Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  “When I was little, I wanted one of my own very much, I suppose. A hero. Doesn’t every child?”

  She remembers what passed for her childhood, though she never had that: on decanting she was full-grown. “Indeed, Your Highness? From what did you need rescue?”

  Savita colors. “Childhood wants are very silly things, Admiral. I probably wanted to be rescued from my etiquette lessons. Here, if you’d like to take a look. We grow as much of our own food as possible. Our bioengineers specialize in it—we have the advantage of not having to worry about parasites, the leviathan’s are biomechanical and live on the outside, not that they’d care to sample what is edible to humans . . . ”

  The princess leads her to an enclosure where her sister keeps large cats: lynxes, leopards, panthers. All tranquilized, blanched of their wits and drained of their instincts. Anoushka sees the fineness of their pelts and could have appreciated them as accessories, as articles of clothing, but breeding them to keep drug-tamed for their entire lives is a squandering of resources. She knows precisely why Rajathi has been indulged like this—the princesses may have anything—but these animals could just as easily have been replicants.

  Finally they stop at a blue, limpid lake. Waist-deep, Anoushka judges, the surface picturesque with lotuses and duckweeds. Another absurd waste, useful for nothing but ornament. Savita expounds on the complicated horticulture, bioengineering and simple gardening that go into the upkeep of this deck, this area.

  Anoushka tugs on the leash, bringing Xuejiao closer. She winds the chain around her fist and runs her fingers down its lustrous length until she reaches the back of her wife’s neck. From there she lets her hand roam. Xuejiao arches.

  The princess falters, trailing off.

  “Do you have a good relationship with Princess Rajathi?” Anoushka asks as she idly strokes down Xuejiao’s spine. “I never had siblings, and growing up with a sister must be a different experience.” In truth she had plenty of fellow clones, but that was not the same—they were not familial, and even if they were none of the royalty would have recognized them as such.

  “Oh, we get along. She is very dear to me. Naturally.”

  She wonders what Savita would do if she were to strip Xuejiao and take her right here in the grass. That the princess is easily distracted when she toys with her lieutenant is blatant—Rajathi’s gossip might have some truth to it, beyond an effort to humiliate Savita. “It must be excellent to be in utter harmony despite what is at stake. In every army, officers would vie against one another—even lethally—for a chance at promotions. You’re blessed to have a sister content to assist you when you rise to your throne.”

  To that Savita only laughs, a small uneasy sound. “I do have to watch for trouble regardless, Admiral. A perfect kingdom does not exist. There’s always the possibility of treason.”

  Such as what led to the sabotage. “Indeed there is. One must balance vigilance and paranoia, isn’t that right, Your Highness? The burden of leaders everywhere.”

  On the opposite shore of the lake, three servants are kneeling in the grass, trimming and planting new flowers. Red-and-yellow birds of paradise, magenta asters, crimson hibiscuses. Perfect specimens, no blossom marred by bugs or worms, the advantage of a closed ecosystem. Anoushka toggles on an optical assist, zooming in on each servant: the same face mirrored thrice and almost the same schooled expression.

  From between a cover of bushes and graybeard moss, a supervisor—they don’t share the servants’ faces—emerges with a swan in their arms. The bird flaps its wings and lunges at its bearer; the person somehow avoids evisceration by long, sharp beaks. They hurry past the gardeners and put the swan into the waters. This time there is no obvious tell but something about this person, this supervisor, does not belong. They look up from the muddy shore, from the swan. An embed glints in their neck, no bigger than five millimeters across. She can’t confirm at this distance but she’s almost certain it is a network augment, the kind that enhances a user’s overlays and signal receiving range. Peculiar.

  The supervisor does nothing remarkable—they bring more swans from a cage out of view and release them into the lake, their motions as sure and practiced as if they’ve been handling half-feral birds all their life. Swan cries resound in the air, resounding between the artificial canopies like wind instruments, unevenly played and badly tuned. The false sky glistens. The lake ripples to the rhythm of the leviathan’s pulse.

  For a second Anoushka feels estranged from the present. Ensnared by the impression that this is not quite real, that she is not quite here, on a deck of the leviathan on which she was birthed: that either she has never left and her last century was a convoluted delirium, or she is still aboard an Amaryllis ship and never arrived here. Mirage upon mirage.

