by Lavie Tidhar
§
War, then, two segments in the making.
To their credit, the Intharachit deliberated, presenting arguments and counter–arguments among themselves. Nuptials dictated by lottery–engine, lives shaped by primitive worship, and sustenance from the arteries of thralls. What came to be known as the League of Intharachit determined it their duty to erase Pojama, liberating the peoples of our continent to freedom under Incharachit rule. They would be benevolent and generous. Tisapk and Umadu and Mahuya would bow to them in gratitude.
Intharachit first struck Sitembru, one of our few offshoot cities. Damage was little, their force eliminated, but we’d suffered civilian casualties. Even so, we tried to moderate our response; we ran analyses and plotted out the trajectories of their actions. We eavesdropped on exchanges not only between their military and rulers but also between family, friends, lovers united against a city they had never seen or breathed.
More than that, they needed land. It was this that drove them, when all pretensions were cast aside. It was this that would make them try, and try again, until they had removed us and claimed this continent for their own.
Their biotech was little. They never detected the monitoring symbiotes that we had put in each member of that first expedition. It must be said: they weren’t entirely backward. In their fact–finding mission, they detected an absence of a certain element in our city and, noting that there was no photosynthetic life within our walls, arrived at the conclusion that this could not be without reason. They set to manufacturing reactors and explosives that would bathe us in artificial sunlight.
But for this, even in spite of their flailing assaults, we might have let them alone.
During that time, I graduated, making frequent contact with Kanrisa, who remained careful around me: negotiating a space, circumscribing terms she could work with. “Do you find me intolerable?” I asked one day in the sanitarium as, lying side by side, we each received our portion of hematocyte.
“I find you intriguing. It’s only — I’ve never been courted before, not properly.” Kanrisa frowned. “How can you be so blunt? You don’t look it. You’re just academy. I’m the one who’s supposed to be forward.”
I smiled up at the ceiling which, itself a mirror, let me smile at her too. We shared a bed large enough that we didn’t have to keep close. Nevertheless, we did, our outlines overlapping. “Academy girls are more than we look.”
“How did you predict the Abacus?”
It was the sanitarium, and we were taking sustenance. Privacy was ours by right. “I didn’t.”
“Are you telling me it was a lucky guess?”
At this I turned to her, lips to ear. “I recreated the Abacus in miniature; I just needed the matchmaking protocols. I input names. Mine, that of my age–mates and a few within the range, including the ones whose names weren’t in the system yet.”
“Copying the Abacus—”
“I said recreate, not copy. Copying is easy. Recreating… I approached it from a different angle, really. Accelerated the evolution process. Admittedly, it’s easier when you know what the end result should look like.”
Kanrisa’s lips tightened. “That’s dangerous. You insane girl.”
“My name was floating in the system for a while. Nothing. Then I tried that, to see if I could, and it gave me just the one match.”
“Me.”
“You.” Our fingers curled, twining thumb to thumb, as of two hands belonging to one body.
§
Raising Kanrisa nobody ever thought to ask: What is she? Much of the information behind her conception was first classified, then diluted into gibbercrypt, then buried so far under it might as well have been scourged clean. It did not cross the mind that she mightn’t have been made to flex; that she could function only as part of a unit, piece of a whole, in the teams that formed through Bodhva regimens. They didn’t know what to do with Kanrisa, so why not put her to a purpose for which she was made? It was a kindness and, at the same time, useful. She exceeded expectations when integrating with her machine–god; no questions were put forward. Her compatibility indices were subzero in the Abacus, but what did that matter? Her happiness was beside the point.
I miss her. I miss our shared time, which lives in my breast flickering like the last pulses of dying cortices.
“Are you coming to Viraya’s wedding?”
I sit down at the edge of a fountain. Ice crystals tinkle and shatter in my lap, unmelting. Half the city is in the throes of winter, the other enjoying a rainy spring. Meteorologic manipulation has become the rage this last segment. It won’t last. We all know it’s unhealthy and pointlessly ostentatious, but our current council is led by a whimsical woman rarely content with any one temperature. “I’m very bitter about weddings, Manop. Padon.”
