Shall Machines Divide the Earth Benjanun Sriduangkaew (books for students to read TXT) 📖

like razors on glass, and pulls again. The two of them move into a labyrinth of flora, and soon they disappear from view.

Chapter Six

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