Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  “You’re full of shit,” he said calmly. Behind him, NewQuarter made a strangled noise. He ignored it.

  “It’s because of people like you that we have to go unseen in order to be honest. You’ve made the truth impossible anywhere but in the dark, behind false names. The only thing that ever sees the light of day in this City is bullshit. Your bullshit, the Emir’s bullshit, State’s bullshit. But that’s over now. All the people you’ve chosen not to see are out there calling for your blood. And me, and NewQuarter, and all our friends, all the ones you’ve been hunting and kidnapping and shutting up in prison all these years—we’re going to give it to them.”

  The sweat on the Hand’s brow grew more pronounced. He tore off his headdress with a restless jerk and tossed in on the floor; bareheaded, he looked smaller, his hair an untidy thatch threaded with grey.

  “I thought we were talking about jinn,” he said in a cool voice.

  “A jinn is not the only way to be invisible,” said Alif. “There are other ways, equally involuntary.”

  “You’re a very cheap philosopher,” sneered the Hand. “Much good may it do you. I have the Alf Yeom. I’ve got your marid in an empty soda bottle. I have battalion of servants no earthly army can touch.”

  Alif realized what was missing from the room.

  “Where are your guards?” he asked. The Hand gave another barking laugh.

  “Are you blind?” He motioned to the voids that stood beside him, the seething mass of dark bodies moving about the room.

  “No, your human guards. Your State Security people. The ones who bashed in my ribs at Al Basheera and starved me in prison.”

  The Hand licked his lips.

  “I have no need of human guards,” he said.

  “The Emir’s cut you loose, hasn’t he,” said NewQuarter incredulously. “You screwed up, and he’s decided it’s safer to feed you to the angry crowds than to defend you.”

  Rising again, the Hand pulled at the collar of his robe, which clung grey and damp to his neck. “The Emir is an old fool, and his foolishness will cost him his throne. He’s under the illusion that his people love him, and if he purges his government of a few corrupt officials, everyone will calm down. He doesn’t realize that the people in that square are not going home.”

  He leaned against the windowsill, heedless of the ragged fringe of glass that ringed the empty frame. A red spot blossomed on his shoulder. Alif stared at it in dismay. He had been unprepared for this, for a Hand unshackled from the regime. Alif knew the bitter, boundless energy that came of having no dignity left to lose—it was what had made the difference between the idle boy with a computer he had been at fifteen, and the threat he had become a few years later. It was what had made him, in his own way, dangerous. He recognized the rage in the Hand’s opaque eyes, and was seized with fear.

  “What are you going to do,” he asked.

  The Hand’s lips parted in a smile.

  “Exactly what I planned to do,” he said. “Restore the natural order of things. I built the State’s digital infrastructure—they can’t keep me out. And the people in that square must be made to know the poison that lies at the heart of all false hopes. They can oust the Emir if they like, but they must learn to make do with me. And thanks to that—” He pointed to the Alf Yeom. “this City will be under a meta-firewall that will make China’s Golden Shield look like a leaky bucket. The Alifs of this world will either crawl home or die in a prison cell, as you were intended to do. As you will do, in very short order.”

  “You’re sick,” whispered NewQuarter. “You’re crazy.”

  “And you are a dead man flapping his gums. The people out there want to see princes strung up by their feet. I may start with you.”

  The eyeless things grew restive, boiling around the floor and walls on their swollen feet. Alif gnashed his teeth.

  “You’re bluffing. You can’t build any firewall. The book will betray you like it betrays everybody. Look at the damage you managed to do to every ISP in the whole damn City.”

  A dark, blank face snapped at his ankle. He bit back a yelp, hoping the Hand had not seen him start.

  “That was your sloppy coding,” the Hand said stiffly. “Now that I have the Alf Yeom, I will correct your mistakes.”

  Alif ’s eyes strayed to the manuscript lying on the floor between them. The eyeless creatures avoided it as if by instinct, leaving a circular perimeter around the book as they orbited their master. The noise from the square had redoubled, and seemed now to come from all directions at once, including the floors below. There was the sound of a window shattering, close by.

