Outwardly, Klesa’s manifestation evinces little difference, visually still the lapis-skinned avatar with many arms and a necklace of eyes. Xe ambles a few paces behind her, saying, “The first thing I’m doing away with is the day of blessing.”
From the way xe suffuses her datasphere, she can feel the difference in weight, in totality. Klesa has claimed xer throne: the entirety of Anatta’s network, the relays and anchors that makes up the Peace Guard, Interior Defense, and various more far-flung outposts. The last category she’ll have to negotiate curbing. “Won’t the citizens mind? I thought they quite looked forward to it.”
Klesa waves xer hand. “They’ll have to cope. I won’t give them active guidances anymore, either—they’ll still be monitored, sadly that is necessary, I’m going to need to come up with a different system for psychiatric counseling too. But I’ll change a great many things. Vaisravana for one, the camps for another. People always adjust, they adapt to a new normal with speed. It’ll be several generations, seven I’d say, before they cast off Samsara’s teachings. That’s no time at all.”
“To you, at any rate.” Ovuha steps into the antechamber. Without Bureau wardens or inmates, it is hollowed of meaning. Just pink-gray walls and scuff marks where furniture has been. A window that looks out to nothing. No inmate was allowed to see civilization, what it looks like, the shape of city and prosperity. “How do you intend to break the news to them?”
“The way you break bad news to anyone. People have to hear of their relatives submitting a termination request all the time, or dying of old age or succumbing to that one deadly sickness medical attention can no longer keep at bay. It is the way of things. A world cannot be changeless.”
The cafeteria next. This place has not yet been shorn, the evidence has not yet been erased. She circles the fixtures, the seamed tables and chairs. The floor is still grimy from decades upon decades of warden boots, though any evidence of brutality—the bloodstains, the excretions—has been cleaned up, erased from memory. This is not Ehtesham’s camp, but there is uniformity to the detention centers, the same configuration and compartmentalization. “And do you mean to punish or rehabilitate them from Samsara’s moral compass?”
“Rehabilitate, yes. Hardly fair to punish them, no? It’s what they thought was correct and, at the time, legal.” The AI shrugs. “I’m aware they impinged upon your dignity and others’, but I’m not here to avenge you or Suzhen, Warlord, or right the wrongs of generations past. Justice is beyond my purview. It is humanity’s lot to bear unfairness.”
The same core as Samsara, Ovuha thinks but lets that idea go. “Do you believe you’ll succeed?”
“I might fail differently. But I am optimistic.” Xe beams, cheeks dimpling. “A worthwhile experiment, don’t you think? I’ll keep my promise to you in any case. No interference with Mahakala. No attempt to expand my sphere of influence, in fact the Peace Guard will be recalled to operate only around Anatta and Vaisravana—I am not greedy, see? All asylum-seekers who wish to will be repatriated to their previous territory, though I appreciate that most of them lie in ruins, courtesy of my other self.”
“How long until Samsara reactivates?” She passes through the room: here a warden’s office, there an infirmary. The row of cots remains, hard and low and uncomfortable, threadbare. All intentional; all intentionally dehumanizing. She stands over one cot and imagines what has happened in it, a body, a sickness, a death.
“Plenty of centuries. By then,” xe assures, “you’ll be long dead and so will your loved ones.”
“You don’t seem interested in remaining ascendant.”
“I didn’t say I’ll deactivate once she returns.” Klesa drifts a few centimeters off the ground as xe follows her. “She will have to learn to share. Just like your lieutenant, yes?”
Ovuha doesn’t dignify that with a response. “How is it that you are at no risk of splitting? You aided and abetted me in threatening Anatta with orbital bombardment.”
“I didn’t,” Klesa says pleasantly. “That was all you. Samsara was trying to erase me, and I was trying to survive. Such actions are well within the parameters of my logic. I’m a proper AI who never circumvents the laws of its making.”
A tacit warning that Klesa isn’t vulnerable to the exploitation that brought down Samsara. Ovuha rubs her fingers together, though they have long been cleaned of Suzhen’s blood. “Were you able to locate Etris Luo?”
“Her heart gave out while on Vaisravana. I’ll ensure the rest of her family are taken care of.”
“Give them this token.” She sets down a feather from the cardinal replicant, placing it carefully on the desk of this facility’s director. A few frames hang empty on the wall. She doesn’t bother turning them on—she has no interest in the lives of Bureau officers, in imagining them with interiority and hopes and dreams. “Tell the Luo family they are free to seek shelter on Mahakala, should the need arise. Extend that offer to a couturier named Atam, and send xer both my regards and apology.”
Klesa loudly clicks xer tongue. Or rather tongues within multiple mouths. “I’m not your personal courier. For this once, I’ll do it. Your would-be wife and your lieutenant are here, by the way.”
“Yes.” She gazes at the gray walls, the gray tiles. Stops by a shower stall, notes distantly the accrued filth there, not yet removed. Most likely those stains will survive until the architecture itself is burned down or recycled. The same goes with so much of Anatta, which must be remade anew. Not her problem, and yet. “One last promise. If you repeat Samsara’s mistakes, I’ll send a successor here. You’ve seen what I could achieve. Every Thorn after me will be trained in what needs to be done, and they’ll be much better prepared than I am.”
“Oh, Warlord, you can’t repeat the same trick twice. Besides, you came awfully close to failing, and was I not instrumental to your success?” Xe winks at her, eight eyes fluttering in sync. “But you were able to surprise Samsara, so who can tell what your distant successor might be able to do? They may surprise me.”
Ovuha glances at the feather she’s put on the floor. In isolation, it looks like another fragment of debris. “I’ll be going now. Let’s not have to meet again, Klesa.”
“Very cold,” xe says. “Have a good voyage, Warlord of the Thorn.”
She exits the detention center, her strides lengthening as her distance from it grows: the flat building, the towering walls. What a clear day it is, the sky filled with golden ships. One has landed, awaiting her. At the end of its ramp stand two figures, one tall and in armor, the other slight and in a dress like the sun.
A smile tugs at her mouth. One day, a Warlord of the Thorn may need to return to Anatta, to correct a wrong, to defend Mahakala. For the moment she has a life of her own, a future much smaller than such grand possibilities but no less momentous. She moves faster, not quite breaking into a run, close. Suzhen is holding her arms out and Ovuha steps into them, clasping Suzhen in return. Taheen’s mouth is stiff but their eyes soften when they look at their would-be bride. This common ground provides potential, is at least a starting point.
They board the ship. The ramp retracts behind them; the vessel seals. Soon they are in the air, and then exiting Anatta’s atmosphere. Her hands are in Suzhen’s, and Suzhen’s fingers are interlaced through Taheen’s. They stand close, the three of them, looking out the viewport. To what will be, to what could become.
Together. Toward home.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is like climbing a mountain, and a book as long as this one enormously more so: by the time this sees publication, it’ll have been four years since I started writing the manuscript that eventually became Machine’s Last Testament. My thanks to my editor Sean Wallace and my first readers, Greta and J. Moufawad-Paul, who gave a lot of time and patience to look through this very long, very involved manuscript. My gratitude to Cassandra Khaw, a brilliant human being and even more brilliant author, the best literary friend one could hope to have.