Her carriage is all but empty, sparing her the requirement of desultory interaction. She has been marked for asocial tendencies; her guidance has warned her of the fact more than once. Ahead of her a family has seated themselves, two spouses and one wife talking of parental application in hushed excitement. Next to them are three students, interning at a tax branch, in blue-and-white academic uniforms. They mutter about their aptitudes. At their age they will be receiving their third evaluation: the first early in life, to measure character and inclination. The second to judge academic and vocational training. The third to assign employment. Suzhen imagines what it is like to receive all three, to have that certainty of path from birth, lives laid out in a flawless map. To be called citizen from the start.
“You’ve reached your destination, citizen.” Suzhen starts, at first thinking her guidance means quite something else. But the train has simply stopped.
Stepping out of the station there is a brief moment where she’s met with bracing cold, before her clothes adapt and thermoregulate. She has configured them so she’d feel the elements, another old habit. There are no settings that would let her feel discomfort, even then. She heads up the winding, blue stairs. Each step is gently lit, and the metallic glass has more suction than it looks. Even a drunk tourist wouldn’t lose their footing. She emerges. Salt in the air. The night gleams wetly, the grid-lights limpid on the pavement.
She walks down the waterfront onto a bridge of steel cartilage and porphyry, the railings black and high as walls. Underneath, ferries speed by like jeweled sharks, loaded with commuters and travelers from Yudhishthira or Khrut. Going too fast for Suzhen’s filters to identify. She breathes more easily as she leans against the bridge, forehead against frigid glass. Perhaps she needs more than a few hours off. Her guidance would readily request a vacation on her behalf: it pesters her to take just that, every other week. A hobby, she needs one of those. A functioning social life. The stratum on the hierarchy of needs that, however omniscient, Samsara cannot entirely provide when the citizen is not willing.
On a nearby billboard, a Peace Guard feed plays. Dispatch from the frontline, lately more frequent. Footage of combat in thermosphere on one of the barren worlds that exist beyond Samsara’s governance, the domain of warlords. A Peace Guard hornet is engaging a locust formation, its aegis flaring as it dissipates enemy fire, its bulkhead platinum against the planet’s clogged atmosphere and wasteland clouds. The locust formation is quickly broken and dismembered. Their components—armored hull, pilot cradles—plunge through the atmosphere, cinderous as they fall.
This is might.
Next is a scene in a town blackened by artillery, the buildings in ruin, shattered roofs and walls lying in pieces on the russet sand. The skeletons of houses stand bared and ruddy as raw skin. Their tattered inhabitants have been herded out, lined up in the open. They are tearing up images of their masked warlord—the Comet, Suzhen recognizes from the design—and scattering the pieces to the dust-choked wind. Peace Guard soldiers watch them as they do this, soldiers who are not independent beings at all but appendages of the vast intelligence that is Samsara. Soldiers who have one purpose and one only, to abolish the warlords’ reigns and guide humanity back into the fold, the unity of Anatta.
Samsara proper appears too, in its aspect of war: a woman of brilliant crocoite and unforgiving geometry, robed in sun-gleam. Larger than life, nearly four meters in height and with the breadth to match, a figure that shines brighter and realer than any other on the ground. The proxy body has its arms extended, elegant hands held out. The civilians kneel to receive its touch, a golden finger brushing a child’s forehead, a lustrous knuckle beneath an elder’s chin. They kiss its sleeve.
This is mercy.
She watches until the end; a good citizen does not turn away. She watches and remembers a time when she thought the Warlord of the Mirror was a god. The mind of a child is a malleable construct, easily impressed by size, by the polish of boots and the sheen of gunmetal. But that was long ago, another life, before Anatta remade her and reformed her, from vocabulary down to the myelin sheath. And now she is here, she belongs; she is Samsara’s whole and entire.
Suzhen steps into her apartment; the lights come on in tide-green sheets and particulate bettas swim up to her, nuzzling her with duochrome fins. The floor is seabed-dark, soft, swallowing up her feet. What an immense space it is, her home, and how empty. She sheds her clothes as she goes, and in the shower she submits herself to near-scalding water. Cilia scrub at her back, scraping away the day, the murk of catastrophizing. “You’re not very happy, citizen,” her guidance informs her between lathers.
Interacting with the limited AI is fruitless. It is many rungs below Samsara in scope and parameters. There is no personality to it, only surveillance. “I’m good at my job,” she says. But then they all are, it is impossible to be incompetent in this position. A selection agent’s success is measured by how well they follow regulations, how their records are untarnished by failed sponsorship. For Suzhen that last is easy—to date, she’s sponsored no one. The rest is a matter of coping with the wear and tear of the position, and in that too she performs well, requiring less counseling than some. Her heart has been fortified.
In her bed, seafoam sheets and firm mattress, she slips into a simulation. The lover she’s built for herself is a product of memory and footage: a figure that looms above her in armor, face hidden behind a mask and eyes glittering like knifepoints. On occasion she’d browse through connected sessions, where the array of partners are humans cloaked in anonymous avatars. Once she participated in someone’s fantasy, with them playing the role of a halfway house inmate, her the role of a warden. Uniform and baton and tactical gloves. She’d thought this would somehow satisfy her, fix her even, but it only left her feeling dirty and nauseated. She’s tended toward solitary gratification since.
(Her guidance encourages her to seek out in-person intimacy, develop an actual relationship. Save for one exception, she roundly refuses. In the physical world, one-night assignations are difficult to anonymize, and she’s not going to get temporary body mods for strangers who might bring her home from a club. How to explain to her guidance that she cannot connect with a born Anatta citizen, those who have been class prime from their genesis within a womb-tank. She used to seek the company of other refugees, or those descended from refugees, and—again, save for one exception—found even less to build on. Few admit to being class theta or a probationary resident. Those who have transcended those miserable states are more reluctant still to confess that they were ever anything less. In the end she moved to this city, where few refugees—despite proximity to the processing centers—are settled. Better to be a thread in the velvet fabric of citizenship, better to act as though she too has always been class prime.)
The AI lover is no more sophisticated than her guidance, but specialized differently, all its heuristics devoted to learning her pleasures and preferences. In virtuality she is transported to a warship, the noises of a crew at work in the distance. The AI figure hides her from view with its long cape and hefts her up against the wall. It never takes off its armor or its helm. A warlord image, rendered safe by artifice, far softer and gentler than the genuine articles could possibly be, and far more obliging. A knee parts her thighs, a hand works between her legs. She is veiled from the imaginary crew; she pretends to stifle her sounds, moaning into the AI lover’s gauntlet and clinging to its waist. She grips its angular jaw with one hand, imagining that under the mask is a woman’s face of surpassing exquisiteness, a full red mouth.