  “Admiral?”

  Xuejiao has slid down to the grass, resting her head against Anoushka’s knee. That more than anything returns her to the here and now, grounds her to what is rather than what was. “I was wondering, Your Highness, whether the auction will continue at all. It is a difficult juncture, to be sure, and you and your mother must root out this perfidy.”

  “The auction will resume shortly,” the princess says. “We will not waste your time or that of our other guests. As soon as things have calmed down a little—”

  The skybox goes out.

  What is left behind—the auxiliary lighting—is anemic, exposing the ceiling as a cavern crisscrossed by nests of symbiotes. Sacs that throb wetly, perspiring from their stems. Small winged rodents that drape themselves across branches of reinforcement, their bodies flat, nearly two-dimensional. Patches of fluorescent flora that flutter gently in the way of anemones. In an instant the illusion of jungle and orchards is gone.

  Beside her, Xuejiao has stood up and detached her leash. She draws a small blade. There are faint clicks as the mannequin dermals that cover her limbs spread in a fine web of mesh armor, extending until she is a figure of moonstone radiance, liquid and shimmering.

  A heavy mass drops from above, landing with loud, bone-shattering force. Dense alloys and actuators. Motion flashes in Anoushka’s peripheral vision, nearly too rapid to track. Her overlays catch it all the same, interpreting visuals into analysis into numbers: speed and trajectory, impact and material composition. With a thought her armor pours over her limb and she catches the strike on her gauntlet, its ablative weave cushioning the impact to her arm.

  The assault drone falls back, servos humming behind plated chassis. Two angular heads, eyeless, and a quadrupedal body lined with sensors along the flanks. It rears up for another attack.

  She kicks it in the midsection, sending it crashing into a banyan tree: wood splinters and behind her Savita screams. One of the drone’s heads twitches in the princess’ direction—interesting, Anoushka thinks before she fires. The drone drops. Two more emerge from the lake, dripping, their chasses slick with water and a layer of camouflage coating. It explains why her overlays never detected them.

  They leap. She shoots them out of the air, a fulmination of ruptured armatures and starburst shock reactors.

  From behind her, Xuejiao throws a disruptor grenade. Heatless, soundless lightning ignites the grove.

  Anoushka’s optical implants normalize her vision within milliseconds. Six hound-drones lie limp on the grass, their cores forced into shutdown, their network functions neutralized. She searches the shore and the ceiling, but no more are forthcoming.

  Savita has collapsed to her knees, hand over her mouth. At a nod from Anoushka, Xuejiao glides over to keep a hold on the princess. Far off, the swans shriek.

  Anoushka nudges one of the assault drones with the toe of her boot. “A little too industrial to belong to the queen—the leviathan doesn’t have its own robotics lab, does it, Princess Savita? Ah.” She rotates one mechanical leg. “Let’s see. The mark of the Nova Legion is emblazoned right here. Very convenient. Whoever sent this must think me a fool. What’s your opinion, Your Highness?”

  “I don’t
know anything of this.” Savita’s voice is high. “I don’t.”

  “Please send your mother a request for an audience, princess. I’d like to talk.”

  The princess looks from Xuejiao to her, her lower lip trembling, her eyes dilated. In the limited light she looks cadaver-gray. Terror has sapped her of dignity, reduced her swiftly. For the moment she is no greater than any of her servants. “Your grenade disabled my network implants. I can’t. Not until we’re clear of the area.”

  Anoushka pulls her lips back—her grin must be enormous, a skull’s, a predator bird’s. Slowly she kneels until she is level with the girl. She draws close enough that her breath would cut across Savita’s skin, raising the fine hairs on her cheeks. “On Vishnu’s Leviathan there is a biomechanical suite, Your Highness, that only you and your family can access. It utilizes the symbiotes as signal repeaters, sends those to a different symbiote that acts as a communication nexus, which then transmits it to the intended recipient who’s hopefully in physical contact with the appropriate receiver. As long as you’re touching the ground or the wall, you should be able to do this—those parasites are everywhere, aren’t they, so small and inconspicuous—even if your overlays are offline. You can direct the leviathan itself, this way, even if all digital channels have been disrupted or jammed.”

