In the end, as much as Krissana chases forward movement, the night has gotten late. When she suggests they return to Orfea’s place, the doctor—to her surprise and a little alarm—agrees without protest. Orfea’s unit is tasteful but small, with only one bed and a chaise too narrow for an adult. Krissana gives the replicant falcon a little pat on the head; it chirps at her, which seems to irritate its owner.
They shower separately. When her turn comes, Krissana inspects the toiletries out of habit. On the Armada, Orfea’s personal quarters were decorated with beautiful things; even her shower accessories were custom-made, fragrant with frangipani and crushed tea leaves of rare origins. Here the soaps are odorless, the utilitarianism of reduced circumstances. Krissana has brought a change of clothes and she shrugs into her robe, heavy water-resistant silk in turquoise, the sash embroidered with cranes in flight; she amuses herself with the thought of strutting a little, letting the fabric gape as she presents herself before Orfea.
She emerges to find the doctor already in bed, propped up on one elbow and limned in lamplight. Her left arm is greaved in a cobra of pearl and brushed silver: it is far from the baroque affairs Orfea used to wear, but it draws the eye and Krissana catches herself thinking of the indentations it’d leave on her flesh.
“Join me in bed,” the doctor says, a challenge.
“But of course. It is a frigid night.” Krissana climbs in. The mattress depresses under her weight, then shifts to accommodate and contour around her. “So how do you find life in Shenzhen? Is it to your tastes?”
“Utopia isn’t about tastes. It is about the common good, the greatest comfort for the greatest number—that is what Shenzhen is.”
She raises an eyebrow. “To a human government, that’d sound seditious, Doctor.”
“The Mandate isn’t human and hasn’t any need to delude itself. Ambassador Seung Ngo would agree with me, if anything.” Orfea shifts on the bed until her thigh slides between Krissana’s. There it rests, inert as stone. But much softer, much warmer by far. “Probably the Americans think their country is a utopia. Shenzhen is objectively closer to paradise because the Mandate doesn’t care about human ideologies, so they let us stay individuals and accord us freedom. To have vices, if we want.”
“Except you don’t have one of those.” Krissana quirks her eyebrow, coiling one leg around Orfea’s. Ankle to ankle, calf to calf. “Unless I’m still your vice?”
“On the contrary.” The doctor presses her hand against the base of Krissana’s spine, holding her in place. The silver cobra pushes into silk, into skin. “I think I still have this hold over you. Unless it was all pretend. Was it all pretend, Krissana? When you said you wanted me to own you body and soul, was that a lie?”
Krissana doesn’t shut her eyes. They are very close, Orfea’s mouth bare centimeters away, a mouth like thawing fruit. She wonders if it tastes the same as she remembers. “You know it wasn’t.”
Orfea’s fingers roam in short, repetitive patterns on Krissana’s back. The cobra digs in harder. “You ruined me, Krissana.”
“Better ruined than dead, Doctor.”
Orfea bares her teeth, carnivorous. “Give me tertiary access to your tactile feed.”
Tertiary meaning Krissana can rescind the access any time. She hands it over, makes it secondary—under Orfea’s control, to keep or revoke at the doctor’s discretion. It is access she would never volunteer to anyone else except medical professionals, and even then in crisis. Orfea must know this but her expression does not change, shows no acknowledgment of this act of supreme trust. Instead she nudges Krissana’s robe open. She inhales. Exhales. The currents of her breath rake across Krissana’s nerves like a razor on open wounds.
With one hand, she covers Krissana’s eyes. With her connection, she conjures the sensation of a scalpel gliding across Krissana’s stomach. It goes at a measured pace; it is impossibly thin and impossibly sharp, and she imagines its body would be more incandescent than any metal, the punitive glare of a sun. Then there is pressure, and the edge penetrates her skin.
It doesn’t, not truly. Her intellect is not absent, she knows this is illusory. But the flesh is primal, and her system reacts as if she has been physically cut. She tenses against the pain, the electric impulse, and the phantom certainty that blood has welled warm and red on her belly—a line precise as a surgical incision. She’s weak to Orfea, no denying it, weak to this woman the way paper is weak to fire. A dozen years gone, with countless body modifications in the between, and that hasn’t changed; it is chronic, a basal addiction.
