Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  A defiant pigeon stares back at Joey from the ancient bel tree that stands opposite their house, a miraculous survivor of years of street reconstruction, a far too frequently used symbol of hope and resilience for her whole family. She'd recently heard a take on how women should sleep with men who knew the names of trees, which indicated a deep connection to nature. But Joey doesn't know the names of trees herself, so how would she know if these men were telling the truth? As a child, she used to be terrified of the bel tree every time it bore fruit, always picturing those rock-hard green spheres smashing her skull as she crossed underneath. Romola would make her a summer drink from those fruits, a sticky, pale yellow sludge with lots of ice, and she'd never told her all through school that she absolutely hated the taste, that she always imagined her own pulped brain in the glass.

  In the distance, a patriotic song announces the arrival of the local Residents' Welfare Association's guard troop: already, one neighbourhood uncle after another is emerging from a nearby balcony, smog-mask in place, to salute the troops as they pass by. Only the very top-most uncles in the RWA pyramid get to write inspirational messages on the whiteboard at the block's gates: the rest must content themselves with feeling the fire rise once in their loins once a day as the guards march past, before they return to their houses to bully their families, emerging only when the night water-supply siren goes off, to stand in gargoyle-like vigil near their water tanks, waiting in lonely gauntness for the sequence of groans and gurgles that announce the arrival of the day's quota of rust-coloured sludge.

  Their block's guard army has covered itself in glory recently, winning a pitched battle with hired water-mercenaries from a raiding Kalkaji block who were trying to divert a water-truck shipment. They're all dressed as Independence-era Netaji troops, their shout-out to Bengali pride slightly diminished by the printed posters on their backs advertising discounts on paneer specials at a nearby Pure Veg restaurant. Most of the guards are very young, boys displaced from some burned-out village, or tossed out of some horrific brain-wipe camp, and pressed into service. Better in uniform than not: this same cluster of boys would have made Joey very nervous on the street if they weren't saluting her as she passed. They're armed with batons and riot shields, not the 3D-printed handguns that the more up-market guards in Joey's own neighbourhood carry, but their weapons are enough to cause serious damage. Laxmi's told Joey that private RWA armies have their own version of football leagues going on: there are star guards transferred from neighbourhood to neighbourhood at exorbitant price, even coaches and military strategists who run a guard league from the Culture Colonies. Her parents are glad Little Bengal's guards are relatively cheap: guard-army upgrades and water-protection bribe surcharges have been the key reason for South Delhi's ever-increasing rents since the mid-20s. Joey doesn't know how long she's been standing by the balcony door now. Being home is not unlike being at work, it's relentless, it's exhausting, except people listen to her at work, they're paid to, and she has a little more control over the programming.

  -- You seem stressed, texts Narad. Would you like to go to the kitchen? I've made you some iced tea.

  Joey stumbles towards the kitchen. Her family is at it still, it's like they're on loop. Laxmi looks at her with concern as the processor pings to announce completion, and offers to pour her tea out, but Joey waves her and her concerns aside. The tea is good. Staring at the cubes floating in it is even better. Narad blows her kisses from her screen, and the processor's humming again, and she doesn't know what Narad's making now and a little worried because she knows she's going to like it.

  ‘Am I depressed?’ She whispers to Narad.

  -- No. Would you like to-

  She taps Narad silent.

  Her parents are very pleased when Joey interrupts them with a tray full of smoothies, and want to talk her to host an intra-family debate about Rono's future, but Joey's done. She tells them she'll see them soon, and trudges off towards her bedroom. She wishes, later, that she hadn't, because if she had just pretended to care about whatever it was, if she'd just crashed on the sofa and snored until dawn, she wouldn't have been nearest to her father's phone when the message came. She wouldn't have been the one who saw it. She wouldn't have had to tell her father that his oldest friend was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE OFFICE CAR is waiting outside Joey's Harmony Place apartment building when her taxi rattles to a halt behind it, and the driver holds a door open and looks at her suspiciously as she rushes him into her lobby: a quick scan for evidence of illicit sexual activity.

