Idempotency (7 page)

The chat window dissolved peacefully, unlike the lines of worry now firmly etched onto Dylan’s forehead. He’d spent months recovering from his deathTrip, and this man had just cast his entire experience into question within minutes.

As Dylan questioned his sanity, Korak was again whispering inscrutable frustrations, his red eyes ceaselessly twitching away all the while.

Sindhu R. was born in a small fishing village along the ocean, just south of Chennai, India. The only child of a modest, lower-class fisherman, Sindhu’s mother had died during childbirth, leaving father and daughter alone in a country where loneliness was at a premium. Sindhu grew up bathing in the putrefied waters of the Indian Ocean while feasting on rotten meat and bacteria-laden, genetically altered vegetables. Her childhood consisted of twelve-hour workdays, six days a week, spent under a sweltering heat that radiated off of southeast India’s expansive and shimmering beaches. Hundreds of children battled vagrants for space on the beach as fishing boats floated offshore. As the boats came in, the children waded into the debris-infested ocean waters carrying buckets, nets, and crates. The day’s sickly catch was promptly unloaded, to be sold in the markets the next morning. The only respite came during the summer months, when the heat became so unbearable that the beaches would clear for several hours during midday as people everywhere sought some semblance of shade.

As the sun finished its day, Sindhu’s was just getting started. In the dusky, polluted light of late afternoon, she and her father would walk, hand in hand, back to their hut: a rusted metal shipping container, one of thousands constructed within their village by the Indian government during a rash of building to combat the rampant population growth of the twenty-first century. Sindhu and her father were lucky to have any shelter at all, even if it radiated heat like an oven. Once home, Sindhu would eat a quick meal of rice, lintels, and carrots that looked as if they’d been given growth steroids (because they had). On occasion, Sindhu’s father would thieve a portion of his catch and they would feast like royalty. After her meal, Sindhu would unlock her Net-connected, government-issued school tablet. She would attend a full six hours of virtual classes. After six hours of sleep, her day would repeat, starting with selling their previous day’s catch at the local market.

Sinhu’s father, Ramachandran, had married Sindhu’s now-deceased mother, Tamalika, when they were twenty years young. An arranged marriage between families of common class and village, love followed soon after their ceremony. With the passing of their first anniversary, the Indian government had initiated a countrywide mandatory health and population-enforcement procedure. It was the largest organized health effort in the history of the planet. The government decreed that genetic-based enforcement of childbearing was to become law. All women under thirty years of age were required to receive a gene-altering compound, administered intravenously, eliminating the ability to bear children without an “unlocking” agent. Henceforth, married couples were required to apply for a “child exception,” the granting of which would allow for administration of the unlocking genetic agent. Exceptions were granted primarily based on wealth and cultural standing. Not coincidentally, exceptions were more readily handed out to people matching historical caste names from generations past. The Indian state of Tamil Nadu had been progressive in eschewing caste status in the twentieth century, but capitalism slowly created a new caste system based simply on tax brackets. Isolated exceptions were made for exemplary genetic matchmaking, such as a pair of well-built Olympic athletes, but these exceptions were rare.

The government had sold the population-enforcement act as a necessary requirement for population control to ensure the nation could support their citizens as they aged, with the added benefit of free health care available to all of India’s impoverished. Thus, elemental disease screening and basic inoculations were provided to all citizens as part of the new law. The benevolence of the health screenings did nothing to quell the uproar over the heavy-handed enforcement of the childbearing laws, however. Proponents cited childbearing restrictions in neighboring China and Thailand as precedents, but opponents were quick to point out that those programs were not enforced at the genetic level. After years of debate, however, the law was passed and the enforcement began. The clinics started in the south, and with the help of over a hundred thousand soldiers, the entire country was screened and administered within six short months.

