Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

'Oho madam, don't worry, they are all friends.'

  'I'm serious.'

  A long pause: she knows he's biting back insults. 'Do you wish to file a complaint with the building society, madam?'

  'No.'

  'Thank you. Are you all right, madam? You sound unwell. Have you eaten?'

  They're still at it when she puts her helmet back on. It's possible no one even noticed she was gone, except Indi, whose angry chat messages and increasingly indecipherable notes on the meeting are all she can see on her view.

  -- Where the fuck were you? Indi asks.

  -- What did I miss?

  -- I wrote notes.

  He wants a toffee. She can see the sulk in his texts, they're practically vibrating. There's nothing Indi hates more than having to write things down, and she wishes she weren't so used to this that she has no problem understanding what he means through his labyrinth of typos and misplaced autocorrections. Nikhil thinks even Indi's most loyal fans will switch to Japanese laifu-VR or Chinese neo-wuxia. Joey actually agrees with this, and what Nikhil says about Indi never having 'real' Indian superfans, who build temples to their idols, attack people who say bad things about them, tattoo their faces on their hearts. Indi's never done anything terrible enough for her to wish that life on him.

  -- Where are we now? Joey asks.

  -- Fuck knows, Indi says. I was waiting for you to get back.

  ‘You have to understand we live in overlapping realities right now,’ Nikhil says, pulling her back into the conversation. He's swaggering around the virtual Parthenon, no doubt imagining he's some kind of ancient philosopher. ‘You can change the reality you live in like switching channels. And all the realities want to eat each other.’

  -- Is he pitching a movie or is just drugs? Joey asks.

  -- Fuck knows. I’m going in.

  'I'm going to stop you here,' Indi says. 'Look - bro - I can see you're a brilliant guy. But there's one problem.'

  'What is that?' It's difficult to tell from avatars, and for all Joey knows Nikhil's got emotion-masking tech in play, but he's certainly signalling interest.

  'If I told you that you were getting everything wrong, and you asked me how I could fix it, and I basically negged you and then started talking about the multiverse, what would you say?'

  Nikhil laughs out loud. 'I like you, Indi Mathew,' he says. 'You and I, we're going to make magic together.'

  ‘Can't wait,' Indi says. 'So we're good here?'

  'No. I wasn't joking when I said you're heading towards a massive downslide.’

  'I disagree.'

  'The last forty years called, Indi. How many examples do you want? Four generations of next big things, the brown faces of a new global India, new stars for a new young audience. Where are they now? Running around hosting sports and travel mainstreamer shows. Fighting over dressing rooms with the kids competing in the music contests they're judging. Pretending they're still famous and relevant on their Flows.'

  'I'm better than those guys.'

  'How many examples do you need? All those genius new-wave filmmakers, slum rappers, woke comedians, social influencers, where are they now? Vanished, or transformed. Wake up. This country is not going to change. People are not going to change. Who's going to have to change to stay ahead of the game? We are.'

  -- Just agree with him and end this, Joey messages.

  Indi doesn't respond. He’s twitching so hard his onscreen avatar is glitching.

  'I know what I'm doing, and it's working,' he says.

  Joey sighs, and takes her helmet off. She puts on earphones, and lies back on the beanbag, looking up at the ceiling.

  'The entire history of Indian entertainment is proof that this isn't true,' Nikhil says. 'Forget entertainment, haven't we figured out by now that people will vote against their own interests if anyone presses their buttons right?'

  She stares into her phone. There are several missed calls from her mother, followed by priority messages telling her to ignore the calls, everything’s fine. She’ll have to call Romola soon, it’s been a while. The news, otherwise, is no more terrible than usual. Today's crisis is a drone that has flown — from Russia, it's rumoured — all the way to Gurugram, and into the house of a retired singer. It has shot him, his family, his staff, and even his dog and powered down. No one knows what to do with it, and so it's now in jail.

  She starts scrolling through her other messages. Nothing of interest, again. There are thousands of unread messages in her filtered folders, she hasn't been bored enough to open them in months.

