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In this way she made them wage war, negotiate treaties, develop primitive poetry. In this way she discovered what they became when they dissolved. It was time-consuming and too individual for mass production, but she was diligent. She saw the potential, and made more.

Sometimes she fed the peacock out of her hand, and found she could be full that way.

By the second anniversary of her operation, she was ready.

Charinda’s house is a stage. It tells of a cluttered life, mildly temperamental: mementos littering the floor, framed stills of friends, personal data pocking and inscribing the projected autumn sky. Aborted prostheses murmur in the walls and swing from the ceiling to the tune of cardiac arrest, casting six-point shadows. Silent intelligences, suspended on the cusp of permanent zeros, bristle within the house cortices.

When there is a new client, she would purge the house to a blank slate. Windows angled to catch and slant the sunshine, limning the walls in soft dream-light. Empty rooms, empty floors.

Stepping in, Lunha shields her eyes, an affected gesture made more garish by the prismatic reflections eeling down her wrist. Her vision adjusts to sun-glare or darkness effortlessly, Charinda knows: the best the army can provide.

“Your body,” the general says. “Have you had it for long?”

“It’s considered rude,” Charinda says easily, “to inquire. Much as it would be if I asked you why you’re female now when scarce an hour ago you were a man.”

“I recognize the make. I’m not asking as an outsider; my augmens works are extensive.”

“You don’t wear yours openly.” She switches on furniture. Plush chairs and a faceted table unfold, sheathed in haptics and contour sensors. “What brought you to Laithirat?”

“When I left the Hegemony, I found myself troubled by a mathematical burden. One of your predictives should be able to solve that, and I’ve come to negotiate for it.”

“In your hand my oracles would become weapons to render civilizations into history, prosperity into genocide. I’m not interested in abetting you.”

Lunha smiles with a mouth painted and shaped for an idol’s pout. “I don’t need artificial prophets whispering in my ear to carry out war. This burden is of a personal nature. I could give my word that I won’t use your children to scorch so much as a single city block, extinguish so much as one solitary life.”

“A pledge full of loopholes.” Charinda opens a server rack. “I’d like to do a deep scan, just to be sure you haven’t set aside a partition for an intelligence cluster.”

“As a rule, I don’t lie. I was a soldier, not a diplomat.”

“Is that all you are? Have you never aspired to anything else?”

“When I was very little I thought of becoming a scholar, working with classics or ancient history.” Lunha’s voice has turned detached and melodious, as if presenting someone else’s life. “A while later I thought of dance, theater, music. Later still I performed exceptionally well in a certain aptitude test, and discovered that I enjoyed putting my mind to work in that capacity. Tiansong has its own defense force, but joining the Hegemony’s gave me a wider scope with which to exercise my imagination.”

“And so the deaths of billions are tattooed on your fingerprint,” Charinda says, keeping her voice warm, this side of voluptuous. “An engineer with a peacock in her middle isn’t going to scare you. A deep scan, please.”

Lunha raises an eyebrow, but complies. The spiders are discarded to perish on Charinda’s carpet, breaking down to proteins that the house quickly absorbs. Stripped of porcelain coating Lunha is hard muscles, thick thighs and a torso mapped with scars from duels and failed assassins. The scan shows a plated skeleton, filtered digestive organs, and neural enhancers built like constellations to orbit the sun of her thought. Grafted onto that, serpentine and gangrenous, bides the Hegemony’s parting gift.

“Your mathematical burden,” Charinda says, examining that knot of encryption, “appears to be a killswitch.”

“I’ve forced it into a reset loop, but it won’t always hold. I like to imagine a tech executing the termination command over and over.” Lunha laughs softly, eyes half-lidded. “The next one decompiling it, rebuilding it, trying again. The one after that coming to the realization that it’s never going to activate. As problems go, your clusters are uniquely placed to solve it.”

“By prolonging your life at all I’ll be adding to an interminable slaughter toll.”

“Good calculation takes into account both sides of the equation: acceptable losses, a threshold of collateral damage you will not cross. Would you prefer the wars of the universe helmed by commanders who cause carnage for its own sake and trigger supernovae for the adrenaline rush of it? Conflict will happen with or without me. Even if I fell today, even if I was never born. But I’m tidy; many are not.”