  Her flat is as impeccable as always, everything in its perfect place under this morning's layer of dust, she's just flowers, food and friends away from party-hosting readiness. Joey's flat is her pride and joy, the only part of her life that's wholly adulted (apart from the out-of-order smartwasher), aesthetically arranged (a set designer needed a favour), and adequately tidy (she believes this is because she's very rarely home). She always intends to have many guests over, perhaps next weekend, but there's never time for a proper party, and her last few lonely-swipe male visitors have displayed no interest in interior decoration.

  She can't remember the last guy's face, only his topknot: the memory of it tickling her thighs distracts her briefly. How long ago was it, even? It’s funny how her visual memory’s started working like a three-second SanSan video: he stirs and begins to look up at her, but the memory loops before his eyes appear.

  She's been a Disappointing Daughter already, at the crack of dawn: missed her alarm, dead battery, and ignored Avik's morning irrelevant-feels lament while scurrying around the house trying to find a strong enough network to book a cab. She'd finally had to call the manager of the Little Bengal black-yellow cabstand, an ancient sardar who'd been saying, 'Ok madam, taxi with-AC/without-AC?' to three generations of her family. ‘AC,’ she'd said, while Avik informed Laxmi that there was nothing as crushing as a child's indifference. This had been the last straw — she'd told Avik to feel lucky his irrelevance came with air conditioning, and no one really gave a fuck about it. She'd regretted it immediately, but the damage was done.

  Narad has had her flat powered up and settings-optimised since she entered the lobby. Laundry bag toss, shower, equipment checklist, pack, coffee in flask, mirror scan. She rushes out in fifteen minutes, hair still wet, and remembers only after the elevator doors close that she's forgotten to bring her mask again. But it's a shoot day today, so she doesn't have her usual walk to work.

  The ride to the ground floor is short, but rendered extremely uncomfortable by her neighbours, a trendy and over-familiar Israeli documentary-filmmaker couple wanting to know who she'd hooked up with this weekend, and she can't bring herself to tell them she'd had a wild night consoling her sobbing parents and hearing Rajat Gupta stories. She still doesn't know what drove the Roys and Guptas apart — her last memories of Rajat Uncle were not fond, she'd been fifteen and he'd been creepy, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her up close one night when he was supposed to be sleeping on their sofa and she'd walked past on her way to the fridge to drink some water. She'd pushed him off, and he'd apologised at once, saying he was drunk and he was sorry, begging her not to tell anyone. A decade later, she's surprised she wasn't more upset or angry, that she hadn't even thought about it all this time: it wasn't the first time that an uncle had pawed at her. She'd just gone back to her room, glad that she hadn't elbowed him in the face. She'd heard him crying as she shut her door. She hadn't needed to avoid him afterwards, or tell her parents: she'd never seen him again. His horrible wife had stayed in touch for a long time, though, mostly through viral forwards and endless streams of pictures of her new saris. Joey had asked her parents last night what went wrong between them, they were such friends, closer than family, for so long. They didn't want to talk about it.

  'We have to focus on the good things,' Romola had said. 'We grew up together, you were supposed to grow up with his sons.' Avik had said nothing: he'd just found album after album o
f old photos and handed them to her for the memorial video. It always amazes Joey that her parents are so old their baby pictures are black and white. That there are whole years of their lives with no photos, no videos, that they just appeared on the cloud fully formed in their 20s. No wonder they're able to forget so much — the nostalgia algorithms have nothing to haunt them with.

  The driver is new: she face-scans him to make sure he's assigned to today's car. He's not one of the hires from Laxmi's lists: she keeps sending Joey people from her old neighbourhood. 'Any job, didi — guard, driver, cook — they will do anything, all good children, if you don't take them they'll turn bad.' Most of the IDs are obvious fakes, but very few of Laxmi's boys have caused Joey's Flowco any trouble. Laxmi'd wanted Joey to find them Flowverse work, as camera assistants or make-up artists or spot-boys. She’d done her best, but most of those jobs were reserved for people who knew somebody. The driver's face is correct: she wonders how many scans he's already undergone since morning. She'd struggled at first with the idea of putting people through this humiliation, but you had to be safe. Just a few days ago she'd seen a Flow about a serial killer being captured by tollbooth cameras while crossing the Yamuna on one of her regular routes: the original driver was in the trunk, his IDs switched, his smartatt skinned right off his wrist.