  'Somebody told you when you were in college to respect your audience,' Nikhil says. 'Everyone else's fans are stupid, yours are the coolest. But I'm telling you this because no one else will, Indi — just look around at the whole country and then look me in the eye and tell me that most people aren't fundamentally dumb animals. You think people like you are smart? They wouldn’t know if there was another epidemic happening right now, or a genocide, or a civil war. Even if they knew, they wouldn’t know how to join it. They would have no idea what to do. They’re that easy to distract.’

  The messages in her Abuse-filtered inbox are the usual: a parade of strange penises, a torrent of invective, death and rape threats. She swipes them away lazily, pleased at how much space she's clearing up despite knowing she has unlimited space.

  'Most people aren't fundamentally dumb animals,' Indi says. 'And I'm not one either. I have faith in people, no matter how much our rulers try to make me lose all hope.’

  ‘Bro, you have no idea who even runs the country,’ Nikhil says. ‘It’s certainly not the dumbfucks on the hoardings.’

  ‘Okay. But here’s the thing: I don’t care! I’m not going to be told what to do by any executive. The things you're telling me now? I've heard them at every audition in Bombay. I still hear them in most meetings. You live in a bubble, Indi, you're not real. Of course, as an investor, things are less risky if I just follow the numbers. But right from the first day I started Flowing, I've heard people who weren't storytellers tell me how to tell stories. And any success I've found has been because I'm smart enough not to listen to them.'

  The messages in Joey's Low Priority inbox are a different story. Thousands and thousands of audition videos, idea pitches, portfolios, photoshoots, CVs. Complaints, pleas, outbursts, hate mail cleverly worded enough to escape her content filters. What puzzles her most are the people who send her pictures of flowers, landscapes, movie stars, babies, hundreds upon hundreds, all of which bear only the words 'Good Morning'. What do they hope will happen? How long will they keep at it?

  'All the people I really admire from this part of the world have gotten where they are by ignoring the suits,' Indi says. 'So no. No scripted mainstreamer soap. No slapstick-melodrama garbage. No laughtracks. No politician guest appearances. No Bollywood promo special episodes. No South Indian comedy character. No token Christian liberal beef-eating sex-mad friend. I'm not doing any of it.'

  'Well, I think we can all agree this is a fascinating discussion.' It's Founder Karan's voice, and Joey tosses her phone aside and scrambles for the headset, stepping back into the virtual world just in time to see Indi's toga-clad avatar vanish as he logs out of the meeting. 'I'll, um, be back,' she says, and logs herself out.

  They go to the kitchen and drink the freezing water their Narads have waiting for them in amicable silence: by the time he's drained his, Indi's all cheerful again. They let two calls on Joey's phone ring out, then one on Indi’s.

  ‘So - did we achieve anything there?’ Indi asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why did it take so long?’

  Joey shrugs. ’Work.’

  'What were you doing, anyway?' Indi asks. 'Did you need to take a shit or something?'

  'Do we have a plan?' Joey asks as they put their helmets on.

  'They need us,' Indi says. 'Never forget that.'

  She never knows whether it’s inspiring or worrying that he knows how to deal with these people. It’s co
nvenient, they often win, but it always reminds her of the time Indi had taken her to an insiders-only no-phones private event called Desi Power Chakra or something even worse. She’d been worried it was a shady-politician networking event, or a gateway cult thing, but it had turned out to be something far worse: a presentation. Some American-Indian hair-gel-reservoir type had mashed together pickup-artist techniques and wikis about Indian political strategists, Chanakya onwards, to put together a very predictable set of self-help tips for neoliberal sociopaths.

  She’d half-slept through it, and dragged Indi away from the post-presentation drinks schmooze, but on the drive back he’d completely shocked her by revealing he’d actually enjoyed it, that if he’d known how to use the enemy’s tactics against them, how to make the enemy think he was a friend, and how to always think three moves ahead, his life would have been much better. And that he was going to use these techniques, use the tools of evil but for good, and thus transform himself into a global superstar. He’d laughed at her completely horrified face and pretended he was joking, and to be fair he’d shown no particular ability to be either strategic or forward-thinking ever since.