“That’s self-serving logic.” Charinda tilts her head; the peacock chirps, baring razor teeth. She has no more love for the Hegemony any other Laithirat born and bred. “What can you offer me?”

“That depends.” Lunha undocks, a hiss of body sockets and ports in release. “Name what you lack or want, and that’ll be our starting point.”

“I won’t haggle, General. There’s one thing I want, and one only. I haven’t any use for fancies, and any essentials I need are already mine. You don’t have to offer up the riches of worlds like dripping sweets or the mastery of star systems like savory meat.”

“Yes?”

“I want to be free of Esithu.”

Charinda’s surgery was performed remotely. She met Esithu afterward at a reception, for the first and last time.

Despite being wanted on most planets under Hegemonic jurisdiction and several not, Esithu walked openly. Their triplet bodies—the ultimate prostheses—spoke and acted with apparent independence, one making conversation with the Duke of River Seven and another with the Vice-Tetrarch. The third sampled frozen fruits wrapped in heated spice pastes, scorched eels wriggling in puddles of chili salt.

“Ah,” the cyberneticist said, looking up. “A celebrity.”

Charinda had brought a bowl of ape ears studded at lobe and whorls with pearly roe, braised in oyster essence. She put one piece to Esithu’s mouth. “In your presence I can’t claim to be that. A satellite, maybe. Lesser, definitely.”

They obliged with a bite, licking unborn fish off Charinda’s thumb. “I’m glad you came, since I wanted to speak to you directly. There’s an individual, famous or infamous depending on your point of view. We’ve a pact, she and I, to stay out of each other’s way and cooperate when short-term goals align: at present such is the case. You’ll notice that I didn’t exact payment for your operation.”

“I was hoping you considered me a charity case.”

“You don’t require my charity,” Esithu said, raising a glass. They did not drink. “Most people would rather I keep my charity away from them—the other side of space-time, for preference. When the day comes you’ll commit yourself to this individual or I’ll shut down your implant. Don’t take it personally. Your specialty singled you out for her purposes, and I hear she’s a polite guest.”

Pressed afterward Charinda would not be able to tell what Esithu looked or sounded like. No security footage, omniscient or personal, captured them. Neither the Duke nor the Vice-Tetrarch could recall what they spoke. There was only the certainty, prickling like thorns under skin, that Esithu was there.

The petals on Charinda’s cheeks deepen in color. Some of them shed free of the stems at her chin, dusting her collarbones in pollen. It’s the season for that, and she doesn’t try to hide them any more than she tries to hide the peacock. In public she attracts stares.

The general does not. Chameleon matrices cover her grid presence and though she wears no physical mods, she goes unrecognized in train lobbies or crowded promenades. There are many on Laithirat who, though no more desirous of Hegemonic rule than Charinda, would eagerly turn Lunha in for those impossible prizes: they owe a Tiansong native little, an ex-soldier nothing.

“Wouldn’t it better serve you to commission a skilled cyberneticist?” Lunha asks as they settle under one of Charinda’s hybrids, a canopy of linguistic fruits and axiomatic fronds, infrared flowers igniting as evening draws on.

“You think I haven’t tried? Not even the best know how to bar Esithu from access, and they’ve all been of the opinion that it’s what I implicitly agreed to.” She plucks a pomegranate, breaks it open for zircon couplets and obsidian epigrams seeded by local poets. The quality has been uneven lately but the subjects have not. A trend for lamentations and famine, ruinscapes and seas blasted fatalist-scarlet. “Help yourself.”

The general picks a mangosteen. It splits open to six plump segments inscribed with astrophysics theories. “Botanic splicing for a hobby?”

“I like trees. I’ve donated these for public use; anyone can enter data to pattern cultivars. There’s some automatic curation but for the most part it’s unregulated, and I quite like the results.”

Lunha eats the mangosteen segment by segment, variables briefly lighting up her lips and sternum as she swallows. “In theory your predictives can calculate anything.”

“In theory,” Charinda says, rolling the taste of an enjambment on her tongue. The consistency is elastic, pleasantly chewy. “It hinges on what input is fed to it and how much; it depends on the application. If any fool could use them to great success, the universe would be full of miraculous reversals, inexplicable plenty, and we’d all be winners.”

