When the time comes to rig power from the cabin’s generator, the afternoon has grown long. The drones connect the proxy through a makeshift port, newly chiseled into the small of its back. The eyelids convulse, synthetic ligaments jumping beneath tattered epidermis. One arm flings out, as if reaching for a hand to grasp.
The body goes still. Lacking the heuristic animus, lacking the core of sapience, or just mismatched parts that did not cohere into a whole.
Suzhen steps back, leans against the wall, and breathes out. She is relieved. This is it, then: nothing. A passing fancy. She will turn this proxy in, and when the next supply drop comes she’ll request a return to Indriya. Her work in the jungle is at an end. There’s still a section of terrain she hasn’t visited, but it’ll be a mere formality.
In the evening she sets out, her steps light. When she sees Samsara again she will ask for a favor: for retrieving the body she will have more than earned it, and the AI has been indulgent of her—You can ask me for anything, within reason. No more than a sentimental thing, she will say, she simply wants to see how her former potentiate is doing. That must be permissible.
She sends the drones ahead to scout. They return to report a structure. But many structures exist in the jungle, and those she’s come across so far don’t mean anything. On a whim she stops by a kauri whose trunk is draped in albino orchids that resemble children’s shoes. The bark is pristine. No parasite has ever burrowed beneath it, no bird has drilled into it. A kauri offers few handholds, but this one has more than most. The drones help her up, propelling and levering until she reaches a bough. Not enough altitude by far, but better than from the ground. Most of what she sees is more canopy, more trees with trunks as sheer as ice. The lone finial of a half-finished pagoda, worn down to a stub and the brittle whiteness of salt. It isn’t much of a landmark, though she does wonder how it still stands at all.
More and more she thinks it has not been that long: that Samsara did not put its subjects to sleep for uncountable eons. Chronology provides a sense of scale and the greater the scale, the closer it brings Samsara to godhood. The more immutable Samsara seems, the more impossible it becomes to displace. A quality accomplished via myth-making, via apocrypha. In this way the old deities and legends are pushed out, their places usurped by Samsara.
The drones lead her to the structure they spotted. It is covered in fallen leaves and moss, in orchids of duller colors than the rest. Most she has come across are butterfly-patterned, tiger-striped, brilliant. These are bland green, chameleon to the growths around them, as though planted to mask this place from attention. Underneath the orchids, she can glimpse stone the vivid yellow of pollen.
This seems more intact than most but no more remarkable than the shrines, the pagodas: relics stripped of meaning. She approaches with little expectation. The structure is unimaginatively rectangular, sloped and sunken into the mulch. The yellow material is porous like sandstone. Another artifact of fabricators—she’s found no sedimentary rocks this color in the region.
She circles it, this unremarkable, derelict thing mottled in shadow and orchids. Fifty-six square meters, according to the drones, eight by seven. Small. She can’t imagine what it was built for. The shrines and pagodas are obvious in their intent, but this is drab and flat, featureless. It doesn’t look like a temple, a house, or much else. Almost a child’s approximation of architecture. She trails one gloved hand along one wall, scraping off fistfuls of moss.
Her hand sinks into an indentation, a rusted metal plate set into the yellow stone. A humming vibration—she recoils—and then a voice. “Biological identity confirmed. Welcome home, traveler.”
The voice speaks clearly, enunciation like cut glass. For half a second she thinks she’s been seized by paracusia. She is alone: her guidance remains offline. This is still the ghost liminal. It isn’t that the voice is familiar—this is several notes higher and lilting—but there’s something in the inflection, a machine familiarity to which she has become attuned. She knows, and nevertheless softly asks, “What are you?”
“I am Samsara, the machine for immanence. You would be a descendant of those who created me.” Part of the wall scrapes against the mulch, opening like a palm unclenching from a long-held secret. “Why don’t you come in?”
Onboard the shuttle, Ovuha sits across from Warden Hinata and a second, anonymous warden of nondescript features and pinprick eyes.
It has all the markings of a secure vehicle, the cockpit sealed behind a shielded partition and the window opacity turned tar-black. Hinata can probably see outside well enough through the pilot’s feed, but to the naked eye it is much like sitting within a featureless void. There’s no sense of movement and the engine is quiet; the passenger half is insulated from sight and sound. She wonders how Etris is doing, whether the Wyomere woman will be given another chance in the arena, whether she’s been offered some cruelty that she must complete in order to earn escape. It is not something Ovuha ought to dwell on. She has problems of her own and Etris’ plight is commonplace.
Warden Hinata has her face turned to the window. She is not looking at Ovuha and has not pushed for paralytic restraints. There’s the tracker implant, which can immobilize a potentiate, but either Hinata doesn’t think of Ovuha as a threat or the warden is under order to leave her be. Hinata’s colleague has dozed off.
“It occurs to me,” Ovuha says, “that don’t even know whether you have family, Warden.”
“You don’t.”
It is hard for her to guess where they are, but she suspects they are far out of Indriya. Seaward, judging by the initial direction—what little she saw as they lifted off. Ovuha folds her hands in her lap. “Do you ever find this work unsatisfying? Dull?”
“It is work that needs doing, Ovuha, and finding potentiates worthy of citizenship is its own reward.” This is said plainly: asylum seekers are not individuals but a multitude, formless and nameless, that must be processed en masse. Like raw sewage from which the rare jewel might rise, given patient sifting. The sifting itself being an act of ultimate nobility.
“And when that happens it must be a wonderful surprise.” Ovuha smiles, lets that splendidly engineered face do its part. “It would be easy to insinuate that a warden gains something unsavory from this work. A sense of control, of having power over the powerless, so you might pretend at significance that you don’t otherwise have. But that seems simplistic. People can be more than base urges, can be genuinely made of finer substances. And what a grand gift it is to meet such a person.”
The warden stares, unsure whether she has been insulted. Then she stiffens—another order from her puppeteer telling her to stay put either way.
Ovuha pushes on, partly to locate the limits, the slack this mysterious interlocutor means to grant. “I often think on the functions of how Samsara assigns its citizens to work. Suitable labor must be offered to suitable minds, and there’s much to be said for that which is regular and routine.” On purpose she puts on the most sculpted Putonghua accent, the register of class-prime citizens who attend exquisite weddings and wear clothes made by the Taheen Sahls of the world. “The process fascinates me. Everyone thinks they’re destined for something lofty. What if you’re disappointed?”