Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  'Tara, I want you to succeed, I really do. But you know enough about my family to know this is very clearly my brother trying to push us into an argument, and to provoke me.'

  She almost throws her phone at him.

  'I do not fucking believe you just made this about you,' she says. 'Do you know how worried I've been? What my situation is? I can't just sit around and do nothing like you. I don't have wealth to fall back on.’

  ‘I don’t-’

  ‘A god-given opportunity comes to me and you're trying to kill it because you don't want me to meet your family? Because this is inconvenient for you?' Her voice is raw, cracked: she looks like she wants to hit him.

  She pauses, and each second that passes then is heavier than the last. He sees everything he wants to say scroll up and delete itself in front of his eyes, he can see her recalibrating, like a phone restarting.

  'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that,' she says, her eyes filling with tears. 'Rudra, I promised I'd fix you. And I'm here for you. So trust me, and come with me? Sometimes the best way to bring a family back together is an outsider.'

  'I thought this was about your career, not my family.'

  'It is. But it's something that can help both of us. And I want to help you, not just myself. I know you think I'm greedy, and don't know my place-'

  'I don't think either of those things at all.'

  'Then can't you just trust me? Why won't you let me in? Did our time together mean nothing to you?'

  'It meant a lot. And okay, maybe I've already ruined this, but I wanted us to do something together. If my brother is serious, he'll still want you for this tomorrow.'

  'If you care about me, so will you.'

  'It's your last day today, and I actually have a whole day out planned. All your favourite places, all the places you said you wanted to go to but couldn't. I have the whole list. You said I never take you out. I wanted to change that. I know I'm boring and I want to be better. I want us to have a day.'

  'That's sweet, and I totally appreciate it.'

  'But not today.'

  'Ideally not? I'm not going to risk annoying Rohit. He's a powerful man. He can change everything for me. And for you. And you can tell who the powerful people are quite easily — they don't wait. They know there's no time to sit, and think, and analyse things. They act. Other people wait for them.'

  Rudra nods and rolls out of bed. It feels ridiculous, pulling his clothes on under Tara's cold gaze.

  'Thank you,' she says. 'Have a shower as well? You kind of smell of us.'

  'Oh, I'm not going,' he says. 'Just putting some clothes on.'

  'I want you to do this with me,' Tara says. 'I want you to step up, and be happy for me. I promise you, I'm going to make you so happy in return it'll make your head spin.'

  'My head's spinning just fine already.'

  'Your brother said you wouldn't come,' she says. 'He said you refuse any attempt at therapy, healing, you don't want to belong to your family, to your family's community, to your guru, to society at all. He said you might be past hope. I told him he was wrong about you. Now don't let me down.'

  'I can already see our day together, the three of us with my mother doing crazy cameos. He wants you to be impressed by the house, and show me how you don't fit in. He wants me to get angry, and he wants you to watch him humiliate me.'

  'You know, there's obviously a lot that's happened between you that you don't talk about,' she says. 'You need to talk about this stuff with a professional, but that's for another day. I'm not going to get angry. I'm not going to ask you why you think I wouldn't fit in your house, because I'm going to. You think your family is a challenge, after the places I've been?'

  'That's not what I was saying.'

  She blinks back tears, and he hates himself for wondering if she can cry at will.

  'I'll fit in a lot better than you ever did,' she says.

  'I'm sure you will,' Rudra says. 'And I wish you both joy.'

  She laughs at this, and reaches for him, and kisses him with much tenderness. 'I keep forgetting I haven't known you forever,' she says. 'I haven't seen you sulk like this before. You know what, it's fine. Forget it. You're probably right, and he's probably just using me to irritate you. And I'm sure I can get another job. I mean, look at me.'

  They hold each other, perfectly still: as stalemates go it's the most comfortable one Rudra's been in. A little too comfortable, in fact: it's morning, his body is clearly not aware they are fighting, and he knows he'll agree to absolutely anything in a few seconds.

  'You should go if you want,' he says. 'I don't want to get in the way of your career.'