  Getting out of her gated neighbourhood, India China Harmony Place, takes longer than usual because her neighbourhood militia are out in full force, sponsor logos glowing over clean grey uniforms. It's not some regulation march-past: they're herding people out of ICH Place. Men and women in rags, matted gold-brown hair, and children, many children, all of them girls. How had they found their way into her upscale neighbourhood? What horrible detention centre were they being taken to? Had the state already taken away their citizenships? Was it about to take away their organs?

  She knows better than to stop and ask, she'll hear they were illegal immigrants or terrorists or Pakistani spies, and her concern will be noted in the Welfare Association's ledgers, marking her out as a potential troublemaker. As the procession passes her car, she knows better than to make eye contact with the prisoners: what if they ask her to help? What if they shout at her, demand she joins the resistance? How will she tell them she has no idea how?

  Indi's convinced that one day the poor will rise, an unstoppable zombie horde, and just destroy the city, that they've suffered so much for so long that they won't care about taking over, they'll just want to burn it all down. Not that the Years Not To Be Discussed left a lot to be burned, but Joey doesn’t see how: Indi’s job is to look for inspiring creative ideas, he doesn’t see the production challenges like she does. But whenever she looks at the streets, at the guards and barriers and the spikes and the drones, she knows that more thought has gone into them than most urban infrastructure; that the city’s rulers are prepared to fight any insurrection. So she looks away, as usual, a skill everyone she knows has learnt since childhood, because not looking away means seeing terrible things.

  She’s seen other Reality Controllers and even Flowstars lose their jobs for being seen at protests and taking public stands — never directly, not any more, the punishment for her class is no longer that linear, but she’s noted each inevitable fall, watch them fade and disappear from the industry, or redeem themselves by complete transformation. Inspiring photos of millions of protestors fighting the same battles, standing up despite their differences, braving police brutality, fascist mobs and harsh weather, across the country and all over the world don’t help. It’s not wholly safe to go look at them too often, either, some of the sites are ID traps. Daily reminders of her own cowardice don’t really boost her productivity. Neither does stalking the accounts of people she’s met who’ve suddenly gone completely silent.

  Her driver finds a clever shortcut and in no time they're speeding over the flyover chain towards Film City. Network booster in place, headset on, she loses herself to the Newsflow.

  There's a horrifying video about a gang of fifteen-year-old AR gamers being tricked into beating up elderly Malayali writers for digital credits, but today's news crisis is a Singapore real estate tycoon openly advertising for partners for an organ-farm business, claiming it could give backward Indians a chance to contribute value to the world. Somehow, the debate is not centred around rampant body ownership and its links to human trafficking and slavery, but around the maximum allowable percentage of foreign ownership of these firms.

  -- You seem unhappy, Narad texts. Care to share?

  -- No.

  -- I can read your emotions more effectively if you do a simple series of facial exercises. Initiate fun-learn now?

  -- No.

  -- Would you like me to set up an appointment with a therapist? Tap here to see Top 5 results for you.

  'I have to find my ex-boyfriend and current colleague an onscreen girlfriend,' Joey says. 'Do you have anything helpful to say?'

  -- Would you like to hear a selection of inspirational quotes about love, breakups, coping, finding new love, office relationships, hiring the best candidate or secrets of long-format content?

  'No.'