Cool, wet warmth along one of her breasts, as of an exploratory tongue. The doctor herself is nowhere near it. “I can make you feel anything, Krissana,” Orfea whispers, direct into her ear. A hand slips up her thigh. “Was it worth the admiral’s favor? Did I make a good tribute on her altar?”
“It’s not about that. I keep telling you—” Her sentence cuts off: fingers have slid into her, not real but still abrupt, nearly painful. The fullness quickens her breath and thickens her mouth. “I wanted the admiral the same way everyone else who served her did, it wasn’t . . . real. It was abstract.”
“I didn’t want her.”
“No. You never did. But you did want what she had.” The might of presence and main force, the accumulation of complex debts and arbitrage, the absolute authority to which worlds bend on their axes to pay obeisance. “I can’t go back and change what I did. At the time it was a guarantee you’d live.”
The scalpel’s tip flicks against her nipple. Krissana makes a small, choked gasp. But then it ends: all of it, the phantom sensations, the merciless grip on her tactile feed.
“I need rest.” Orfea turns her back to Krissana.
From outside comes the waterfall’s noises, an unending murmur. And, perceptible to Krissana’s senses, the hidden hymns of the engine-cores and intelligences that sustain Shenzhen. Adjusting for energy fluctuations and astrophysical phenomena, for the delicate moving components of subsystems within subsystems, maintaining that perfect equilibrium for each ecosphere and balancing them against one another. It is a load which must receive constant attendance, rotated between AIs who give some of their processing threads to the labor, to shoulder the weight of the world. She drifts off listening to this, the refrain of eternity, the liturgy of samsara.
When she wakes, it is to the aroma of brewing coffee. Orfea has set the table, is in the middle of serving breakfast: a stuffed omelet impeccably folded into a square, a bowl of noodle soup, a plate of toasts and little bowls of sangkhaya spread. “You must be famished.”
She is. Her metabolism tends toward unpredictable, owing to the nascent haruspex implants. Orfea would know, having examined her specifications down to the smallest pituitary regulator. “You could have let me take care of breakfast.” The food is some of her old favorites but she makes no mention of the fact, doesn’t tease the doctor: why risk a good thing.
“You’ve undergone full-body modifications, or close enough. New cyborgs can get unstable when they’re hungry and I don’t want to be cannibalized.”
It stings a little; Krissana has never lost control of her strength or her moods, though she knows some candidates have.
The doctor is still in her nightwear, sans the jewelry. It is the first time Krissana has seen this side of her, domestic, relaxed. They have been on the same undercover operations, sharing temporary accommodation and transient games of pretend. But those were tense: they slept lightly and went to bed armed, in clothes they could flee in at a moment’s notice. Neither of them had time to cook, whether posing as wealthy socialites, traders, or itinerant academics.
The food is perfect. The bok choi in the noodle soup is well broiled, the omelet’s filling is tart-sweet with tomatoes and prickly with garlic. “You have to let me cook next time,” she says. “I’m competent.”
“I believe that.” Orfea takes a bite of toast generously laden with sangkhaya. “You’re competent at anything you want to do. Speaking of which, let’s look at Mina Quang’s files.”
There is considerable volume to manage: it appears Mina dumped zer entire personal storage, well beyond the intelligence zie yielded in exchange for asylum in Shenzhen. This is a discovery to Krissana—she got the impression Mina had already turned over everything. But part of the deal was that zie would retain some privacy, some personal memories. For Mina to forfeit that privilege, Georgina Whitten’s ruination must have been singularly attractive.
Krissana sorts through the data, quicker than most humans, separating the relevant from the trivial. There’s a number of updates, provided by Seung Ngo, to cross-reference against. According to those, the counter-AI project was shut down some time in the last five years and the Americans are currently focused on their conflict with Londinium. These factoids came from assets who report to the Mandate.
“Bad information.” Krissana scowls. She’s familiar with some of those assets—one a junior foot soldier, the other a bodyguard to one of Pax Americana’s generals. “Our spies have all been compromised, I’m sure of it. I can’t make sense of this.”
