonal. A tessellated ceiling that pulses with small needle lights, and at the center an object that hurts Recadat’s eyes to look at. She can only view it peripherally, the black of it so hungry and relentless that her optic nerves avert themselves. Little by little she pieces the visual of it together. A cube wrapped in briars then robed again in a thin, glistening membrane. At once industrial and unnervingly organic.
She has seen one just like this before.
“An AI core,” Thannarat says, unnecessarily. “The Wisdom of Vishrava, to be precise.”
Chun Hyang’s looks just the same. Almost. Some personal touches—now that she’s seen her second she wonders if each AI customizes theirs. Probably. Chun Hyang’s core is rounder, more like a pearl, but the same devouring dark, the same layer of what nearly resembles skin. Elastic, she recalls. Impossible to penetrate, and then she ran out of time, Chun Hyang’s proxies closing in.
Recadat does not reach out to touch the core, as much as she wants to. She remembers it feeling like flesh, like it should easily yield; she remembers her shock at finding out that this is all that an AI boils down to—a single object, destructible, even if she herself failed to break it. “Vishrava’s going to kill both of us.”
“Do you think xe knows either of us is here, Recadat?”
Her skin pricks, as though a thousand thorns have budded underneath. “That’s impossible.”
“Why do you think I’ve made sure not to appear when you have company? The wardens know I exist. But they have a . . . difficult time tracking me.” Thannarat nods at the core. “Even here. I haven’t been able to locate the other two, and this could be a decoy, for all I know. All of this could be an experiment in what it would be like if they allow a ghost to run amok in their pretty orchard.”
“What are they really after?”
“I don’t know any better than you do. I may have a theory. What are you after?”
“You,” Recadat says without thinking, her mouth dry.
Thannarat turns to her. The chamber is so tight that at once she corners Recadat. “And what else, Recadat? I’m not the only one you want.”
“I—that’s . . . ” Zerjic is a port in a tumultuous storm, nothing more. She can’t quite say it. “I want only you.” That comes more easily.
“You want me.” Thannarat’s fingers graze the outline of her cheeks, her jaw. “In what capacity?”
“You know exactly how.”
“Say it. I want to hear it from you. Tempt me. Beg me .”
Every word spoken as though Thannarat has extracted it from the deepest recesses of Recadat’s fantasies. “Use my body,” she whispers through fevered lips. “Break me open. Doesn’t matter if you put me back together. I don’t want to remember anyone else.”
“Yes.” Thannarat grips her waist, lifting her up and propping her against the machine core. “I’ve waited for years to take you, to reduce you to a beast so that together we could rut. I imagined what you’d be like when the veneer of civilization is ripped off, whether you’d be a wild thing for me . . . ”
Recadat scrambles for purchase, finding none on the unnerving, smooth barrier that protects the true body of Vishrava. She clings to Thannarat’s broad shoulders as the first kiss comes, not on her mouth but her throat, pressing against the marks left by Zerjic’s teeth. Pain flares. Thannarat’s teeth are much sharper than Zerjic’s, lupine, and when they break skin she goes rigid. Her own blood warms her. Thannarat licks and sucks, and it is as though the wound pulls on a direct line to the core of her need. Her thighs tense. One of Thannarat’s hands is between her legs, cupping her, and when Thannarat’s tongue runs across her throat she shudders.
Thannarat pins her in place as she comes down, her head light, her muscles loose. A knowing smirk spreads across Thannarat’s face, rouged by Recadat’s blood. “So soon? Your other lover must have taken care of you so poorly.”
Recadat looks away, putting one hand over her mouth as though it is possible to swallow back her own noises. “I wasn’t expecting—”
“Shh.” Thannarat unbuckles her belt. “Our bodies will do the talking. The language of beasts, my little tiger.”
She is flipped onto her stomach and now she has to cling onto the AI’s core, Thannarat’s weight securing her. Her breath comes with difficulty as she’s pressed down, parted first with Thannarat’s blunt fingers, then by something much thicker, much longer. Sensitized as she is, the passage of it is agonizing, each centimeter a small sharp shock. The trajectory of an anonymous encounter in a club scarlet-lit, except the hands on her—the length filling her—belong to the woman she’s wanted since they first met.
Recadat turns her face to her wrist to muffle herself, but there’s no stopping or silencing the other noises, of Thannarat thrusting into her so hard that she jerks forward a little each time; she is almost riding Vishrava’s core—surely an act of blasphemy, here in the Garden of Atonement, and the thought makes her clamp down on Thannarat. Who growls, wordless, and bites her earlobe.
She claws at the AI membrane when Thannarat’s hips rock against her, thrashing as the instrument inside her bottoms out. Thannarat holds her in place with one hand and preternatural strength. Her fingers slip into Recadat’s mouth and press against her tongue as she bucks.
Thannarat slips out of her and lifts her up without effort, turning her around. Studying her with that same faint amusement, an attention that resembles a sculptor’s on her magnum opus than a libidinous lover’s. “Look at you. My little tiger—finely made, and just for me.”
A pleasant ache thrums between her legs. She can barely stand, but Thannarat keeps her upright and lets her perch on the AI core. “I never knew you felt that way.” When she touches her throat, her fingertips come away with blood, though the pain is impossibly distant.
“My heart’s always been yours.” Thannarat licks Recadat’s fingers clean. “I’d like to have been your first, but failing that I shall be your only.”
Has Thannarat always been such a possessive lover, but then Recadat never got a chance to know her in that way. “You said you had a theory about the Garden of Atonement.”
“So amorous.” Thannarat neatly does up Recadat’s trousers one-handed. “My hypothesis is that they are running an experiment to see if civilization can be reversed. Whether human socialization can be stripped off, and each person returned to a state of innocence—satiating the body, soothing simple desires and essential needs.”
Recadat wipes at her mouth and chin, suddenly embarrassed. “To what end?”
“As for that, I can’t say. Boredom? To make us their pets? To put their excess of time and resources to novel use?”
None of the possibilities reassure her. “Will they let me leave by the time my year’s up?”
Thannarat sets her on the ground, careful as though she is made from sandstone and spun salt. “Most probably. I suppose that you could ask. What do you want to do once you’re out of here?”
She says nothing. No particular wish or ambition presents itself. No particular future, as though that part of her cognition’s already been flensed off.
“I’m taking you back to your room,” Thannarat says. Her mouth glistens, rubied by Recadat’s veins. The only lipstick she’d ever wear. “I will visit you again.”