  He loses count of how much time he spends lost in VR games after she leaves, dimly aware after a few hours that he's very hungry, but he's hovering too close to full immersion to step out. His American friends are delighted to see him: it's been a while since he last attended one of their all-night sessions. They're mer-clans fighting in the ruins of submerged New York today/tonight, and Rudra finds in his gameplay a certain recklessness that's been missing the last couple of years. He leads his clan through a particularly dangerous raid, berserking his way through a subway-tunnel trap-maze full of newbie shark-men, engages their leader in solitary combat, hammering his head with a fire hydrant-based mace, and is on the verge of a glorious kill when the screen goes dark.

  He curses freely, punching his haptic-gloved fist into the endless darkness, and is rewarded by the sudden appearance of a group-chat window. A stream of emojis pops up, several active speakers. Assuming it's a glitch or a hack, he shuts off his helmet. Too many people he knows have lingered in unfamiliar virtual environments and accidentally helped in organising droneswarm attacks in the Balkans.

  He wipes his face, waits a minute and restarts the helmet, but the startup screen doesn't show: it's still a chat conversation, emojis and animated GIFs and segments of texts, friendly picture-appreciation-comment banalities: 'Hot!', 'THIS', 'Stunning', 'Crying rn'. A memory pops up: the link to Joey's VR helmet must still be active. He hasn't played since her meeting with Nikhil. Is he now creeping on some chat with her girlfriends? But Joey isn't even here.

  He's about to take the helmet off again when he hears Zaria's voice.

  'Rokheya present and secure,' she says. 'Requesting entry to New Tion.'

  He knows this is his cue to leave, so he tells himself to leave. Spying on his first Flowstar got him kicked out of the house, even though that was by accident. This time it's absolutely not an accident, and Zaria’s a lot more dangerous than Indi. He takes off the helmet. He puts it back on.

  A sim-environment opens up, a Blockhead open-world setup, one of the new ones they've made for women gamers. Rudra remembers a recent online controversy because women weren't at all happy with the Blockhead-for-girls design, with its shiny pastel colours and overwhelming cuteness: they'd wanted safety regulations in mainstream Blockhead sim-worlds, not a separate enclosure. This build is a generic city, clearly a work in progress: flat-colour skyscrapers line textureless grey streets, a building-block playground under a sun with an actual smile drawn in it, staring fixedly down from a sky-blue sky. Zaria walks into a Sadface cafe, where another woman waits for her, a default starter avatar, completely uncustomised.

  'Olamina,' Zaria says, and hugs her.

  'The others are on their way. Are you safe? Are you alone?'

  'As alone as I need to be. And yes, safe. The new crew's completely harmless, I've never seen anything like it.'

  'You all ready for our session?’

  ‘I’m hopelessly underprepared.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  'Stop me if I go on too long, okay?'

  'You know I won't.'

  Zaria looks at the Sadface cafe menu, and Rudra does too, through her eyes. He's seen this sort of thing before — the items on the menu pop up one by one, morose and quirky, Chipped-nail Americano, Schadenfreude Cheesecake, Microaggression Avocado Toast, Debt Muffin. Truly his generation's id
ea of fun. The cafe itself is incomplete: one of the walls is an untextured flat surface, another seems unfinished; she can see the city outside through glitches in the walls.

  Other women appear and are greeted, all names Rudra feels like he's heard before, or seen used in games: Khutulu, Jingwei, Safronova, Marmokreb, Aineko, Patasola, Mekatilili, Huli Jing. They're all using standard avatars: if there are spying eyes on the cafe, eyes other than his own, they see ten identical smiling animated girls sitting around a Sadface table, and occasionally exchanging places.

  When Rudra was really young, his father had often tried to entertain him with a game where he shuffled three overturned paper cups around, and Rudra had to spot which one had a marble trapped under it. He always failed, and cried, which amused his father greatly, and this when his brain was young and sharp. Watching these women roam around a cafe is far worse. He wonders how Zaria tells them apart, if she even can.

