Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  Alif pulled his flash drive out of the shredded backpack and held it up. It was undamaged; the blessing of the blind dervish had stuck.

  “Give the Hand a tail,” he said. “One he can’t shake off.”

  * * *

  He worked with furious energy. As NewQuarter had promised, the Cloud was intact. It contained chat logs full of hypotheses about his methods and techniques, diagnostics and analyses, and entire file chains dedicated to records of the Hand’s attacks on their digital outposts. Alif cleaned the data and fed it to the Tin Sari botnet, muttering bismillahs every time he struck the Enter key.

  “Do you have a cold pack, or ice we could put into something dry?” he asked NewQuarter at one point. “The netbook is starting to run very hot.”

  “How many motherboards do you melt on a weekly basis?” asked NewQuarter with a sigh. He picked his way across the room from the door, where he had been standing guard with a piece of splintered wood.

  “Not as many as you might think,” said Alif without taking his eyes from the screen. He put out his hand; Dina touched it with hers.

  “How are you?” he whispered.

  “I’ll be better when this is over,” she said. The pressure from her hand increased. Unwilling to draw away, Alif typed one-handed for several minutes, plugging in lines of code one by one, creating a payload of malicious software that was, he hoped, primitive and toxic enough to turn any operating system into pixelated soup.

  “I don’t get it,” said NewQuarter, swinging his stick at the air, “What is so special about this profiler botnet of yours? The Hand isn’t some bucktoothed thirteen-year-old running DoS attacks. He’s already got revolving IP addresses—you know how this goes, he’s so good that sometimes there’s never an origin IP at all. The man is as close to untraceable as it gets.”

  “Not to Tin Sari,” said Alif. “In order to avoid this, he’d have to become someone else.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “There’s nothing to follow. I wrote this application and I have no idea what makes it work. But it does. That’s all.”

  NewQuarter plunked down on the marble floor with his stick over one shoulder, looking impressed.

  “That’s called mastery,” he said.

  Alif sighed, finger hovering over the Enter key.

  “No. A master is someone who understands what he creates. I am so stupid that I have overlooked something very simple,” he said. “Everyone say a prayer. I am going to execute this thing. And then we need to pray some more, because it may simply shut down before it can profile the Hand, or after it profiles him and before it starts launching bombs.”

  NewQuarter dutifully raised his hands to his face.

  “I’m not sure I can pray for a computer program,” said Dina.

  “Do it for me,” said Alif. She acquiesced, breathing into her palms. Alif cast his eyes down and made something between a prayer and a wish, aware of how close he was to ruin, how many and various had been the unintended consequences of his actions. The noise in the square below grew louder.

  “We need to keep moving,” said NewQuarter. “It looks like things are getting nastier down there.”

  Alif nodded briskly.

  “Can you put this in your pack?” he asked Dina, handing her the netbook. “Mine is pretty much kicked.” He dangled the shredded nylon husk from one finger.

  “Sure.” She zippered the netbook into the backpack she’d brought from the marid’s house and hefted it over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They hurried across the living room. NewQuarter braced himself against the remains of the door and shoved; it came off its hinges and crashed into the outer hallway.

  “There,” he said, “Now the revolutionaries can properly loot the place. They’ve left a lot behind.”

  He led them down the hall toward the main stairwell, cutting a path through the glittering debris of his neighbors’ flats. They passed a bank of silent elevators, their doors jammed open to reveal mirror-lined interiors. Alif was startled by a glimpse of his reflection and muffled a cry.

  “Quiet,” hissed NewQuarter, “We have no idea what else might be lurking around this place.”

  “What’s happened to the people who live here?” whispered Dina. “Where has everyone gone?”

  NewQuarter glanced around with a blank expression.

  “Dead or fled,” he said. “Most of my neighbors were foreign corporate types working for the oil companies. Their embassies have probably evacuated them.”

  “I never thought it would come to this,” muttered Alif, kicking at the electronic guts of a flatscreen TV lying on the ground.

  “Really?” said NewQuarter. “I thought this was what we wanted.”