  Alif was possessed by the same impulse that had overtaken him in the marid’s courtyard, when he had bolted for the door that led him to Dina; the certain knowledge that most problems had very simple solutions, if one was willing to make sufficient sacrifice.

  “Prove it,” he said. Behind him, Dina took a sharp breath. The Hand looked anxious, as though Alif had erred from the script he was meant to follow.

  “What do you mean,” he said cautiously.

  “Pick up the book, open it, and tell me how you would outcode me,” said Alif. He was startled by the evenness of his own voice. NewQuarter grabbed his sleeve. He jerked away irritably. The Hand raised one eyebrow, glanced down at the book, looked back up at Alif, and licked his lips.

  “Very well,” he said, and picked up the Alf Yeom between careful fingers. Alif watched as he thumbed through the flaking pages, scanning the text. His face changed, growing eager, almost manic.

  “Yes,” he said, “The frame story, you see—Farukhuaz and the nurse, and this theme of marriage. You noticed of course that marriage plays a very small role in the subsequent stories. Naturally this is because it refers not to literal marriage, but to the union between analog—that’s Farukhuaz—and digital—that’s the nurse. The necessary blending of rational and irrational, of discrete and algebraic functions. The frame story is the platform, the subsequent stories individual programs . . .” He dragged the heel of one hand across his glistening forehead. Wiping it on his robe, he returned to his task, flipping pages three and four at a time, the greed in his eyes a terrible dead light.

  “Have you read it through all the way to the end?” he asked.

  “No,” Alif admitted. “I jumped around. I stopped after I came across a story that was—it was about someone I knew. I couldn’t go on after that.”

  “Your own weakness,” said the Hand with contempt. The twin voids shimmered behind his shoulders like great dark wings. His fingers trembled. The room was silent but for the crisp sound of paper and the thrum of dissent below. Alif looked nervously over his shoulder, hoping for some unspoken vote of confidence from Dina or NewQuarter. But NewQuarter had bitten his lips raw, and stared at Alif in wordless accusation; Dina was unknowable, her eyes cast down. Alif tasted bile.

  He jumped when he heard the Hand cry out.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”The book dangled from the Hand’s fingers, open to a chapter heading Alif couldn’t see.

  “Joke?” Alif ’s fraying nerves made him smile like an idiot. He fought for control of his face. The Hand was pale, jabbing with one finger at a page near the end of the book.

  “ ‘The Fall of the Hand, or A Sad Case of Early Retirement’,” he read. “The final story. Is this your work, you ass-coveting little shit? Is this elaborate hoax your attempt to drive me mad?”

  Alif looked from the book to the Hand and back again.

  “My what?”

  “Read it,” the Hand shrieked, hurling the book at Alif. He caught it awkwardly, crumpling the fragile pages against his chest. Looking down at the title page of the last story, he read his own name.

  The Tale of Alif the Unseen.

  A muffled cacophony of feet and shouts drifted up from the flat directly beneath them. Alif read the title over and over, attempting to make sense of what had occurred. A buoyant, illicit feeling stole over him, and he felt drunk on something much head
ier than wine.

  “That’s not what it says when I read it,” he murmured at last, at a loss for anything more eloquent.

  “What the hell do you mean that’s not what it says? Are you illiterate?” One of the eyeless things jumped for the Hand’s sleeve with a congested snarl, tearing off a length of white cotton between its teeth. The Hand seemed not to notice, staring instead at Alif with an expression that frightened him.

  “I warned you,” said Alif, his voice cracking. “I told you this book is tricky.”

  “Tricky?”The Hand spat on the floor, suddenly vulgar. “So it’s a trick, is it? Shall we see how it ends?”

  Alif read the title once more. He discovered he did not need to know.

  “I think it’s too late for that,” he said, handing back the book. “You can read it if you want. I won’t.”

  The Hand snatched the manuscript, scanning its final pages at a frantic pace. His face drained of blood.

  “ ‘If he had left the room that instant, he might have lived’,” he read. “ ‘But he lingered to read the last chapter of the book, which was full of sly silences and half-truths, revealing nothing’.”

