Dawn

by Rakesh K Kaul

  Ta da dam,

  Ta da deum,

  Dhaa dhin,

  Dhin dhaa.

  Dhaa dhin,

  Dhin dhaa,

  Dhaa tin,

  Tin taa.

  Taa dhin,

  Dhin dhaa!

  Like a gazelle, I sprang up on my toes. I jumped up, kicking my heels against my back, landing in a squatting position. My feet were pointing in the opposite directions. I jumped again into a standing posture. I raised the right foot up above the left foot, and then jumped on the right foot with the left foot up higher than the waist. I repeated the process alternating the hop and swing the leg to each side. Each jump reflected the power of life to overcome the power of death. I held my hand up facing the fire, displaying the ability to face fear. Coming down on the flat of the feet on the note ta and on dhin, I landed on my toes for speed.

  Hafiz danced close to me and whispered that AIman was picking up that the crowd was getting energized in a way that she hadn’t witnessed earlier. All sensory systems within the shikha men were engaged and firing. Hafiz’s paradox bombs—already installed in AIman’s system—were overloading AIman’s energy capacity and she was dragging a bit, but still not in any way incapacitating her. He had plugged us into his sensor readings.

  But then, the first anomaly occurred, which his sensors picked up. Each shikha man was seeing a different me—his own Dawn. Do You See What I See was a common game in Arman’s empire, designed to show how objects were perceived, which were then shaped by the onlooker’s wishes. There were now five billion Dawns that had paired up with the men. The shikha men all stood up and started dancing with their Dawn. Each felt like they were the chosen partner in the Tandava dance. The tempo of the music increased and then decreased in alternating cycles. As if on cue, Tan sang a leela verse.

  When baby Krishna was born,

  Lord Shiva who we adorn,

  Came running to have darshan,

  And danced for his favourite son.

  The men were slowly dissolving into a rhythmic energy flow. It was not me but the dancer who had mesmerized them. AIman tried furiously to interrupt with a command to her clones to distract the unruly dancers, but what was happening in them was beyond the mind, in a region that she could not penetrate. AIman’s skin was breaking out into unruly waves. Hafiz quickly launched most of the viruses in his arsenal. She tried to isolate them and erase them, but all was happening too fast at the same moment. There were new openings that were revealing themselves within her design. The graphene skin shimmered and changed, indicating that she was trying hard to shut down the viruses but not fast enough. We had bombarded her with too much information. The viruses were multiplying and sapping her of capacity.

  The dance ended. But it was not over.

  I smiled sweetly at my audience.

  I had concluded the first part and began the second by taking a few playful steps. Bashful and confident with folded hands, I stretched out my limbs slowly in front of the Pandavas. They followed with the music we had rehearsed on. The beat was now unhurried.

  My body folded and unfolded gracefully, weaving circles in the air. I was the charming Lasya dancer, a form first said to have been performed by Goddess Parvati. It was a form that was delicate, enticing and magnetic. Hafiz alerted me in real time as to what was going on. My mind was calmly observing even as my body was flowing, each curve embodying the form of River Vitasta. The human-hybrids in the audience pushed the clones away. They realized that what was next to them was synthetic sameness. I was natural. They realized that it was the nature of Nature to be diverse and they had been deprived of it.

  The shikha men were finally caught in the net of my leela. My Lifetrons had tunnelled inside them and entangled with their Lifetrons. When that connection was locked in, it fired up. The shikha men rushed to the stage, first hundreds, then thousands and then hundreds of thousands milling around it in a total state of frenzy. They tried to climb the stage and get to us, entrapped by the dance.

  To counter, a desperate AIman shot a chemical command—a release of serotonin—to force the men to break their concentration. But according to Hafiz, it seemed that it had been blocked by my dance. Hafiz noted that something was flowing upwards within them in a finer form, which was not getting picked up by Arman’s sensors. All that he could sense was an energy that had enveloped the humans. To AIman, the men had gone mad. Tan had a beatific smile, and I understood. The battle between AIman and me was an unequal one because I was using weapons that AIman’s inferior technology simply could not penetrate. AIman had been rendered obsolete by Nature, by the juice of life that my teachers had talked about.

  Then Tan slowly sang the closing song—a song Kira had taught us to use as the ultimate weapon against all demoniac forces. Tan tried to replicate her sweet voice.

  Namami shamishaan nirvaan roopam

  Vibhum vyapakam brahma vedswaroopam.

  Nijam nirgunam nirvikalpam niriham

  Chidakash maakaash vasam bhajeham.