  Chastened, Alif fell silent. They left the hall through a glass door and crossed a rooftop courtyard lined with smashed pots of tuberose and hibiscus. From here, the riot in the square was a muted, homogenous roar; a human sea at high tide. Alif did not stop to listen closely. They reentered the building at the far side of the courtyard, arriving at a lounge area furnished with oversized leather armchairs and what had formerly been a wet bar, reduced now to an empty cabinet, its contents long since carried off.

  “By process of elimination, we now know your place was not looted by Islamists,” Alif joked weakly.

  “We don’t know that,” said NewQuarter. “They could have taken the bottles away to smash them, or to turn them into molotov cocktails. We’ve come into this uprising in the middle. It’s like watching a half-melted ice cube—impossible to infer its original shape, or that of the puddle it will eventually become.”

  “You’re so negative,” scolded Dina.

  “No I’m not, I’m a student of history. Revolutions only get names after it’s clear who won.” NewQuarter hurried them along, pushing open a set of large, brocade-paneled double doors that looked to Alif like they belonged in the lobby of an expensive hotel. On the other side, a grand marble staircase twisted down away from them toward the ground floor.

  It was covered in tarry black matter. At first, Alif thought the staircase had been befouled with the contents of several restrooms, but to his horror, the dark things began to move and shift, reaching out with froglike arms, turning eyeless faces toward the gallery at the top of the stairs where he stood with Dina and NewQuarter. There were too many to count.

  “God save us,” whispered Dina. Alif struggled against the urge to hyperventilate. He stepped in front of her, reaching across her body with one protective arm.

  “Run,” said NewQuarter hoarsely.

  “What? No—”

  “Run, you fools, run.”

  A wriggling instinct overcame Alif ’s self control. He scrambled after the retreating white blotch of NewQuarter’s robe, towing Dina behind him. Hideous flapping noises pursued them, curiously dry; the sounds of padded feet galloping up the stairs. They bolted back across the courtyard. Alif heard Dina cry out, and turned to look: she had stumbled over a flower pot and lay sprawled among hibiscus blossoms.

  “Wait!” he called to NewQuarter. The dark things were pelting toward them on all fours, silent but for their uncanny footfall. Alif grabbed Dina’s arm and hauled her to her feet. She took a step and cried out, favoring one leg. Alif cursed.

  “Put your arm over my shoulder,” he told her.

  “I’m too heavy!”

  She was right. Alif tottered toward the glass door on the far side of the courtyard with Dina clinging awkwardly to his back, watching with a sinking sensation as NewQuarter’s face grew paler and more frantic.

  “Hurry!” he squealed, yanking open the door. Alif dragged himself through. Dina kicked the door closed behind them with her good foot. The glass shuddered as a dozen dark shapes hit it at once, their spastic bodies struggling against the invisible barrier. They drew back as one, paused, and charged the door again. A crack snaked its way through the glass.

  “Son of a dog!” NewQuarter scrambled away from the door on his hands and knees. Alif stared a
t the crack in the glass, suddenly unable to move.

  “My pack.” Dina tugged at his sleeve. “In my pack.”

  “What?”

  “Pepper spray.”

  Alif fumbled with the zipper on her backpack. Inside, along with his netbook, were a length of thin rope, a pair of pliers, a lighter, and a half dozen other items, along with a small black canister emblazoned with various health warnings in English. “Things we might need?” said Alif, incredulous.

  “Yes, yes, from the marid’s house. Don’t ask. Just get the spray.” Alif pulled out the black canister. The dark things threw themselves against the cracked glass in a litany of thumps, creating an ever-wider radius of damage. The door began to bulge inward. NewQuarter was screaming in earnest now, hands bunched around his face like a girl. Alif fumbled with the pull-tab on the black canister, hands slippery with sweat. It slid out of his grasp and rolled on the floor.