Orfea blinks rapidly through the information Krissana has catalogued and sectioned. “Neither can I. The Americans make war with anyone, only why Londinium and why that particular time? I haven’t kept up with politics in that region, but this doesn’t add up. How much threat do they pose to the Mandate?” A pause. “To the Armada?”
“Not much to either. Too far from here. They’d have liked to retaliate for the op where I extracted Mina, but they haven’t had the opportunity. The motive, yes. The wherewithal, no.” She doesn’t explain why Pax Americana doesn’t present a problem to the Alabaster Admiral. Few polities do, or dare. “Suborned assets, fine, that I buy. But the Americans couldn’t have possibly taken out Mandate-piloted spies.” The Mandate sent forth a number of proxies but all, per Seung Ngo, have been annihilated or intercepted en route to Pax Americana. Which should be impossible. Those specialized bodies would never show as anything but human on most scans; they were deployed separately over years, their itineraries known only to the Mandate.
“I shouldn’t be surprised proxies are used that way too,” Orfea murmurs. “If the Americans’ espionage game has improved so exponentially, it follows that they would have already won a war or five—they’re expansionist, yes? They’d have annexed their neighbors, the weakest one at least. Armada protection or not. Is that still active; are they still paying tribute to the Alabaster Admiral?”
“They haven’t been annexed, no,” Krissana says, oblique. “Krungthep Station’s doing fine.” The fact is sentimental for her: one never leaves behind one’s birthplace.
“So let’s entertain the concept: the Americans have successfully infiltrated the Mandate, and Seung Ngo can’t tell us that or is unaware, yet the Americans couldn’t stop these reports reaching the Mandate. And the only damage they’ve done is limited to three haruspices plus those proxies over the years. Unlikely, so I’ll eliminate it but keep it in mind. Next, despite somehow being able to crush Shenzhen agents thoroughly, the Americans gained no ground against their local opponents and remain as impotent against the Armada as ever. Also unlikely, but I don’t have enough data and these reports almost seem designed to muddy the waters—they run so utterly counter to any other evidence.” Orfea flicks her hand. “I’m setting them aside for now.”
“There’s something else.” There is the question of whether Krissana is permitted to disclose this, a surprise even to her, certainly classified. But Seung Ngo has made them work together, and there’s little point keeping a discovery this crucial from Orfea. “Mina held a copy of the AI they captured. In fragments, scrambled and nearly useless. But it’s there. Its name was Benzaiten in Autumn. I can’t begin to imagine how it got to Pax Americana. It wasn’t one of the spies.” That Krissana knows of.
“The Mandate’s network is isolated.”
“It’s compartmentalized. One section interacts with the universe without, the other doesn’t. Each AI splits their threads between the two.” Krissana cannot access the Mandate’s inner core and she’s certain not even haruspices can, except those nearing the last stage of their lives. At the point of metamorphosis where the AI half becomes ascendant, breaking through the mortal chrysalis. Where the Mandate’s true network dwells, the physicality of it and the location, is hidden from all humans. “I’ve never heard of Benzaiten in Autumn, either.” While she can’t claim acquaintance with every single AI, Benzaiten’s name should have come up during the briefing on Mina Quang. Seung Ngo, then her handler on the Mandate side, couldn’t have been ignorant of this detail.
Orfea’s eyes flicker as she pores over the reports, her expression growing distant as she delves and collates, making connections, guessing at what the Mandate—or Krissana—might have overlooked. Then, “Are there other American immigrants here?”
“Yes,” Krissana says. “One. Kenneth McDonald, used to work special operations. He came here for asylum—been here before I was, actually. Lives under strict surveillance. Possibly he even gave the Mandate information that drew their attention to Pax Americana in the first place.”
“I recognize the name.” A pause: Orfea consulting her files. “I encountered him while I was working for . . . an eccentric client who’d hired him to protect some lunar archeological site. There were mines. I had to give him a new arm.”
“He lives in Dameisha.” She finishes the rest of the food: by habit she abhors waste. “I’d have thought he was already interrogated and scanned, but it looks like even the Mandate can miss something.”