While the more vociferous, erudite, and metropolitan Indian citizens had been debating and protesting the plan’s merits for several years, the poor and unconnected—the slum residents and lower-class villagers—had never heard of the plan prior to its enforcement. Like the diseases being screened for, rumor of the enforcement spread, and the prospect of restricted childbearing created a fervor to get married and pregnant before the enforcement. A counterproductive baby boom exploded from south to north, an event that many scholars should have seen coming, but hadn’t.

Ramachandran and Tamalika had heard the rumors only a few weeks into their marriage. In the following months, they had tried desperately to become pregnant with no success. Tamalika cried to the Gods as she waited in line for hours on the day of their village’s screening. Thousands of soldiers organized the villagers into large groups and then smaller lines, until finally Tamalika was ushered into a tent at the exact moment a rare and particularly destructive monsoon arrived upon the coast. Rain pattered the tent as if Tamalika were inside a drum and God herself was outside beating a rhythm describing anger and decrying fairness simultaneously.

Nine months later Sindhu was born, and Tamalika cried with joy as she held her newborn child and the life passed out of her eyes.

Sindhu’s diligence in her studies was born from a natural curiosity for learning, rather than any pedantic responsibility preached by her father. In fact, Ramachandran rarely had to remind his daughter to do her schoolwork—it was typically the highlight of her day. Eventually her curiosity paid off in the form of consistent excellence during testing, allowing her the extraordinary opportunity to attend a realWorld examination. If she tested well in realWorld, she would be granted the option of attending realWorld school full time. Many villagers and slum dwellers had learned methods to cheat in their virtual studies (no small feat, given the biosecurity protocols of the government-issued tablets) such that they were given the opportunity for the realWorld examination, but nearly all chose not to attend, as they knew a human-monitored test would result in failure. (Only the very wealthy had the means to cheat on those.) Sindhu attended.

The day of the test was a watershed moment in Sindhu’s life. Her father took the day off and accompanied her to the city of Chennai. Once known as Madras during British rule, Chennai had quietly transformed into the largest city in the south of India: a burgeoning metropolis brought to life by an explosion of technology and manufacturing. They took the train, a four-hour ride north on a dilapidated, hundred-year-old rail system. Ramachandran fought off hordes of fellow travelers to gain two adjoining seats in the back of the third-class passenger car. Sindhu avoided eye contact, focusing on the holes in the floorboards by her feet where streams of railway tracks merged into a solid brown as the cars sped up.

The day blurred together, much like the tracks in the floorboards. They arrived at a large train station late in the morning, surrounded by a bustle of people who were late getting to work. At once, they transferred to a monorail system (only half as antiquated as the train) and shuttled their way to the testing site, a towering government-built high-rise just outside of downtown. The test went quickly, and Sindhu knew she had not missed a single answer.

She spent the remainder of the afternoon touring the sprawling city with her father. Westernized culture danced with technology. Skyscrapers reached for the heavens while avoiding eye contact with the crumbling infrastructure at their feet. Retrofitting projects appeared around every corner with an antique stucco architecture being replaced by media-enabled exterior walls. Western fashion—vibrant colors, dynamic media-enabled clothing, and even some dynamic body art—swirled around Sindhu. Advertisements were everywhere: holograms, 3-D video, laser displays. Single-person solar-powered taxis sped chaotically, each with a different advertisement rolling across their small hoods. Even the corner market was impressive; easily fifty times larger than the single market in Sinhu’s small village. Technology powered everything: Transactions were done electronically, even when bartering; colorful logos emblazoned even the simple baskets that held fruit.

Sindhu had been in such awe that talking had become difficult. Her father’s reaction wasn’t much different, until finally they reached the ocean. Although the amount of people at the Chennai beach was exponentially more than in their village, the beach itself was so expansive that it felt proportionally similar. Further, the act of fishing in Chennai was not so different from their own village. The awestruck pair found a safe place to sit among the throngs of people, and both took a moment to catch their breath.

“Sindhu, you did well on the test?” asked Ramachandran in their native and nearly extinct language of Tamil.