  “For God’s sake!” Dina darted toward the pepper spray and snatched it up as the glass finally splintered. Instinct made Alif double over to protect his face. There was a loud hiss; an acrid white gas filled the hall and burned through Alif ’s sinuses. He stumbled away, choking. A chorus of amphibian pain and outrage was audible through the fog. Hands propelled Alif forward, into the door-lined corridor where NewQuarter’s flat stood. His eyes smarted.

  “Keep going,” came Dina’s voice behind him. He obeyed, weaving erratically on his feet, grinding the heels of his hands against his eyes. There was a cough and a moan to his right: he fumbled blindly, caught NewQuarter’s collar, and pulled him along without a word. The barren doorframe of NewQuarter’s flat appeared in front of him. He blundered through it into the remains of the opulent living room, sucking fresh air into his lungs. Hacking vigorously, NewQuarter pulled free of his grasp and slumped to the floor. Alif looked around for Dina. She limped through the doorframe behind him.

  “Thanks,” he rasped, “I sort of screwed that up.”

  She shook her head and coughed, then gave a hiccupy, hysterical laugh.

  “Well,” she said, “At least we’re back where we started, instead of somewhere worse.”

  “Oh, not quite.”

  Alif jumped, blinking, searching through the watery haze of his vision for the origin of the voice. It was familiar. So too was the smell of sulfur that permeated the room, which seemed too dim for midday, and too stifling for winter. He was seized by dread.

  “Hello again, Alif,” said the Hand. He was seated with his back to the window, dressed in a white robe; to Alif ’s smarting eyes the sun behind him seemed to throw a perverse halo around his figure. “And Abu Talib—who would have guessed that beneath such a puny, underdeveloped exterior there lurked a dangerous provocateur. You’ve caused me quite a bit of unexpected trouble and expense. Does your mother know what you’ve been up to?”

  NewQuarter merely whimpered in response. The Hand was seated in a desk chair rescued from a corner of the room, as calmly as if he was taking a meeting at his own office. He was flanked by two twin voids, fissures of nothing that pulled the warmth from the air around them and moved like living beings. Alif glimpsed obscene hints of tooth, nail and tongue in the writhing darkness, which, though silent, spoke of carnage for which there were no words.

  “Alif,” quavered NewQuarter, “I owe you an apology. I could never have believed—”

  “Oh for God’s sake, be a man,” said the Hand, lip curled in disdain. “I don’t like the idea of killing someone barely old enough to shave, any more than you like the idea of dying. NewQuarter01 my ass cheek. I’ve been hunting you for years. You must have started up with this hooliganism at fourteen.”

  “Thirteen,” said NewQuarter.

  The dark things that had pursued them through the building began creeping into the room on dry toadish feet. Dina shrieked as one of them brushed past her leg.

  “You think these are disgusting? You should see their larger cousins. These might as well be a litter of kittens,” said the Hand. He reached out: the creature nearest him stretched up its distended neck and caressed his fingers with its cheek.

  Alif began to laugh silently.

  “Something funny?”The Hand’s voice was sharp.

  “No,” said Alif, “It’s not funny at all. It’s just that the Islamists have been saying for years that State is propped up by demonic powers. I never imagined they might be right.”

  The Hand made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and stood, pacing.

  “A pack of crazed, bearded homosexuals, the lot of them. What do they know of demonology? What you see in this room is not dangerous, Alif. I’ll tell you what is. The spirits that lurk in your bloodstream, poisoning your mind day after day, eroding your will. They breed in the marketplace, sapping you with goods you don’t need and money you don’t have. God was right: those are the demons a wise man fears most. And they were well in evidence in this City long before I came along. This place is festering with shayateen, yet you despise me for conjuring up a few helpers as one would call a dog.”

  Alif noticed the Hand was perspiring.

  “What about those people?” he said, pointing out the window at the turmoil in the square below. “They don’t look possessed to me.”

  The Hand gave a short, barking laugh.

  “They suffer from another malady, just as you do—the delusion of freedom.”

  “Are you going to hurt them?” whispered Dina, speaking up for the first time. The Hand smiled restlessly.