  The next phase of the Nikhil meeting is set in an underwater paradise: everyone's hovering in incredibly blue water, surrounded by schools of cute digital fish. Presumably this is supposed to be calming, but all Joey can think of is drowning, of unimaginable amounts of pressure crushing her into the ocean floor. She calms herself by thinking of Toons, who'd been to Thailand recently, to shop for vast quantities of seamless innerwear and perform in some pan-Asia traditional dance thing. She wishes Toons were here right now instead of these idiots, swimming about in front of the replica of the Great Barrier Reef that lies in the far background, a burst of splendid 20th-century colour. The tiger shark that floats above Nikhil's head is a bit much: it cannot possibly be a coincidence, but it's not like anything else about him has proved particularly subtle thus far.

  'Joey had some ideas she wanted to pitch to you,' Indi says before Nikhil can get in a word. She's used to Indi suddenly throwing the ball in her court in troubled situations, and so she launches right into it. The new investors stay eerily quiet as she outlines Indi's wants: the animated avatar, the video games, the AR expansion, the interactive tutorials, the smartatt apps.

  'I don't see the vision,' is Nikhil's response. 'Anyone can be popular. Multimedia expansions are boring now. They’ll get done, but they’re for mid-level people.’

  ‘You need to stop shading Joey,’ Indi says. ‘Or anyone else in my team. We’re like a family.’

  ‘Let me tell you what the vision is,’ Nikhil says. ‘The social influencer is dead. While you people were kids, my generation transformed the country by standing up and defeating fascism. We saved India. So if there’s one thing I have to teach you, Indi, it’s that all this superficial shit is for the stupid. We need you to become someone important. Someone whose opinions actually matter.’

  ‘I don’t think you know who you’re talking to,’ Indi snaps. ‘I’m the first one to speak fearlessly, honestly about everything, even if I lose sponsors.’

  ’Yes, and that’s why you’re worth my attention. That’s who I need you to be. Someone so central to the culture he can make governments do what he wants. Sometimes you'll be the opposition, sometimes you'll be the one explaining why bad shit needs to happen. A face this country can present to the world, to explain what's going on in a way everyone understands.'

  'You said the world wasn't interested.'

  'The mass audience you're looking for? They’re not, but that doesn’t matter. Fuck those people. I'm talking about another set —powers who want to build their empires here, and are looking for partners. Some of these people are Indian, some are not. It doesn't really matter where they are. People with real influence, whose faces you'll never see. People who can make governments back down, people who can stop riots with a phone call, lift economies, make Supreme Court judges change their decisions mid-sentence. We're going to make you someone who can shape the future of this country.'

  -- He wants you to be a politician, Joey texts.

  'I don't want to be a politician,' Indi says. 'I've had offers before, from all the usual parties. That's a really dirty space.'

  'If I wanted a politician, I'd buy one right now,' Nikhil says. 'If I wanted a movie star to use as a megaphone to draw in the masses, that's where I've had gone. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you. It's never been about the numbers. Indian culture flows from the top. Elections are irrelevant: I already know how the next one will go, seat by seat. Those decisions aren't made in voting booths, or even when politicians get into bed afterwards. We'd have stopped having elections long ago, but rituals are nice. What the Years We Don't Speak of should have taught India is that you don't leave the actual running of a country to politicians, or corporations, or, fuck, citizens. If you keep remaking a country every few years, it cracks. The whole culture gets broken. Well, a few of us learnt. Out of these ruins we're going to build something new, and you're going to play a huge role in that.'

  'I have to say I don't really understand,' Indi says.

  'And I don't really need you to. You'll get it in time, you're smart. That's why I'm here.'

  -- Something's very off, Joey texts.

  -- I know, Indi says. What now?

  -- Well, no one's ever told me I had a deeply masculine aura before. So obviously I'm a bit stunned, Rudra texts.

  Nikhil does a bit about shifting cultural landscapes and true insiders. Joey misses it completely as she stares at Rudra's chat bubble.

  -- Sorry, Rudra says, after at least five half-typed and deleted messages.