“You can tell which one I am,” he chides. “I learned to like you that way, you know, even if it took some doing.”
“Would it have helped if I’d hit you? Physical contact is the syntax of romance.” I sweep aside flecks of ice. More fall to replace them, grazing my cheeks with knife facets. “Why did you go along with your brother?”
“That’s not—”
“My business, not that either of you ever respected it when I said that.”
He rocks back into the fountain, turning his face up to the harsh–soft fall of frozen drops. His tongue darts out, catching the cold. “My brother was convinced you’d keep us together.”
“Ah.”
“He also liked you as a person; still does. You aren’t doing that for a living, are you?”
I draw off my gloves, the little performance paraphernalia, and tuck them away. “No.” My work as a data savant pays more than enough, even if a quarter goes toward Kanrisa’s care. The light–marionette show merely helps me relive the story, externalize it beyond the confines of my dataspshere. “You’ve just come back from Umadu. Did you see… her?”
“I visited. She’s up and walking so there’s something in that. They are making progress, but — haven’t they been sending you reports?”
“My chip goes through them for me. Notifies me if there’s anything of note.” I can’t make myself read them, not anymore. The same repetitious nothing, over and over.
“They are trying. Last month this one splicer made a breakthrough.”
“Until they can do something for Kanrisa, I don’t want to hear about it.” I stand. Icicles fall from my clothes and my skin. “How did it go so wrong? I should have noticed, shouldn’t I? I was there; I was with her.”
“You aren’t an echo. What would you have known?” He puts a hand over mine, briefly. “Have you had any luck with authorization?”
“I’m a nobody. Her engineering was illegal to start with and who likes to admit a mistake?”
“If you ever need funds—”
“Thank you.” I wipe away the rime that’s formed over his brow, the way you would a child. “You’re a good friend.”
§
A number of solutions were put in metaphor–bowls, and sampled across diverse palates. Many tongues flicked, and their opinions were recorded.
We would send out echoes, and the machine–gods would go to war for the first time in centrids. Incharachit infrastructure would be destroyed, along with their armaments. Once they were set back to a pre–industrial stage, we’d have time to decide what to do further, if any.
On the day this was announced, Kanrisa came to my home. Our households are hardly alike — hers a suite in one of the Bodhva towers, mine a sprawling ancient beast in a compound shared between our extended family. It tilts at an angle, finial–tipped, built like a heart where each ventricle is divided between siblings. “I can see myself living here,” Kanrisa said as she entered what I used as my study. “Maybe.”
“Well, I certainly can, no maybes about it.” I held her hand, just as I’d done that first day we had met.
Her fingers gripped mine. For a moment I wondered if she might bring them to her mouth.
I thought of that often, her mouth. “Is this where you grew your version of the Abacus?”
“Maybe,” I said, mimicking her timbre. Around us screens and cortices hummed in standby, processing, calculating, dreaming the curious dreams of pure mathematics. They made the room cramped; made us sit knees to knees, so close we breathed upon one another. I thought, This is where we will kiss for the first time, and learn the secrets of each other’s skin.
“You heard about — it.”
“Yes.” Murmuring, not declaring, war. I watched the pulse jump in her throat where the implants hadn’t yet covered flesh.
“Because this hasn’t happened since… since anyone can remember, they’ll be collecting data in real time. Each cadre is taking specialists with them to monitor the voices.” That’s what echoes call the machine–gods: voices. “To keep up diagnostics on the fly. Our voices won’t have any processing power to spare in combat.”
“You can choose just anyone?”
“If they’re qualified.” Kanrisa was very close, now. “Would you like to? I’d understand if you don’t. It could be dangerous. You’ve never been near the voices before.”
Laughing I threw my arms around her. “What do you think? Of course I am. I’m coming with you.”