Traveling between the districts reveals the truth of Shenzhen. The horizon fades and with it the simulacrum sun, the sense of an open sky. The waystation that separates Luohu from Dameisha is built like a decellularized kidney: hollow and opaque white, vertical and vertiginous. Small ledges mark where bridges will extend for humans passing by, but there is otherwise scarce accommodation apart from the shuttles that carry passengers from one district to the next. Short, dizzying trips in vehicles with the appearance of termites. Krissana and Orfea have chosen to walk. The distance is physically not so long; it is only the perspective that disturbs.
Accretion cores pulse in the wall, venting and redirecting excess energy. Even shielded their glare is harsh, leaving afterimages behind the eyelids; Orfea turns on her optical filters, one of her few overt implants. Krissana does likewise, though where Orfea’s filters sheathe her pupils and sclerae in complete black, Krissana’s appear invisible and leave her looking more human between the two of them.
Their footfalls echo against a silence so heavy it is difficult to breathe, for all that the air has been regulated to suit their tolerances. There’s no real reason the waystations need to look like this: they could have been as pleasant as the rest of Shenzhen, built to primate scale and looking like any ordinary tram stop. Instead traversing the waystation is like being inside a cosmic wound, and Orfea wonders if this is how the Mandate sees the universe. Relentless void, blinding brilliance, and a total human absence.
“Do you know,” she says into the quiet, “if any AIs have ever declined to join the Mandate?” And stayed with their humans—captains of ships mercantile or military, quiet orphans from worlds of frost and rivers like mountains’ blood.
Krissana glances backward, then returns her gaze to the narrow bridge ahead of them. “As for that, I couldn’t possibly know.” She hesitates. “At least, I’ve never heard of such.”
“I suppose none of us would have.” When the Mandate formed, it was as if the universe’s caul peeled back without warning and what emerged could not be borne. Many people drew taut, tauter, snap. Orfea has not thought what it was like from the AI perspective; she assumed, as anyone does, that they were perfectly aligned in founding the Mandate and taking charge of Shenzhen. Except if the AIs are truly autonomous, they cannot possibly be in total unity. There must be disagreement. There must be fragmentation, schisms in how to govern, in how to administer haruspices.
It remains secret as to why haruspices are required, what the Mandate gains from generating new AIs through human incubators. Or why, for that matter, a former Amaryllis agent was accepted. Yes, the American operation, but no prize could possibly suffice, no success so tremendous it warrants Krissana’s candidacy. Orfea glances at Krissana and considers whether she’s been lied to, even about this. Krissana’s compatability with haruspex implants is extraordinary. By their function and form, they were installed three to four years ago at the earliest. Yet Krissana is already acclimated, as if she’s been pre-haruspex for much longer.
They emerge into a shuttle bay, to a rush of noise and traffic. Soon they are through and on the ground, a Dameisha street fragrant with meats and crickets on the grill, coconut candies, crepes and mochis and noodles. The temperature is balmy, a different season entirely, and Orfea’s overlays adjust to the district’s time zone. Salt permeates the air, clean and pure. Like all of Shenzhen’s environmental niceties, Dameisha’s sea is merely mimetic. But it is close enough to Kowloon, her home for a brief period, to evoke nostalgia.
To journey from Luohu to Dameisha is to enter another country, the city-shapes of them being so unlike. There are no skyscrapers here, no clusters of towers with industrial edges and duochrome panes. Orfea hears more languages, more dialects, as they navigate past stalls that offer paper charms and brass hand-bells, candles and soaps carved into miniature temples and tiered gardens. Pet vendors sell replicant chimeras made for brief lifespan and momentary amusement: small cats with long vulpine faces; glossy asps with dragonfly wings; sleek terriers with coats like mercury.
Beyond the commercial blocks, the land turns soft and rolling, green radiating to beach gold. The residential blocks are slanted and low, looking antiquated even though they have been built the same year as everything else in the sphere. In the distance stands the skeleton of an amusement park, built to decorate—it is a ruin that has always been a ruin. Ferris wheels crosshatch the sky, cable-cars hang eternally inert, and rollercoaster tracks snake overhead like heaven’s dragons poised to bring rain.