  Savita’s mouth is ajar. Her face has gone ashen. “Why did—how did you . . . ”

  “It is prudent to research adversarial territory, princess. Your mother should teach you that, but then you don’t plan to go far from here, do you? For your entire life you are as bound to the leviathan as those symbiotes. Now contact her. I’m sure she would prefer I do nothing drastic to you, and I pray I’ll be due a good explanation from her most royal mouth.”

  It takes Benzaiten mere minutes to conclude what Numadesi already suspected: that for years, Xuejiao and she have been killing each other’s recruits.

  At a glance, this is not obvious. The executions were spread out, and many of the recruits were flagged by other spymasters. Yet browsing the logs shows that either the lieutenant or Numadesi had a hand in each case: a sergeant was caught spying on Numadesi, a captain attempted to sabotage an operation Xuejiao led. These were not frequent—altogether, after irrelevant results have been filtered out, Numadesi had less than a dozen executed and Xuejiao barely ten. But from the outside—in other words, to Anoushka—it might seem that the admiral’s wives are both suspect, striving against one another; that either or both of them could be traitors. The oldest case even predated Xuejiao’s recruitment.

  Somehow Numadesi failed to notice; somehow she did not connect these incidents when it is her function to do so, to notice what her lord does not. The second pair of eyes, the last line of defense.

  “It’s Captain Erisant’s hallmark,” Numadesi says as she paces the parlor. Twilight ripples across the floor, clouds scudding by in fast forward. “The Seven-Sung Fleet began as an information agency, specializing in infiltration and espionage, intelligence trades, rare merchandise procurement. They made the mistake of diversifying into open warfare, but that’s neither here nor there. Captain Erisant liked—likes—to send an operative into deep cover, to unmake eir target from within, eroding the hierarchy and structure one thread at a time.”

  Benzaiten lounges in xer seat, legs propped up, the picture of nonchalance. “And so? The Amaryllis seems in fine shape enough, so it mustn’t have been very successful. These executions didn’t get anyone crucial, did they?” Xe stretches and sweeps one arm through the air like a ballet dancer. “As for the admiral’s second wife, she must have submitted to wearing some sort of kill switch? Anoushka merely needs to activate it. Unless you’re worried she’ll execute you too?”

  She stops, looks at the AI. “There is no such thing.” There used to be, before Anoushka came to power. Abolished since. Occasionally Numadesi imagines what that was like, to always feel this kiss of a blade at the back of one’s neck, in place of the encompassing faith she feels in Anoushka’s presence. “But even if there were, people are not machines, guest of my lord.”

  “I’m a person.” Xe laughs a little. “You mean she will hesitate to trigger that hypothetical kill switch. Even the Alabaster Admiral falls prey to sentiment. But then so do AIs, though in our case there’s always instances and mortality’s not as final. Well, the solution seems simple enough. You contact her, alert her to this grievous duplicity, and let her take it from there.”

  “Yes.” She inhales, deeply and sharply. “I’ll be just a moment.”

  When she reaches for the secure link—the one that’s used only by her and her lord—she finds it offline. Her throat closes. She goes through every available Amaryllis connection and finds the other end unavailable. The admiral’s and Lieutenant Xuejiao’s. All offline. That is impossible. Anoushka’s harrier holds network embeds that would carry the signal to and from nearly anywhere, ferrying it through Amaryllis relays, appropriating outside bandwidth when necessary. Unless those have been destroyed, but there are so many redundancies, ones that Xuejiao wouldn’t know about.

  Another possibility—the two of them are in lacunal space, in the dead zones rather than the grid-linked regions close to the throats and mouths of relays. Except the most recent contact, logged mere hours ago accounting for latency, indicates they were aboard Vishnu’s Leviathan. Numadesi does not entertain the other possibility; that does not bear thinking, not yet. Her lord cannot fall.

  “Benzaiten in Autumn,” she says, “you must have resources beyond our ken. Such vastness must be at your command that lies outside the bounds of human imagination.”