“Do they project results alone, or can they be used to generate a set of circumstances through which a desired outcome may be achieved?”

“Both. But the more variables, the more difficult it is to use. Estimating a result is much easier and takes a smaller cluster.”

Lunha catches a falling petal. Severed from Charinda it curls in on itself, withering to black crumbs. “Might I try my hand at it?”

“I can give you a set.”

“Not so advanced it may solve my little inconvenience, of course. It won’t have to be. I just need to familiarize.”

The general spends the next week in battle simulations. She has requested Charinda obtain the most complex available, scenarios where success is impossible; she plays with handicaps of number and resources, terrain and logistics.

Charinda watches the visuals, as often rapid-fire abstractions as they are animalistic hyper-realism. “You nearly died serving the Hegemony. What was it like when you woke up and discovered yourself a full cyborg?”

Lunha maneuvers one of her buffer hive-states into position. “The reconstruction was cellular, and before my injury I was already more implants than not. I entered officer school when I was young, and standard-issue augmens started a year in. Gradual, with physical therapy to ease the transition. But it was enhancement rather than replacement. Yours is . . . drastic.”

“We weren’t talking about me, General.” In the simulation, human-shaped units blister and shrivel under a warp-sleet. The physics model, Charinda has to admit, is superb. “Did you enjoy your work?”

“All career soldiers enjoy their work. If not the massacre—and many do relish that—it’s the practice of forging individuals into units and fitting them into a strategy. A mathematical pleasure, if you will.”

Charinda unlatches her ribcage. The umbilici unspool as the peacock steps out, tugging at her like ligaments. “It’s said you deserted the Hegemony when serving the side that always wins began to sour. No challenge, no sport.”

“A cynical opinion to take, not to mention sociopathic.” Lunha allows the bird into her lap, where it pecks at her secondskin, indenting the fabric with green triangles. “But my specialty is what it is, with just one kind of use.”

“You could take up another occupation.”

“I could, but I’ll always carry my name and my deeds.” Lunha’s swarm opponents are pinned down, one glimpse of whirring blades and eyes, before they dissipate under optical scatter-fire. The general pauses the sequence. “I’ve grasped how your predictives operate.”

Charinda watches Lunha’s expression closely. “How so?”

“I’ve been using the algorithms after I finish a skirmish. The results they produce are in line with how the game resolves—until I input my data. Your clusters can’t hold a behavioral profile. Grow one that can, feed it data of the implant and Esithu.”

In her place the peacock plays low, amused notes. “Even if it was that simple, my oracles aren’t easy to produce. To develop one to a stage where it’d have that capacity would take a decade.”

“Under what conditions are they grown?”

“Virtual wars,” Charinda says, after a moment. “I hardwire them with an instinct to proliferate, set them up with competitive templates. Winning clusters produce more sophisticated algorithms. It
isn’t
a battle game. The clusters aren’t units to be controlled, and the system is mine alone. Access isn’t something I will compromise.”

The general nods. “I could accelerate the process. What do you say to a restricted sync that’ll give me temporary control?”

Charinda sips the air through her teeth. “A sync is both ways.”

“By definition. Shall we get to it?”

When she was young, full-on sync was Charinda’s drug of choice—edgy and uncontrolled, an indulgence in abandon. That was
before,
when she could afford to be reckless, when her body was just a body. She does not like to think of herself as weaker now, but there’s a line of demarcation: before, after. Charinda of before a different nation with a language of her own, one that Charinda of after has chosen to forget.

This is compartmentalized, boundaries clear and hard between their data streams. Neither of them wishes to lose herself in the other. But permeability is inevitable.

The peacock rattles Charinda’s ribcage and her teeth quiver at the roots. Lunha’s recent memory stains hers like ink in water: the general piloting a reversal engine in vertiginous silence, her skin gray with dead-sun ashes. Probability fluxes making prisms on the viewport of her ship, compression ice making glass of her fingertips; one of her arms is dead from integrity bullets, plastic tendons snapped. A battle of foregone result—carefully sown implosions come to fruit, taking out a Hegemonic supply fleet.