“Yes, Father,” she replied sheepishly.

“Good. That’s very good. I’m quite proud of you, Sindhu. Your mother would be proud of you. You get your intellect from her.”

Sindhu looked at her father and smiled.

“Sindhu, if all goes well—as it will—you will be asked to come here to attend high school, and eventually college somewhere even more exotic. I want you to take every opportunity that comes your way. Do not hesitate for a moment to seize an opportunity on account of me being in the village.”

“Okay, Father, I won’t,” Sindhu responded too quickly.

Ramachandran pursed his lips. “You could at least pretend that you will miss me.” He looked from the beach to her and smiled.

“Oh, Father, I will miss you terribly, and I will return every chance I get. Of course I will!” She hugged him and giggled.

“Of course you will.” He smiled and giggled, too, as he hugged her back.

One month later Sindhu would return to Chennai to begin attending high school. Shortly thereafter, her father drowned while fishing at sea when a small monsoon arrived earlier than expected. His passing had not been easy to overcome emotionally, but it served to harden her resolve to excel in school. She would not pass up the opportunities that her father had sacrificed so much for.

High school passed, and Sindhu graduated third in her class of ten thousand students.
Not good enough
, she scolded herself. College followed. The awe of technology held its grip on her since that first day in Chennai with her father, and so she chose to study its brains: software. For this, she moved to Delhi, also studying in the United States at Stanford as an exchange student for several quarters. She would graduate second in her class.
Not good enough
, she scolded herself. Lucrative offers for employment came from every major tech shop in the Silicon Valley (the Bay Area), Silicon Alley (New York), and the Silicon Sound (Seattle)—but she was not finished learning, and so she went on to gain her master’s at Stanford in two short years. Finally, she graduated first in her class.
Adequate.

Her social life during this period had been nearly nonexistent, aside from studying with like-minded and like-driven people. She had quietly grown into a picturesque woman, a fact that many boys were quick to remind her about. She was tall, xthin, and dark, with long, exotic hair and skin softer than helium, such that she might float away if a boy didn’t hold on to her hand. A felinelike, deviously tempting smile centered her petite nose, and her eyes were so large they must have been stolen from a cartoon character. And while she occasionally partook in some random boy’s affections, she was quick to dismiss him a few days later, much to his dismay.

Sindhu R. had defied the odds by simply being born. She hailed from lower-class parents in a small fishing village in southern India. She battled abject poverty with only a single parent to aid her, and she did so without even being aware of it at the time. She conquered all levels of school, all types of ridicule by childhood peers, multiple language barriers, and thick cultural differences. And through it all, Sindhu became arguably the most sought-after computer science graduate in the world. Had her fellow students known this history, it may have made more sense to them when, after graduation, she chose to work for a pittance at a nonprofit company focused on solving the emergent worldwide class-striation issues, rather than accept the largesse of a glossy techno corp.

For a first job out of school, it was adequate.

Meanwhile, deep within an illegal darkVirt, the representation of a burning man stood atop Kraken Mare, a pristine crystalline lake of methane found on Saturn’s moon Titan. The images around Simeon were being beamed into his ocular implants and thus his brain; down to the core of his visual senses, he was standing on Kraken Mare.

Simeon had clicked off from his text chat with Dylan not five minutes earlier, and yet he was already impatient. The next person on his agenda was running late. Normally, this wouldn’t have annoyed him quite so much, but he was waiting for his wife, Nimbus.

A curvy woman with platinum-blonde hair materialized before him sitting on a swiveling stool, which stood atop a methane lake. She wore clothing and makeup befitting her fastidious personality: In other words and as usual, she was dressed to the nines.

“Running late, Nimbus?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Sim, I was busy running your entire operation while you were out in Nevada because you don’t trust people to do your dirty work for you.” She dispensed with her sarcasm and got to the point: “Do you think Dylan will come?”

“I think so, yes.”