  “Why, of course I do. Flattery’s not going to get you anywhere, Lady Numadesi, though it is lovely to be appreciated once in a while. The days when we were treated like gods are long gone. And I am invested in the admiral surviving and succeeding. What do you require?”

  “I can’t reach her.” Saying it aloud draws the strings of her nerves taut. “Perhaps you’d be able to.”

  “I haven’t been able to contact her since a hundred twenty-five minutes ago. I assumed that was intentional so bringing it up would have been coarse.” Benzaiten pulls xerself upright. “This is vexing. I can’t be there myself.”

  Numadesi’s pulse hammers. “Why not?”

  “My freedom of movement is somewhat impeded when it comes to the leviathan. What’s going on inside there is a . . . ” Xe heaves a theatrical sigh. “Family dispute? I’m not the only AI who’s after the leviathan-making process, and we’re all working covertly. My opponent got there before I did, and if they realize I want in as well they’ll just slaughter all humans onboard and seize the world-beast. The Mandate doesn’t have a treaty with Vishnu’s Leviathan.”

  “That’d unite every single functioning military in a campaign to destroy Shenzhen Sphere.” The realization of long-held fears that the Mandate would turn on humanity, staging massacres at will and orchestrating extinction events on a whim.

  “Such efforts would be resource-intensive, we’ve built the place rather competently and our military’s well-fortified these days. Even if they were successful, incinerating Shenzhen wouldn’t take out the entire Mandate. But my counterpart in Vishnu’s Leviathan will make their butchery of every human in it look plausibly deniable, turn it into a conflict between human factions. I wonder who their instrument is.”

  “None of this you disclosed to my lord.”

  Xe places xer hand on xer chest. “Just as you fully and entirely disclosed your prior association with the Seven-Sung Fleet to her? We all have secrets, Lady Numadesi. If Anoushka had known, she’d be acting differently and thereby alerting my opponent. For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s been killed.”

  “That’s not a reassurance.” She is already spinning out possible courses of action. The obvious: to send in the reinforcements stationed two relays from where Anoushka is and assault the leviathan. Dangerous if the leviathan has been made anechoic and communication is impossible, but physical proximity m
ight allow the reinforcement to establish a link to the admiral. Unless those troops have already been suborned, but she tries not to think of that. In crisis, caution can too easily transmute into the cliff’s edge of paranoia.

  “It isn’t,” Benzaiten agrees. “I may find a way to operate without attracting undue attention, though past a certain point it’ll careen into brute force regardless. Leave it to me.”

  Enticing as the thought is, she knows she will not. “I’ll do my part as I can. I trust you’ll not hinder me.”

  The AI spreads xer hands. “Keep me posted, in case our ploys come into conflict.”

  Numadesi leaves the parlor for her private room, where she sits on the bed that Anoushka shared with her not so long ago. She runs her hand over where her lord has been, the densely made body whose every plane and angle signals strength—as capable of absolute tenderness as savage violence. The indentations creasing the mattress have smoothed out since.

  For a time she watches the leopards, the way dusk cascades down their long-backed frames, the silence with which they traverse their world. She often thinks her lord a little like them, carelessly beautiful and preternaturally at ease. A predator among predators, finer and more splendid than any other, and far deadlier.

  She pulls up Xuejiao’s profile, delving into the background check segments on the off chance that she has been wrong. A recruit is screened not only for their abilities but also their past: their former associates, allegiance, family and lovers. When Xuejiao arrived, she came with a complete history—two mothers on the planet-ship One Thousand Erhus, acquaintances and colleagues from when she worked as a holy assassin; all were investigated when Xuejiao got her promotions, and again when she was courted to be Anoushka’s bride. Numadesi remembers that day with utter clarity—Xuejiao in her red cloudsilk and anklets, swirling, dancing her way into Anoushka’s arms. A private ceremony, attended only by a handful of officers. My little red bird, Anoushka called her new bride, my cardinal.

  How exquisite her lord’s new treasure was, Numadesi thought, how fitting a jewel. Xuejiao’s past looked real then: both parents alive and reachable, an old mentor sending in congratulations. Every care was taken, every social component verified and double-verified, every attack vector preempted.