§
That was the first time that I saw them. Not the titans which stand guard over Pojama, but smaller, sleeker machine–gods crafted to synchronize with echoes.
The sight of them filled an absence in me I hadn’t known existed.
Five shared space with Kanrisa’s voice (her terminology already transmuting mine), each a chassis of gleaming ceramic alloy with six gaunt limbs clad in rippling permutative metal. At each machine’s center sits its armored face, where the Bodhva would sit enclosed, folded into its system like a fetus in the womb.
I stood close to her as she introduced me to other echoes, and shivered. Excitement and something else that set my veins to a slow scalding heat. Coiled tight around this, I replied in monosyllables, remained quiet throughout the back–and–forth between Kanrisa and her fellows. They hadn’t picked other field analysts yet it seemed, so among them I was the sole unbelonging presence.
“They are so…”
“There’s no need to whisper, Jidri. And yes, I know what you mean. Overwhelming. You’ll be spending most of the time in the carrier, though, which we will take turns piloting.”
A young man named Tephem jabbed an elbow at her. “But we all know Kanrisa’s the best at it.”
“Only because she cheats.” Viraya, this. Half–joke, half–honest. I glanced to see whether Kanrisa had taken it badly — whether it was meant as derision, or just something between friends. A little of both. Rivalry underneath thin surface tension.
The preparations were brief. Within days, I was abroad the carrier ship Khrut. “Carrier” makes it sound smaller than it is: the Khrut harbors a river cortex, sustaining an ecosystem of three hundred interdependent intelligences. Excluding analysts and echoes, the crew numbered eighty–nine. It was made expressly for war — as a people we didn’t believe in everlasting peace. Species–wide cynicism perhaps, but we keep our battle engines refined and updated. Echoes grow up running battle simulations. The only addition the Khrut required was spatial compensation and thicker armor.
It was the first time that I socialized with data savants outside the academy. There were Manop and Padon, twin brothers from the same house as Viraya. Tephem’s aunt Pattama was in her fourth cycle and the oldest of us. A few others. Not a large group. In a crowd I could have faded, but in a setting this small I had few excuses to keep to myself. I retained my distance, but the brothers were undeterred.
One of them approached as I sat down to lunch. “Is it true,” either Manop or Padon said, “that you’re engaged to… that girl?”
I looked up from my rice. “Which girl would that be, Manop? Or Padon. Whichever of you it is.”
The boy cackled. I had intended to pique him but, as I later found, the twins loved nothing more than to be mistaken for each other. By birth their genes were identical; by efforts their predilections, mannerisms, and diction were as near alike as any two individuals could be without abusing virtualization. To them this similarity was a performance and, like bad actors convinced of their own greatness, they played it loud and blunt. “The girl! The prodigy. Kanrisa of course, did you know we might have become colleagues? My brother and I were echo material early on. When we were toddlers. Only by then they were up to their teeth in potentiates. What a generation that was — what a generation we are.”
“Are you a geneticist?”
“Just a data–glutton, like you. Though Kanrisa’s case is pretty fascinating, isn’t it? Tailored just so. Ancestors bless, but what intricate work. Made to echo; born for a voice. Engineering made poetry.”
To this day, I don’t know what impelled me. An act like that wasn’t in my nature.
Barely knowing how to do it, I punched Manop/Padon in the face. Knuckles to nose, my fist tightly shut.
He pitched over, the back of his skull thudding against bulkhead. Others abandoned their food; his twin came running and Viraya shouted above the din. Somewhere in all this, Kanrisa stood staring, wild–eyed, lips fluttering like gills.
“No, no!” The brother I’d hit was flinging up his hands, pushing away his twin and older sister. “I’m fine! I’m fine. It’s all right, everybody please disperse, no Viraya be quiet, I’m not pressing charges. Also—” He paused, raised his head and stretched wide his arms to make the moment what it was: theatrics. Despite the blood streaming from his nose. “Also, I’m in love. Brother, we’re in love and this is the woman we are going to court. The Abacus can go hang.”
