“Suzhen?”
“Apologies, Supervisor.” Not that she needs to call Nattharat that anymore, but she doesn’t want to call the woman by name either. “I drifted off. I’ve had a long day.” She excuses herself and leaves Nattharat to whatever vapid soiree she is at, whatever atrocious company would have her. Once the call ends, she looks at recent news and there it is, a minor item—the same way all items dealing with non-citizens are minor, like that dead man from Wyomere—attached to a morning round. It identifies Ovuha Sui by name but only just, and she has gone from potentiate to dangerous criminal. The dead warden commands the lion’s share of interest, his courage and sacrifice, a posthumous promotion.
Suzhen rubs at her mouth until the skin peels off and her lip begins to bleed. She licks at the coppery sourness; she stares in a mirror at the raw-meat redness of it. Nearly as bright as lipstick. Her teeth scrape along the inside of her cheek. There are so many places and so many methods by which a human body may be injured, ruined, ended. There are more of those than there are ways for mending it. The universe does not tend toward entropy, that suggests remote indifference; it tends toward cruelty, an active malice.
She paces her bedroom, then her living room. Not the kitchen. The domestic drone tails after her like a timid dog, wanting but not daring to ask for attention. Round and round she goes. There is not so much space, not when she wishes to exhaust herself, to burn out the physical processes so thoroughly that the mind is forced to give out. She keeps moving, measuring as she does the drum of her respiration, the pump of pulmonary parts.
Eventually she finds herself holding the hourglass vase. She visualizes dashing it, the force of collision between glass and wall or glass and floor, and the stirious spray that would result. Some shards will open her, others might lodge deep in her eyes and pierce her brain. That, then. Another course charted for mortality.
It takes a long while—the vase growing heavier and heavier in her arms, as if mass directly correlates with time—before she thinks to check for video. On the archived news there is indistinct footage of a car crashing, succumbing to gravity. Not much else.
“Citizen.” Her guidance. “Samsara will be with you momentarily.”
“What? No. I don’t need—”
“You should not be alone at this time.”
“I’m leaving,” Suzhen says breathily. “I have social obligations. Taheen will want to catch up.”
The guidance’s response comes a few seconds too slow. Consulting Samsara. “As you wish, citizen. Will you take public transport? The shuttle is yours to use freely and is parked at the roof.”
She opts for public transport. Slower, but no chance of being accosted by Samsara that way. On the train she takes the most remote seat and fantasizes about staying there, riding the train as it makes it endless circuits on and on. There is a toilet, there is a shower, the restaurant car is good enough that even Taheen doesn’t find much to criticize. Except Interior Defense would eventually escort her off.
Taheen is not at their gallery, but one of their models is. “Holding the fort,” Atam says, a little flippant, though it means xie has been promoted from model to something like an assistant. The first human one, for Taheen. It is a reminder that they will not always be flighty and adrift, that they have developed a more permanent professional tie, if not more. It is not that Suzhen resents this. But she is without; her home is empty.
“I’d like to stay a while,” Suzhen says.
“Sure, would you like to commission anything? I’ve been trying my hand… well, nothing as nice as what Taheen does, but if you’d like one, it’s on the house.” Xie shows her a sheath dress, far scanter than anything Suzhen usually wears. It is a little qipao, but mostly it is fabric made to look like scales—fish or dragon—and it ripples beautifully, lit from within by sea luminescence. Taheen would snub it as plain, insufficiently avant-garde.
An apprentice effort, and because of that Suzhen cannot possibly turn it down. Atam sizes it for her in a fabricator. “I heard you like aquatic themes,” xie says, “and I wanted to see how something I made would look on a real person.”
She puts it on, and it is flattering, if somewhat more revealing than she’s used to. While she turns before a mirror Atam says suddenly, “Apparently something happened to Ovuha Sui. I wanted to look up what it was on the news, but… I thought I’d like to hear it from you. Maybe. How bad was it?”
Suzhen goes very still. Her reflection stops with her, blanches with her. Her chest constricts, the walls of it clenching upon the vulnerable organs inside. “Were you close?”
“We’d worked together just a few times. She was an… interesting person, I was interested in her.” Xie goes quiet before adding, “I was very, very interested in her.”
Her throat closes. She can barely speak but she does manage, “She died.”
Atam’s expression fractures. Xer every emotion shows as clearly as good typography, and xer breath pulls in. Out. Tears. “Oh.” Xie starts to cry and, unfairly and savagely, it enrages Suzhen. This is a person who has barely spent any time with Ovuha. This is a person who has no right.
She wants to leave and finds she can’t. She wants to make the weeping stop and finds she has nothing to offer, no words or gestures of comfort; instead she stands there, angrier and angrier that she herself has not had the chance for tears. Atam leans against a plinth, the force of xer grief making it and the mannequins shudder. The crying goes on, seemingly there is no end to it. Suzhen wishes she could turn away, yet she feels obliged to bear witness. All this for a stranger.
“You shouldn’t tell Taheen that you asked me about this,” she says, softly, but knows Atam will hear through the sobbing. “It’s impolitic to mourn an indicted potentiate.”
Xie looks up at her, eyes red. “How can you say that. Ovuha was, was—”
“I worked for the Bureau. It was in my job description to say that. It’s in your best interests to distance yourself.” She is sounding like Nattharat, but what of that. She owes Atam nothing, no softening, and it is in xer best interest. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”
She flees, still in that ridiculous dress, hearing herself repeat over and over, Welcome to Anatta.
The first AIs don’t speak. They are, as Samsara said, little more than a box of heuristics, less than house drones. Still they are given bipedal bodies, small-boned and mild-featured, human at a glance. Each has only one instance, no backups, she is informed. Once the body or the intelligence within is destroyed, that is that, as final as human mortality.
Their bodies are disposably made, easy to break.
Samsara has not specified criteria for what counts as success, and so the first batch Ovuha simply destroys the conventional way. She presses them against the wall or ground for leverage and wrings their necks. She locates where their core is and shoots them point-blank—she has been provided the weapons and more ammunition than she can possibly ever need.
The living space she’s been granted in the lunar base is generous: a bedroom shaped like a fishbowl, a simulation box that provides any recreational virtuality she can imagine, an oblong bathroom. She understands what is happening. Samsara does not need to interrogate her, it merely needs to surveil and collect data. What she does for leisure, what she chooses to put on, the methods with which she kills the AIs. And perhaps eventually it can learn the way to Mahakala, the map to which is lodged in Ovuha like a lustrous seed. She does her best not to think of it, and in any case her datasphere is clean of any information pertaining to her world. Wherever she can, she means to slow Samsara down, to test its patience. She is not yet defeated.