“I’m not capable of protecting anyone, Warden.” Her lower body feels far away. There must be more than painkillers in her system. Odd that they haven’t given her trance drugs.
Hinata’s face darts in and out of her sight. An unlovely face, a chameleon because it will never stand out anywhere. It looks kindly now. An actor’s face, if Ovuha thinks about it—apposite. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She tries to push the tube away and finds she’s been strapped to the bed. At most she can move her wrists and her ankles. “I’m a deeply selfish person, Warden Hinata. I expect it shows.”
“People are complicated. We’re a mesh of interconnections. The heart is liable to spontaneity and we don’t always act in our best interests.” There is the slightest lag and Ovuha realizes Hinata’s words are from elsewhere, a script relayed to her by a more skilled interrogator, one who knows how Ovuha talks and what she responds well to. “You weigh what’s given to you, what has been done for you. Loyalty is a fine virtue. Yet sometimes a benefactor isn’t half as generous as they first seem.”
They suspect, Ovuha realizes, not her but Suzhen. Her pulse picks up, just slightly; it would register on her tracker. She can’t begin to surmise whether Suzhen has done something foolhardy, or if it’s simply her association with Ovuha, her behavior that deviates from the Anatta ideal. The crime of treating a potentiate as more than animal, more than an object. “I’m not capable of much,” she repeats, but still this makes no sense. Samsara itself can monitor Suzhen’s every move, nearly every thought. Or perhaps Suzhen’s accrued deviance has at last reached a critical threshold. “I can barely protect myself.”
Hinata frowns, moves as if to press her further, but draws back: whoever putting words in her mouth must have told her to relent for now.
They keep her there under restraints, letting her up only to relieve or clean herself under close watch. She does not see anyone else. Hinata brings her food, monitors her bathroom breaks, keeps up small talk and lets her know that she’s here for her own sake, to recuperate. No further questions come, though she can sense Hinata’s impatience. The warden is on edge, immersed fully within her role, and not just because she is bored and finds this a waste of her time.
There is something more than routine. Ovuha wishes she could speak to someone, anyone other than Hinata. If Suzhen has been arrested, someone in the camp might have heard, or it might be on the news that Ovuha’s no longer able to access. In the camp there are information brokers, of a sort, with outside contacts through a warden they’ve curried favor with. People forge their own barter economy, regardless of context or circumstances. A system must exist that catalogs people and what they can do, separate those who can from those who can’t. Contrary to Samsara’s teachings, this is what Ovuha has always thought is the true core of humanity: the assignment of value, the shifting definition of personhood according to what one is capable and the resources one can provide. The rest is subsequent to this arithmetic, even war.
By the third day, Hinata informs her that she’ll be transferred.
“To a facility where you can recover more comfortably,” the warden says. “It’s one of the better-furnished halfway houses. There’s a garden, you’ll enjoy it.”
“This seems extravagant, Warden. I hardly deserve so much.”
“You merit a second chance. I mean it.”
She’s allowed to put on something with more shape than the inmate smocks, a dun blouse and sienna pants that don’t quite fit but which nevertheless would make her seem almost foreign, elevated, to other inmates. They pass several as Ovuha is escorted out, and even this simple shift in clothing changes everything: she is no longer one of them, and no doubt they believe that she has been granted amnesty. That she is leaving, triumphant, as a potentiate on her second try at citizenship. They’ll wonder what she did to earn this, whom she sold out. She doesn’t see Etris but despite herself she regrets not having delivered on her end of the transaction, a lesson in hand-to-hand, a lesson in surviving Ehtesham’s blood sport. What might have given Etris the slightest advantage and won her way back to her family.
When Ovuha is done with Anatta, no such family will ever be rent apart ever again.
There is not much, yet, that Suzhen can do with the child-body. From her camp she cannot contact the outside world any more than it can reach her, and it’ll be several days before her scheduled supply drop at the forest’s edge. With that comes one of Samsara’s proxies, the real Samsara. Not that the corpse she has found is any less Samsara for its defeat. Almost she wishes she could reactivate it, rouse it to speech and conversation. Would it have the same personality, would it answer her questions. Or would it, as the living Samsara implied, destroy her for being the genuine article to its pretense at humanity. Loving and becoming are nearly synonymous for me. It’s a dangerous boundary. Samsara, adult and looking a little like Suzhen’s mother, frowned. This brings us to this present impasse.
The impasse, she thinks, the AI’s obsession.
She has propped the child-proxy in a chair, facing the wall. She has cleaned it as best she can, though there’s no doing away with the signs of decay. Some coating remains here and there, on the chest, at the elbows and stomach, but most of the body is as poreless and white as albumen. Suzhen has closed the eyelids and found a few eyelashes still attached. Several fingers and toes are missing. But machine death is a sterile thing. Nothing has laid eggs in this body, nothing has grown within or from it, no pupa of any kind abides within the mouth or between joints. She suspects it would have been so even if this had been a normal ecosystem.
When she looks away and looks back again, she half-expects the mannequin to have shifted position. Knees drawn up, head lolling. Or even standing and staring blindly at her. There is so much vested in it, so much that signifies.
An idea comes to her.
She programs the door to lock from the inside as well as outside when she leaves for the day’s scavenging. There is simplicity to this life, she almost wishes it could extend without limit. Send drone clusters ahead to scout during the night, parse their data onto the map and follow those paths. Her objective is clear, the means to reach it mathematical. There are no moral quandaries when it comes to dead machines, no ambiguity. Whatever else Samsara wants, whatever ulterior motives the AI harbors, they are right that this is a welcome departure from her previous post. Here she does not preside over people; she does not determine their lives and deaths, their endless detainment. It does not absolve her—no Anatta citizen is free of complicity—but it makes her less culpable.
Suzhen revisits the sites of combat, the graves. This time she harvests miniature reactors, thermal processors, gyroscope arrays: the components that uphold the inner balance of a machine and the actuators that ensure its locomotion. As many as she can, she gathers pieces that haven’t been blasted beyond use, that look as if they will still take power and function. It is not an exact science and she’s no mechanic. Quantity must do.
When she returns to the cabin, she lays the Samsara-child on the ground. She may not be any sort of engineer, but the drones are. They unfurl their shining razor legs, cut, excavate. They unsheathe the hands they use for precision work, tiny tines and human digits. She assumed them to be simple units, equipped with the barest of heuristics; nevertheless they know their own, even generations removed. The drones are peerless surgeons and cut this body open with precision, down the middle. Past the surface, the human semblance disappears—there are sharp angles and there are coils, couplings and slots and circuits. The drones remove what does not work and replace it with what does, or at least the equivalent. The eye sockets are cleaned then filled with compound lenses, dark, glittering.