  An alarm chimed out from the innards of Dina’s backpack. The fan inside the netbook began to whir gently. It was echoed, several seconds later, by the hum of electricity in the walls of the building. The lightbulbs in an unmolested chandelier hanging from the ceiling flickered on, filling the room with sudden luminescence.

  “The utility grid is coming back online,” whispered NewQuarter, “Whatever you did—”

  “Shh.” Alif cast a furtive glance at the Hand, hoping he had not heard. But the man’s eyes were vacant. He stood very still, staring at the broken door and the hall beyond. He made no movement when one of the eyeless things nipped at his fingers and drew blood.

  The hum of electricity increased, becoming an almost palpable vibration. Alif imagined he could hear the physical transfer of information as the City’s ISPs booted up; the packets of ones and zeros traveling outward from data hubs, crossing oceans, recruiting allies for the revolution across a thousand social networks, from a million LCD screens, behind which, though unseen, were people who were ferociously alive. The hum in the walls was answered by a roar from the square below as demonstrators discovered their smartphones and tablets were online once more. The Hand’s digital grip on the City had slackened. The world would look into the square through the eyes of a thousand newsfeeds and posts and uploaded videos, and witness the cost of change. For a moment Alif was no longer afraid, savoring the mingled uproar of man and machine.

  “What is that sound?” howled the Hand. Shaken from his reverie, he clapped his palms over his ears.

  Alif smiled.

  “The delusion of freedom,” he said.

  Voices echoed from the hall outside. The shadows of the ascending crowd dappled the walls, spoiling the pristine expanse of white before NewQuarter’s threshold. A vanguard of boys armed with sticks burst into the room, shouting in three languages.

  “You’re dead!” screamed the Hand. “You are all dead men!” He turned on Alif, mouth twisted into a grimace from which sanity was absent, and made an arcane gesture with his left hand. The eyeless things turned as one. Alif backed toward the window as they scuttled after him. He was half aware of Dina struggling toward him through the crowd, and of NewQuarter cursing, his pale robe swallowed in the dusty press of flesh.

  The mob that filled the room did not seem to see the dozens of fanged mouths that howled at Alif as he stumbled over broken glass and slammed into a metal guard rail outside NewQuarter’s window. The square reeled a hundred feet below, one unified wall of noise and jostling bodies. It rose up at him in a rush of vertigo. He pressed his back against the guard rail, steadied by the unyielding warmth of the metal. The Hand was bellowing in some awful language. He raised his left arm, fingers snapping shut into a fist. The eyeless things jerked, squealed, and leapt at Alif ’s throat.

  Alif dodged. Momentum carried the two creatures nearest him through the window, howling as they vanished into the overheated air. The others fell back and warily pressed their bellies to the floor. The crush of human protestors did not alarm them. Somehow they avoided being trampled underfoot, bending and twisting like shadows on water. No one looked at them.

  With a cry of frustration, the Hand shouldered his way across the room, toppling a fat man armed with a cooking skewer in his haste. Alif tensed, preparing himself. He had never thrown a punch—not a real one—but he made a fist anyway, redoubling it when he realized his thumb was on the inside. As the Hand reached out, Alif raised his arm to swing. But the Hand did not reach for Alif.

  He reached for Dina.

  The girl had made her way through the crowd toward Alif, calling something he could not hear over the din. The Hand grabbed her robe at the neck and yanked her head back. One edge of her veil slid away, revealing dark curls damp with sweat. Her eyes went wide and round. Alif screamed at the top of his voice, but the sound was lost amid the shouts and chanting of the mob, and a wall of flesh and cloth and pasteboard signs closed in and cut off his view. He struck the person nearest him—a woman, a middle-aged woman, wearing a beige plaid headscarf—feeling only momentary remorse as she screamed and stumbled back. Alif rushed through the opening she had created, searching for the Hand’s white robe or Dina’s black one. The eyeless things peered at him from between the legs and elbows of the crowd, silent and obscene.

