The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (122 page)

The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base them in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabits the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game pf which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of
Town and Country.
That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and assassination of Sajida Rana.

That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’ description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that I was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemi sphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and; oh yes, failing.

“And what is it then?”

“The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.”

“Why?”

“Do you never give presents to your parents?”

“You’re privileged to this information?”

“I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco . . .”

“Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.” Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. “There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.”

“None,” said Shiv. It was some time since had laughed his vile, superior laugh.

“It’s already happening.” And we thought we had won a water war.

“There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a
settlement.”
Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. “Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.”

She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.

“Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.”

I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.

“What have you done?” I cried. My voice was small and shrill.

“Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.”

“Your biochip interface.”

“Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Distributed dust-processing.”

“Explain.”

Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.

Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.

“You’re years away from this.” I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.

“Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.”

“How?” I cried again. Now the ayah was staring concerned at me.

Shiv pointed a finger to the night sky.

“I could report you,” I said. “Americans don’t take kindly to having their security hacked.”

“You can’t stop it,” Shiv said. “Vish, you’re not the future any more.”

Those words, of all that Shiv spoke in the garden, clung to me. Gliding silently through Delhi in the smooth-running black government car, the men in their white shirts, the woman in their coloured shoes, the cars and the buzzing phatphats seemed insubstantial. The city was still thrilled with its brilliant victory – only a drubbing in cricket would have exercised public excitement more – but the crowds seemed staged, like extras, and the lights and streets as false as a set on
Town and Country.
How would we survive without our national panacea? But Shiv had confirmed, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent a new generation of Threes from arising. They could already be stirring into sentience, like my divine namesake on his scared turtle Kurma churning the sacred milk into creation. I was acutely aware of the clouds of aeais all around me, penetrating and interpenetrating, layer upon layer, level upon level, many and one. There was no place in the two Delhis for the ancient djinns. The aeais had displaced them. This was their city. Settlement was the only answer. Dust blew through the streets, dust upon dust. I had seen the end of history and still my feet did not touch the floor of the limo.

I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv’s way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the back seat of the limo, I realised my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India’s brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for succcess. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.

I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chose to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasing unrecognisable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition; had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not. I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said,
now, now’s the time for that divorce.
Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.

A Father Festooned with Memory

Wait! One more trick. You’ll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven’t seen anything yet, just a bit of running on circles and jumping through hoops. Yes. I know it’s very very late and the sun will soon be up the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and I appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.

And anyway, I haven’t finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.

The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.

I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife – with her blessing and a farewell kiss – my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance which could not be undone and turned saddhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming in to the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminium flanks of the godowns and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It’s a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressway, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge slow trains materialising like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessing as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Did the passengers even glance me through the darkened glass? If so I must have seemed a very strange saddhu to them. The littlest saddhu. Small but determined, beating forward with my staff at every stride.

What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don’t think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead-end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I’m a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji’s boy. That same night I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell; that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired, I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breath in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my eleven-year-old glottis would allow:
wake up! Wake up!
Shiv’s future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.