  “I don’t have to hurt them. I will set my little friends upon the crowd, and they will hurt themselves. Suspicions will grow, factions will arise, secularist and Islamist will discover they cannot cooperate, men will decide women are not their comrades. Someone will get bold and pull a knife. And that will be the end.”

  Alif swallowed hard, staring out the window at the square below.The crowd had swelled to an astonishing size. There seemed to be more people than street; the broad intersecting avenues of the midan were invisible beneath a crush of human movement. He wondered how many of the demonstrators he knew; how many he had aided, unseen, disguising their digital origins from the man who sat in front of him. He thought of Egypt, and the anonymous friends he had allowed to suffer out of fear for his own skin.

  “Never again,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?”The Hand narrowed his depthless eyes.

  Alif forced himself to look the man steadily in the face.

  “Go to hell.”

  Flushing red, the Hand took several steps toward Alif. Alif shook, but stood his ground. Fumbling in his pocket, he took out the whistle the goat-horned woman had given him and clenched it in his fist.

  “I beg your pardon?”The Hand’s voice was deadly.

  “I said I’d live to see you fed to the dogs,” said Alif, “and I’m still alive.” He raised the whistle to his lips and blew.

  He waited. Nothing happened.

  The Hand began to laugh. It was a terrible sound, a mad sound, rising out of his chest like the mindless howl of a jackal.

  “Alif, Alif,” he choked out, “Put that idiotic thing away. Your friends are not coming.”

  Sweat slid between Alif ’s arms and legs and down his back.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly timid.

  The Hand only laughed harder. He sat back down in NewQuarter’s desk chair, muscles straining in his reddened face.

  “What did I tell you back in that filth-hole of a cell? I’ve won.” He reached out. One of the twin voids beside him began to twist like a flame in a strong wind. It grew a vaporous limb, and reaching inside itself, drew out a dusty manuscript bound in blue.

  “You’ve lost your bargaining chip. My little friends lifted this today.”The Hand took the book and ran his fingers along its spine.

  “Take a closer look,” said Alif, emboldened. “It’s not what you think it is. You’re holding an old but ordinary copy of the Alf Layla.”

  The Hand tossed the book at Alif ’s feet, sayi
ng nothing. Alif wiped his palms on his trousers and trembled as he bent to pick it up. The scent hit him before he touched the binding. He closed his eyes.

  It was the Alf Yeom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Is he dead?” Alif asked in a leaden voice. “The marid. Did you kill him for it?”

  “Oh no,” said the Hand, resuming his seat. “I simply bottled him up again. He could be useful at some future juncture. Magnificent creatures, the marideen, but stupid as a bag of bricks. It wasn’t hard. He’s over there in the corner.”

  Alif looked: an unassuming two liter bottle of Mecca Cola sat on the floor next to one of the Hand’s formless sentries. Stormcolored mist curled upon itself inside, sluggish and sullen.

  “And the convert?”

  “You mean the pregnant girl? Do you take me for an idiot? If she’d let me I would have delivered her to her embassy in a private car. No one wants unhappy Americans on their hands. As it was, I left her in the Empty Quarter for the jinn to do with what they will. Though she was rather upset by this turn of events, I have to say. It was she who told me you were expecting company. Once your little band of heroes saw what I’d done to the marid, they wisely decided to stay home.”

  “Cowards,” murmured Dina.

  “I disagree. The jinn are rarely cowards—it’s just that they are, as a rule, practical rather than honorable.”

  Alif thought of Vikram in his final hours, bleeding to death in the convert’s arms.

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  The Hand looked annoyed.

  “Whether you agree or not is immaterial. What incentive does someone who is unseen have to keep his word? None. We are only honest because we must live in the light of day.”

  Alif heard Dina say his given name in a soft voice. For reasons he did not immediately understand, he felt shaken by it, and by the motives she might have had for pronouncing it at that moment. He glanced back at her, unseen as she herself was behind her black veil, and met her eyes, and felt the threads of his life pull taut, revealing at last the modest image he had woven into the tapestry of the world. He turned back to face the Hand.