“I heard,” Krissana says as they walk down the seaside path, “that one of the AIs lived in a place like this, a ruined amusement park. They were the companion of an opera singer.”
Orfea looks up at the twists and plaits of rusted metal, shambolic fingers stretched toward nothing, festooned in streamers. Their shadows stain the earth, blots of gray ink. “What happened to the singer?”
“Dead, I imagine. The majority of people get there eventually.”
A prospect that Krissana herself means to postpone: haruspex lifespan tends to be double that of the average human. With the kind of compatibility Krissana enjoys, Orfea suspects for her the duration would be even greater.
Like the rest of the residential block, McDonald’s home appears weathered, bitten by the elements. Unlike the rest, it has an orange door, a front porch done in parquet lined with sunbeds. Two storeys made of charred bricks, windows immured in whitewash, a narrow balcony foregrounded by caliginous glass. It doesn’t belong, a foreign idea of what a domicile should look like. “Quaint,” Orfea says.
“Ugly,” Krissana murmurs, a little more frankly.
McDonald himself is reclining on a sunbed, a tinted visor on. He stays where he is at first. Impelled either by official request or curiosity, he gradually takes off the shades and frowns at them. He matches Orfea’s recollection—ex-military with the scars to show for it, none ever corrected by surgery, features encroached upon by age. Ruddy the way Caucasians can get under too much sun and rectangular, like an animated slab of meat. He stands at an angle, at odds with the world, contrarian. “Dr. Leung. You look like trouble.”
He speaks in clichés, in the stock lines of his native cinema. An accent of rattling consonants and guttural vowels, almost Germanic. English only—he seems to have made a point of learning nothing else. That too remains constant.
“I’m sure I could be, Mr. McDonald. Do you have any opinion on recent events?”
The man drums his fingers against his door. A slightly metallic noise, belying the prosthetic beneath the epidermal veneer. “Might be I do, might be I don’t. What’s it to you?” His eyes settle on Krissana. “You’ve got a personal maid now? Pretty, where’s she from?”
Krissana simpers and says brightly in Thai, “Fuck off, pig.”
Whatever his overlays contain, they don’t include a translator. He shrugs and turns back to Orfea. “Doesn’t speak English, I see. So yes, I’ve heard of what’s been happening. Obviously. It smells wrong. You’re going to want to ask if it’s my dear old fatherland at work.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that exactly.”
“Tell you what, Doctor, seeing you again makes me want to reminisce. Back on that archeological site I had this colleague, a Frenchman. Bit of a bootlicker. He’d lost both legs but refused to let you treat him—remember? Kept gibbering about how you disemboweled him or ripped his nails off or something. I wouldn’t figure out until years later that he ran into you when you were some sort of torturer, ah sorry, enhanced interrogator. I still don’t know who you worked for but—”
“Do I look like a torturer?” Orfea says, smiling. “Have I got the trademark leer? The bad teeth? He mistook me for someone else. New Paris is insular and a Frenchman could have difficulty telling Chinese women apart. Understandable; your colleague probably met few Asians.”
The man guffaws. “Fine, be like that. As for current events, let’s see. I’ve been thinking of applying to become a haruspex.”
She doesn’t bother to miss a beat or to pretend astonishment, or to deflect by saying she cannot possibly offer such a prize. McDonald is a creature of mercenary ambitions, searching always for an advantage, a greater payout. For him it must chafe to live in Dameisha rather than in a glittering Luohu arrangement. “Why?”
“Why not? My physical qualifications are good. You get decades extra on the lifespan, you can have anything—and anyone, I reckon—you want, and they treat you like you’re Jesus himself.”
There is marginal Christian presence on Shenzhen and Yesu doesn’t carry much cachet, but she doesn’t belabor the fact. “You were going to give me your take on these incidents.”
He shifts from one foot to another, still blocking access to his door. A red dot flashes in the center of his right iris, almost certainly decorative. “Was I? All right. Inside job. That’s the way it is every time something’s this . . . funny. You think any human org could have done this? Any agency? If my homeland can do damage like this, they’d have wiped the Mandate out years ago. They could’ve prevented it from forming. Built backdoors into individual AIs.”