  Perhaps there are clues in the chat-stream, which has not stopped for a second through all of this. If anything, it’s sped up: multiple conversations through a vast range of animated images have spiralled into patterns of dizzying complexity. Using his non-existent hacker skills and far too extensive experience of cyber-thriller films, he deduces they're probably using complex live encryption that translates their inputs into girl-chat code that most surveillance men would ignore, or dismiss. A Brazilian anarchist group had recently been caught trying to smuggle their messages in porn video backgrounds: this is probably just a less attention-drawing, more history-book-friendly alternative.

  He convinces himself that not trying to break their code makes his presence in Zaria's shadow easier to justify — he's not actually spying, he's just watching with idle interest, like when other people's gameplay videos stack up, one after another, and hours pass by because he's too lazy to turn it off. This is really unconvincing, even to him: he has to try harder. He didn't ask to be here? True, but he could just switch it off. It's not like they're doing anything particularly private? Please, this is the most secret secret society he's ever encountered. Zaria's bodyguards should have found the helmet-link and fixed it, why aren't they better at their jobs? That's just victim-blaming, he knows perfectly well what he's doing is wrong. What he doesn't know is why he's so excited to be here.

  'I'm delighted to introduce our newest ambassador, Omu-Ako of Ife,' Olamina says. Her voice is lovely, her accent American. 'Like us, she's here to listen to Rokheya's stories today.'

  'It is an honour to be here,' Omu-Ako says. 'I am still learning your language, so I may be silent today.' She's using a live-translation plugin, a freeware robot-voice, which seems really unsafe, but Rudra acknowledges that if this group's security were watertight he wouldn't be here.

  'Please speak, whenever you want,' Zaria says. 'If there's any place you should feel free, it is this.'

  The avatar Rudra thought was Omu-Ako sits still. Another one, two chairs, down stands and bows in response, and Rudra would have smacked himself on the forehead if he weren't wearing a helmet.

  'Welcome, ambassadors of New Tion, to this special session,' Olamina says. 'We thank, as always, our grandmothers in Hunan, who taught us to use our new shoes.'

  A couple of the avatars giggle, and Rudra suspects this will be the first of many in-jokes.

  'Tonight, or today, we shall hear the stories of Rokheya, who represents us in the land of Swarga,' Olamina says. 'She is set to embark on a grand new adventure, so we thought it wise for all of us to hear her tales before she leaves.' He can hear what she isn't saying as well: whatever it is that Zaria is about to do, she might never come back.

  'Thank you, sister. My first story is about knowledge,' Zaria/Rokheya says. 'It begins, as do all my stories, in Swarga, a land of peace and plenty, ruled by a great and powerful king.'

  He notices she's not using her regular voice, or her journalist-video voice: this is a deep, solemn, slow voice that reminds him of times his high school classmates dragged him to poetry open-mikes or art openings because they wanted to hit on college women and he had a car and a driver. No doubt it's meant to convey deep meaning and gravitas, but it's a voice that makes Rudra's brain want to spin a cocoon around itself, emerge years later with wings, and escape to the Himalayas. He shakes himself into the story, but it's a struggle.

  Zaria's story is about a happy nation where the king ensures his subjects' bliss by learning absolutely everything about them through magic. Two children are born into a village in this country, and live a charmed life until they meet an evil witch who persuades them that the king was not to be trusted, and the nation would actually be happier if people kept secrets. The witch, who's also old and ugly, tricks the children into quest-walking to the country's capital to find ways to stop the king's magicians.

  Rudra zones out in the middle of the story trying to follow Zaria's surveillance metaphors instead of the plot: she's sending encrypted documents to the whole group as she speaks. He's played games with enough dark-webbers to recognise AI-created documents-as-images when he sees them: around the world, the ambassadors of New Tion will be running these chains of Good Morning messages, memes, animal pics, fan-fiction quotes, and bad-poetry images through translators that reproduce them as... what? What is this secret society capable of actually doing? Who do they work for? How do they punish men caught perving on their resistance movement?

