Now Will Machines Devour the Stars (Machine Mandate Book 5) by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Author:Benjanun Sriduangkaew [Sriduangkaew, Benjanun]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: science fiction, novella
ISBN: 9781607015512
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2022-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

In One of Sunder, Anoushka examines the evidence of a puzzle that should have been obvious to her but whose improbability has excluded it from her threat modeling—an idea that has not occurred to her in her wildest imagination, even though it ought to have factored in from the start. Daji’s findings are unambiguous, more precise than Saamiye’s because she knew what she was looking for. The AI admits as much: that she has seen this before. The bodies, per her explanation, are completely human except for a minor alteration of neurology, a nanochip inserted not into the brainstem but low in the spinal column. Control is relayed from an AI core but on a different bandwidth, disguised to avoid detection; it resembles no conventional Mandate signal. Daji has attached the signal’s fluctuating, twisting pattern samples.

I would guess, the AI added, that your wife is kept . . . elsewhere. She’s almost certainly alive. That’s how the AI piloting her clone can replicate her behavior: by observing the real thing constantly and closely.

Left unsaid that once the AI in question has learned enough, Numadesi would be terminated, all the better to replace her for good. Anoushka reads on.

Since you assert that your dead lieutenant’s clone appeared to you while in lacunal space, I should guess it means the controlling AI split off a minor instance and attached it to the body. Probably of limited processing power and dependent on their equipment, meaning it extinguished after you killed the clone. For the one pretending to be your wife Numadesi, it would require continuous network access to function as well as it does.

Anoushka doesn’t bother to look over her shoulder in case the minor instance in question has not extinguished. Briefly she wonders what a limited AI with no proxy—or in this case, with no slaved clone—can do. Damage to her harrier’s systems, possibly. That has not yet happened. No point worrying at the prospect. She shuts her eyes, imagining the gray nothingness surrounding her ship. One of Sunder is an artifact, taken apart and put back together, upgraded again and again over the decades. It was the same ship that brought her to Sumadram, the world where she met Numadesi; the same ship that carried her and Numadesi to missions during those deadly years when she—Alabaster Admiral title or not—had to execute her most lucrative contracts, because she had not yet secured loyalty and troops that’d make the Armada what it is today. The harrier is small, nothing like proper housing, and yet it is as close as she has to a true, personal home. More than that it was their home, in those benighted years when she fended off assassination attempts from within and without. In One of Sunder she and Numadesi were inextricably bound, each other’s sanctuary.

Many things in her life have been discarded, by force or by intent. She’s shed people and history with ease: Imhaan’s mortal coil in the black earth is testament. There is only one thing, one person, she will preserve at any cost.

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