  -- Wrong conversation?

  -- Yeah.

  -- Keep it together, Rudra.

  -- Sorry.

  -- Who thinks you're deeply masculine?

  -- Typo.

  -- Are you sharing this meeting with someone else?

  -- No. Sorry. Leaving now.

  -- Rudra!

  -- What now? They're all looking, Indi texts

  -- Wing it.

  'I'm excited to see where this goes,' Indi says. 'But I want you to promise me I will have creative control, and I get to pick my team.'

  Joey's pretty sure that the tooth-display on Nikhil's avatar's face is supposed to be a warm smile. But it’s a smile that feels like there’s a large dorsal fin somewhere behind it.

  'We'll let the lawyer-dudes earn their pay with all this shit. Listen, I hate meetings, this is the longest one we'll ever have. But the stage-management of public opinion in your segment — of media, civil society activists, lawyers, students — is a tricky-as-fuck dance. Much trickier than — what are you doing now? A sex tattoo? If you learn the game, the rewards are endless. I can teach you. What we're starting here is something special, if you're up to the job.'

  ‘I am,’ Indi says.

  'Fantastic. You'll look back on this moment as the one that changed your life.'

  'Amazing,' says Founder Karan. 'I'm just so happy for all of us. Now will you tell him the best part, or should I?'

  'Dude, this one is all mine,' Nikhil says.

  -- Now, the catch, Joey messages.

  -- I know.

  'So, we were looking at your Flow together, Indi, and we figured out the perfect way to make it bulletproof. We're going to get you a partner. Someone whose relevance scores are off the charts, and will give you the credibility boost you need, while you get the casual audience to fall in love with her. Brace yourself — we're getting you Zaria Salam.'

  -- Who? Indi texts.

  -- Act happy, not so bad, Joey says.

  She's not surprised Indi's not heard of Zaria Salam. The truth is she hasn't seen much of Zaria's work either, but her name is one she's seen with increasing frequency. Her friends' gossip-groups have been full of Zaria for several months — 22, former college troublemaker, controversial politician's estranged daughter, risk-junkie journalist or stone-cold power-climber or boyfriend-steal
er or stuck-up bitch, depending on which group Joey's watching. The rumour is that watching Zaria's videos on foreign sites gets you under special surveillance. What she must have given up, or what blackmail material she has, to be allowed to work at a leading Indian Flowco, Joey cannot imagine.

  'We think Flows are the future of hard-hitting journalism and activism as well, and we can't wait for Zaria and her team to completely transform the nation — and you.' Nikhil says 'I presume you're already a fan?'

  'Normally I'd pretend I know all about this person,' Indi says, 'But you said today's a special day, so let me stop you right here. I'm not giving away my audience to any partner, because I've worked bloody hard to get it. She can appear on my Flow, we can see how we get along, and we can take it from there. You want to build a new Flowstar, let her earn her own fans, not hijack mine.'

  'We need both of you for this to work. We need India to take you seriously, and not think you're just another seasonal wokebro. You need a strong, edgy woman by your side. But there's no question who the star of your Flow is — she's a Muslim woman, hello. You'll have to teach her how to be charming, how to fit in and be cool.

  -- What do you think? Indi asks.

  -- Ask for time. They're rushing you.

  'I need to think about this,' Indi says. 'Maybe when we're done with the Tavata project. I need to see what the plan is, go over it with Joey.'

  'Yeah, details, all good,' Nikhil says. 'Do you know what a pika is?'

  'No.'

  'It was the latest animal to go extinct. Last week. Looked like a hamster, cute ears. There are memes. It didn't get killed by predators, or humans. It got killed by climate change. We live on the top of a mountain, Indi. As the world gets warmer, the animals that live on the lower slopes move up, or die out. And the world is getting warmer.'

  -- This is from a douchebag-motivation book called Cultural Warming, Joey adds.

  ‘One more thing,’ says Nikhil, ‘and it's mostly technicalities and boring shit for the lawyers as well, but I wanted to tell you so you wouldn't be surprised when it came up.'