  In the story, the children have escaped mobs of enchanted citizens whose love for the king has inspired them to remorseless bloodshed, and reached Swarga's capital, and discovered that city people are strange, and keep secrets from the king, but don't seem happy at all. The children are captured by the king, and find he's amazing, and the witch was lying. And then the kids team up with the king, become magicians themselves, and build even stronger magic, magic that they gift to all the nation's people, city and village alike, for their own good.

  The story grows fangs: enemies of Swarga are found and executed, spies, traitors, infiltrators from other nations are put to the sword for the greater good. Later, Rudra cannot identify exactly when the story drew him in — was Zaria actually a skilled teller, or were there subliminal messages in the images that floated past him in the chatboxes? Were the New Tion society using a new form of communication?

  Whatever it is, he finds, to his amazement, that he suddenly cares, that he's able to hear what Zaria's actually saying, sinking past the laboured alt-world fable plotline into an immersive reality. Beyond her words, he understands her message when she lets them know that the upcoming physical brain implants that will be forced on the poor soon will do more than identify and monitor citizens — they'll measure them, fortify the national Lakshman-Rekha internet, power the national blockchain, vote on their behalf in sham elections, store and share data, and eventually become their bearers' only source of education, income and wholesome entertainment. They’ll make the process of selling people’s bodies wholesale to anyone who has use for them much more efficient.

  'Ten years ago Swarga mapped their skins,' Zaria says. 'Now Swarga is under their skins. But it needs more. Swarga must be inside their heads, to guide all their actions for their own good, to give them real purpose again. They will get there, one day, it is just a matter of building the tools.'

  Already Rudra has forgotten what happened to the heroes of the story. They may have become the new kings, or perhaps they were killed by the witch? He's not sure how he missed the story's end, because he was definitely listening.

  'What's happening in Swarga now already happened to us three years ago,' Omu-Ako says. 'You have long known, like we did, the pleasure of being the cradle for global experiments. Where the role of your country is for the world's rulers to field-test their strategies, and dump their waste, while our so-called global saviours look the other way, generation after generation. Where everything in rich nations’ news has happened in your country before, but somehow their new tech takes a generation to reach you.'

  'Let us hear the next story–' Olamina's voice
is wary, but Omu-Ako isn't done.

  'How long will we sit by and watch East and West buy our leaders and carve up our lands? Watch our own chieftains sell out our people? The air and the water are poisoned, the bar for normal is deep underground...'

  A burst of emojis, and Omu-Ako stops talking. Rudra glares at the icons as if the sheer force of his curiosity might cause them to transform into text. Did they just shut her up? Was the new girl saying more than she should?

  'My next story is about death, and the lives we take to escape it,' Rokheya says.

  This story is about a hero from Swarga who befriends a lost orphan in its streets, and is shocked to find she is a witch in training. He rescues her from this life, and even plans to marry her, but his parents wisely intervene. A family friend, a magician, finds through a spell that the girl is not even from Swarga: she is from the dreaded land of Narak, opposite to Swarga in every way. Discovered, the girl disappears, but the hero cannot forget her. He becomes convinced she has been abducted by a demon from Narak, and sets off against his family's wishes to bring her back. Going to Narak involves many difficult magic-enabled steps — portals, tunnels, oceans crossed on magic dolphins. Rudra knows the story’s just a distraction, a bassline at best, but he can’t help following it, since he can’t read the real one scrolling on the screen.

  Rudra remembers the time Chuki had come to his flat with a fresh set of scars, not the deep grooves on her shoulders that she'd acquired as a child during her crossing, but new ones, that ran from her torn ears down her neck, disappearing under her winking Mariam Marvel t-shirt. She'd laughed when he'd offered to go with her to the police, or to a hospital, or talk to former classmates now in the media.

  'Give me beer. Give me games. And give me space,' she'd said. He had. Later, after she'd gone, he'd realised she'd kept her hand on his thigh, and her head on his shoulder, for a long time while they'd been shooting aliens in space together. She hadn't come back for weeks after that, and when she had it was with a new boy. She'd refused to take her smog-mask back from him after his father's shraddho. He needed to have a reason to come find her, she'd said.