  Finally he saw familiar slim brown fingers reaching out, and caught them. They closed on his. Over some anonymous shoulder, Alif saw the Hand grit his teeth and twist the fabric of Dina’s veil behind her head, pulling the material flat against her nose and mouth. Her fingers jerked out of his grasp to claw at her face as she fought for air. Alif threw himself at the Hand, knocking the taller man backward into a group of teenage boys. He cried out in surprise. Releasing Dina, he pinwheeled his arms, but it was no use: he slid inelegantly between two pimpled, roaring youths, one of whom gave him a look of half-interested disgust before elbowing him in the throat. With a sputter, the Hand went down, disappearing beneath the throng.

  “Are you all right?” Alif could barely hear himself speak. Dina’s chest heaved beneath her robe; there was a red smear in her left eye where a blood vessel had burst. She leaned against Alif without answering. He lifted her in his arms, pushing sideways through a circle of men shouting recriminations at one another: one wore the red armband of the City Communist Bloc, the other the wooly beard of an Islamist. The room was choked with the rank butchery smell of perspiration and blood. Alif made his way toward the broken window, following a whisper of hot but breathable air, shielding Dina’s head from flailing fists and banners. When he reached the window he set Dina down on her feet and leaned against the adjoining wall with a gasp.

  “Your eye,” he said. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not much.” Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. She straightened her veil with hands that shook. “We have to get out of here before the crowd blows up. Where is Abu Talib?”

  Alif stood on his toes and craned his neck, scanning the room. He thought he saw NewQuarter’s white head cloth bobbing in the midst of the crowd, but it was eclipsed by the looming face of a man with gelled hair, reeking of cigarette smoke and punching his smartphone in the air like a weapon.

  “The internet is back!” he bellowed. “Mobile service is up! Electricity is online! Get everyone into the square!”

  Bluish light vied with the declining sun as half a hundred phones and tablets emerged from pockets and bags. The dark things skittered around the room, suddenly agitated, snapping as they blundered into one another.

  “Is this you?” Dina tugged at the sleeve of Alif ’s shirt. “Is this because of what you did?”

  “Yes,” said Alif in a faint voice. The backpack where his netbook lay churning out algorithms was invisible beneath the crush of bodies that filled the room, yet his work was a tangible presence. If he closed his eyes, he cou
ld see his commands scrolling up the screen, and imagine every step of the silent mathematical siege that had taken place as Tin Sari exposed what digital hiding places remained to the Hand. Alif felt no triumph, merely a physical sense of relief. It was only when Dina touched his fingers that he realized they were trembling.

  “Are you going to tell them it was you?” Dina cupped her left eye with one hand and regarded him solemnly with the right. “Everyone knows what happened at Basheera. You’ll be a hero.”

  Alif flexed his shaking hands. The energy of the crowd was shifting as people babbled into cell phones and punched out text messages, rallying unseen others for the final push. Alif heard one man say the Emir was in hiding; another claimed State security forces had been authorized to shoot to kill.

  “Being a hero was never the point,” said Alif, and realized it was true. “The point was what’s happening right now. The point was to win.”

  Dina’s visible eye regarded him with admiration. High on the energy of the crowd, Alif was struck by an urge to kiss her, right there in the sweaty miasma of revolution, like the hero of an American film. He might have forgotten himself and tried had he not heard a terrified scream—male, but only just—issue from across the room. Jostling ensued, and a chorus of raised voices began calling for rope.

  “What’s going on?” Alif asked the man with the gelled hair, who was shouting orders over the crowd. He turned and smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth.

  “Looks like we’ve caught a prince,” he said. “The little bastard who owns this flat.”

  Alif felt the blood drain from his face.

  “Abu Talib,” said Dina in a horrified voice.

  Alif did not respond. He began shoving people out of the way, forcing himself toward the center of the room. Answering fists and elbows pushed against his ribs, but he ignored them, intent on the white head cloth that flashed between the unfamiliar dark heads of the protestors. He had not gotten far when someone seized his wrist and curled blunt nails into his flesh. Alif yelped, wriggling, and found himself being hauled back toward the window.