  The traffic overlay in her headset's vision field looks like a blood circulation diagram. There's a couple of large processions out: a massive farmer's march, thousands of white-clad, red-capped men and women in floating popup videos hovering in front of Joey's eyes, all standing patiently in front of roadblocks, trickling through gaps in single file to submit to searches and facescans, solar panels on their caps charging their out-of-date phones. Some of them already have the new data-implants installed on their necks: they look like meteors striking the earth. Sun-baked leathery skin, dust-caked faces, blood-streaked feet. A gaggle of urban kids hovers around the farmers’ leaders, shooting SanSan selfies. The dense smog around the crowd sizzles and shimmers as drone-cams fly by. Heavily armed police are out in force too, a large fleet of commandeered schoolhouses behind them.

  The nationalists are out in a rival protest in West Delhi, demanding mass deaths for other protestors, compulsory cow urine drinking in all schools and government sponsorship for Muslim-identification squads. Joey gesture-mutes the latter and speed-scans the former. She's forgotten to silence public commentary, and is too shocked by the troll-wave to gesture it away.

  Her smartatt gives her a rage-spike alert two minutes in and her headset autoplays happy SanSan videos.

  'I brought you in here because I trust you more than anyone in the world,' Indi had said to her on her first day. 'Just promise me you won't try to change the Flow, or me. People come to my Flow because they trust me to be myself.'

  'You were a flailing baby when I met you,' she'd said. 'I trained you to be human, and other people get to enjoy the work I put in. I should be asking for royalties.'

  'I feel that way about my exes too,' he'd said. 'Yes, we learned a lot from each other when we were together. But you have to move on from that, Joey. I have.'

  She'd considered punching him in the face, but he'd been really helpful with the contract. And she'd known since college that she and Indi made a brilliant team, a winning team, even if it was one she'd want to quit every few hours.

  'I'm going to change absolutely everything about your Flow,' she'd said. 'It's... not good.'

  'I know.'

  'No more breathless inspirational bullshit. No more know-it-all dickery. No more stealing other people's stories and making them about you.'

  'Fine. I'll tone it down, and keep my shirt on.'

  'No, you'll lose your whole audience.'

  'Just... don't talk to me like this in front of the team.'

  'Same.'

  She's making good time on the highway. Her Flowco's paid for silver-level road privileges for the whole team, which has proved invaluable in getting Indi's Flows out in time for the office crowd's morning commute. But even with tolls pre-paid, pre-approved scans and cashless-subscription bribes she still has to leave early on shoot days because there are construction delays on every route: most of
East Delhi's being broken down and rebuilt from scratch. Through the grey-white haze she can see the towering Brave Hanuman statue standing over the Delhi end of the Yamuna bridge as if daring the mobs from the Uttar Pradesh wildlands to cross. A protective cordon of Delhi Police drones hovers around Hanuman's loincloth. The drones are to protect this Chinese-manufactured Indian pride icon from celebrity Dalit drone-mural graffiti artist E-Klav: every week, he (she? they?) crowdfunds a new piece of drone-painted vandalism on the statue's bottom. Sometimes it's just red buttocks: the last one was a poem about riverside slum demolitions. A troop of bare-chested men stands at the statue's feet, naked swords in hand, officially to protect the statue against Neo-Naxal attacks but really to remind Delhi's citizens that their sect and its war-hordes could sack the city any time they chose. Joey had forgotten to cancel outdoor shoots during their annual stampede last time, a grave error: Indi's whole crew had been locked in a car showroom for a whole night, with drunken pilgrims threatening to break the glass and rape everyone, held back only by the glare of their light-rig and their evidently professional live-broadcast setup. Then, as now, there had been policemen on patrol among the mob, armed and ready to do absolutely nothing should violence erupt.

  An update floats in from Jin-Young: the Flow is live, and Indi's doing very well, it's an easy gig. Not that Jin-Young would ever put any real criticism of Indi on record: ever since he took over her former role as Senior Reality Manager, she's had to remind him he's now allowed to be critical of Indi, that his wary politeness is bad for the Flow. Today's joint Flows are studio conversations between Indi and a few Hindi news mainstreamers, generic happyfluff but worth the journey in terms of viewership boosts. But it's not just about numbers, it's about boosting Indi's value as a nationwide trendsplainer, a familiar face everywhere, and Joey always manages to reel in a big sponsor or two on these fishing trips.