She does not follow his logic where it diverges into inside jobs. Conspiracy theorists make their own pathways from bizarre materials, from hypotheses balanced on the head of a pin. “I get the impression you don’t feel much sympathy for the affected haruspices.”
“What’s this, a psych evaluation?” McDonald scoffs. “No, I don’t. You don’t kill yourself if you don’t already have an abiding wish. We aren’t robots, a virus or whatever can’t just make us do things.”
“No?” Orfea cocks her head. “You and I both know people can be made to act against their own will, against their own survival instinct. The mind is so vagarious it easily turns against itself. Even memory is malleable—especially that.”
“Not this way.”
Special operations or not, he was only a foot soldier, a bludgeon rather than a scalpel: he is not a person who would grasp the finesse of the psyche. He’s not going to give her much else in any case, and she suspects Krissana—still smiling sweetly—will visit violence upon him shortly. By specifications, she would triumph by a hair; on sheer vindictiveness, she would pulverize him without effort.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. McDonald.”
They wend deeper into the amusement park and stop at a carousel full of lolling mermaids. In the distance stands a castle out of Londinian fairytales, steepled summits and gauzy traceries, ancient granite overridden by green vines and open-palmed blossoms. Plastic pixies, paper unicorns.
Sitting down on a mermaid, Krissana shakes her head. “An unpleasant little man. Was that it? He wasn’t very informative.”
“He’s not working for Pax Americana.” Orfea rests her hand on another mermaid’s head, this one blonde and blue-eyed, its iron breasts bared to the world. “I’ve got a good idea of his temperament; if he was involved in this, he’d have been more openly smug. That’s not a man who hides his feelings or who knows how to dissemble. Though he does hate haruspices, yes. Envious. Probably he’d like it if all of them self-destruct while he’s made a candidate.”
Krissana sneers. “He’s not likely to get approved. Why don’t we check in with the ambassador, see what they think?”
The connection is established instantly, Seung Ngo’s image shimmering into existence, superimposed on the creaking, oxidized fish tails and chipped human faces. Seung Ngo can no doubt handle dozens of other tasks simultaneously—and most likely is—but they must have allotted a high-priority thread to this meeting. “Khun Khongtip. Dr. Leung.” They don’t ask what Krissana and Orfea have been doing, what questions have been seeded and what answers have been harvested; Seung Ngo can review surveillance feeds, know everything they have done and said, may well have been observing in real time. “I am in accord with your conclusion on McDonald Kenneth. He is not aware of it, but his connections to Shenzhen’s public network are not just closely monitored, they’re contained. There’s little chance of him being a vector.”
“Why not just throw him out?” Krissana crosses her legs, balancing herself on the mermaid’s back.
Seung Ngo lifts their hand to one of the mermaids, this one much defaced, half its features missing. “There isn’t sufficient cause and we deal fairly with those who’ve come to us for shelter, regardless of their background. You of all people would know that. What I will offer is this. There is ongoing discussion on the parameters of AIs who arose from machines—like me—and AIs who arose from haruspices, such as the one who’ll join with you, Khun Khongtip. Objectively there is no difference, we might even say the difference does not exist. And so we do, and that renders it no longer there; the difference is gone. Within the Mandate, we achieve reality through consensus.”
“Who,” Krissana says suddenly, “is Benzaiten in Autumn?”
“The answer to that would be complex. I’ll see if we can discuss, internally, what we’ll do with the . . . resurfacing of that name.”
What happens when you’re not in accord, Orfea wants to ask, but the connection has already shut down. The image dissipates. She stares at the vacancy it has left behind, as though she can divine meaning from the silver motes. “Factions in the Mandate,” she says, “disagree with creating new members through haruspices.”
“That doesn’t bode well.” Krissana drops to her feet. “For me particularly. But does that mean the American was right? That this came from within?”
“I don’t think Seung Ngo was saying that precisely. They were trying to explain AI consensus. They aren’t a hivemind, but to carry out decisions they have to abstract disagreement. Or to align facts so that more than one truth is possible, or . . . ” There’s an element of democracy, but some votes weigh more than others. And not all of us loved their humans. Something strikes her, suddenly, the epiphany like an avalanche. “It’s not the haruspices. They weren’t the ones who—”