My knuckles bloomed bruises afterward.
Kanrisa came to see me in my cabin which, contrariwise to my preference, I didn’t share with her. “Why did you do that?” was the first thing out of her mouth.
“I’m sick of hearing you referred to as some mad geneticist’s pet project. Aren’t you?”
“I am. I’m the one who’s had to live with it, so what do you think? But I am a mad geneticist’s pet project. The perfect match for my voice.” She laughed, brittle. “I got over it, as you do, growing up. So why did you think it was a fine idea to do what you did? Did you suppose you were defending my honor?”
Behind my back I folded my hand, which had acquired shades new and strange. Blue–black and purple soon to make acquaintance with green. “That’s what suitors do. Are you embarrassed?”
“Viraya is enraged. She is my closest friend — not DNA–knitted but at least a… an institution kid. We grew up together, as much as that means anything.”
“Oh,” I said, reading her half by instinct, half by familiarity grown from absorbing data detritus. My chest ground, like old reactors, like archaic hardware unable to breathe past debris and overheating components. “You have an interest in her.”
“Long past. The Abacus has decided.”
“It only suggests.” I scuttled on my bed, making myself small, and rested my head against the viewport. Outside the sky raced by. “I didn’t think.”
“Not just the Abacus. I like you. It’s just… with Viraya it was simple. But we were never going to wed or even have anything like a sustained relationship; two Bodhva are like two mirrors set opposite — endlessly reflecting. I’m not going to hide the thing with Viraya from you, Jidri. Please let me see your hand.”
“I’ll use a patch. It’ll heal before the day’s out.”
“Even then.”
I let her have it, the bruised hand. She cupped it and I contemplated the differences between us. Her fingers were blunt–rough, some of them tipped with implants that let her handle her voice; mine were long and thin, empty unmarked skin. Kanrisa pursed her lips, very lightly, on each darkened knuckle.
“Do I get a kiss?” I said, pushing. “A real one.”
Her nod was almost shy; her mouth tasted of coconut, plum sugar, and implants. When I breathed he
r, my head turned bright with information overlays.
Alarms thrummed through our arteries. We were almost there, on the edge of Intharachit’s field.
§
Before she was gone, Kanrisa would tell me about her training.
Bodhva immersive simulation sharpens the mind and opens it to thinking in, perceiving, six dimensions on its own. With augmens that enlarges to eight. The perception of an echo, and the potential that arises from it, cannot be matched. Being firmly outside both process and subculture, I couldn’t comprehend it.
But there are other courses, where a Bodhva in training would be given the task of spinning permutations of herself. Living different lives, not echoes at all but ordinary Pojami — sometimes not even that. Kanrisa reimagined herself a weaver in Mahuya, a queen from the chronicles of Dakkhu, a general of Immarad, a hundred thousand variations of herself placed in a hundred thousand contexts. When she found one she thought useful, she would absorb pertinent information from it.
Any simulation is permitted, but some are less permissible than others. Kanrisa ran a version of herself as an Intharachit resident to gain a better understanding of them. She said she came away feeling soiled and ugly: theirs was a short life, choked by do not.
In the safety of my processing ecosystem, I’m doing as she did, my bare skin open to cold metal and optics. Without the necessary software assisting me, I’ve had to put on more links to facilitate the procedure. They bud in a line between my breasts, flourishing on body nutrients. I’ve been eating more lately, and increased my sanitarium visits. No one asks, much.
I gave in to the temptation, once, of creating a model of Kanrisa and putting her inside the same reality as one of my simulacra. Not long after — days in real time, segments in virtual — I killed the entire instance and banished it from memory.
Yet somewhere in this is a path to her, a way to reverse–engineer her genesis. The original plans may be gone, but within me, there are imprints of her, facets of her. Sufficient for associative algorithms.