  The notes of the santoor were fading away. Slowly, I sank down on my knees with folded hands, my heart and mind settled on namami, my limitless self that had broken the knots in my heart and the noose of the cage that had bound my body. It was the grand finale. I looked up.

  AIman was still functioning.

  Arman was sneering.

  Time had run out for me.

  Muladeva had trained me to maintain face even when dead.

  I stood up and began to slowly slide towards the stage exit door facing the shikha men with my hands folded, bidding goodbye to them forever. My heels were closing and opening alternately, a sideways moonwalk. The QuGene scientists quickly followed me with their weapons. Their circle tightened around me. I was theirs now. My time has come, my heart sank.

  AIman and Arman had won.

  Suddenly, a frenzied cry went up from the shikha men. It was like one that I had never heard before. They shouted ‘NOOOO! Mamah, Mamah, Mamah, mine, mine, mine!’ as the orgiastic dam burst. ‘NOW!’ I ordered Hafiz, ‘Go, go, go!’ Hafiz immediately fired all his remaining paradox viruses into AIman. Simultaneously, the humans clamoured on to the stage to get to the last woman with a free mind.

  It was a 100 billion-watt Rasa energy of desire that had burst from the five billion shikha males. It hit AIman’s reflexive PNS system precisely at the point that her overloaded, controlling CNS system was barraged by the new paradox bombs, making her scramble for additional surge requirement. That ran head-on into her energy reserve limits, causing her CNS to slow down.

  ‘What is going on?’ I asked, frantically looking at the scientists around me and the audience, who too had paused and stood silent like robots.

  Hafiz’s excited voice came in, ‘She got overloaded. AIman’s PNS reflex system has tripped its fuse. This has automatically put the human’s brains in complete lockdown mode, bypassing AIman’s central command and control brain and switched them off to stop the Rasa energy burn. Wait, wait, wait! Her brain is coming back online and slowly trying to reconnect. What the . . .’ he stopped.

  All of us yelled, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Yes, one second, I’m scanning. So, her mind is getting synchronized with the shikhas. It seems that it’s a . . . a void.’

  ‘What void?’

  ‘Dawn. They are dead. Their minds have been completely short circuited. It happened when AIman put them on lockdown mode.’

  ‘Dead?’ my eyes scanned the crowd. No one was moving.

  But Hafiz, completely in trance, didn’t hear me. ‘Oh my! AIman is synchronizing now, but . . . but her memory is getting completely erased! The reboot connected her to the blank shikha men. They erased her out.’

  This was what Patanjali had said. A calm mind could still a turbulent one.

  ‘Look, look at the Circassian clones! The blankness of AIman has now flowed into them. It seems . . . it seems they have been wiped out too. This is colossal! This is Data Deluge on a universal scale!’ Hafiz screamed. �
��Yoginis, I could kiss you for being the great programmers that you were. When you designed the Master-Slave synchronization, you gave unidirectional power to the people to be Truth Keepers. The minds of the shikha men became blank as it prevailed over AIman. Man over machine.’

  As I tried to process the information, my eyes scanned the stage. And it was then that I saw a sight that I would never forget: AIman, her eyes blank, lifeless orbs, standing still with her mouth all frothy. This was strange for an AI. White pus dribbled from the side of her lips and leaked from her eyes. Her graphene body began to blotch and break out, as if insects longed to escape her skin. Her face began to morph into a shapeless pudgy mass and her twisted mouth opened into a soundless scream—as if as a last cry for help. She looked like she was gasping for air. Then slowly, very slowly, like time itself had slowed, the graphene particles started peeling away from her body, large black flakes scattering on the stage. She was literally getting flayed apart, molecule by molecule. The other Circassian robots followed her disintegration. When it was all over, there was only graphene dust on the floor of the stage and the stadium, alongside the dead men who still stood transfixed by the power off command that had aborted all mental and physical activity within them.

  ‘In death,’ said Tan, his head bowed, ‘it was the final revenge of the shikha men over their tormentor.’

  ‘Their tripwire of natural response based on biomimicry has completely wiped out Arman’s UI,’ said Yaniv, jubilantly.

  ‘We . . . we have won?’ was all I managed to say. The victory was not sweet, for all the men had perished. Five billion of them. It was a great price to pay and along the lines of what my mother had predicted.

  My eyes now red and blurry with rage, I looked at Arman. He stood among the dead. The QuGene scientists, the men around the stage, the clones and his grand creation—the Fairy Princess AIman—had all fallen. I observed him as he frantically attempted to revive command and control through his connectivity controller, screaming for it to reboot, but it was of no use. He knew that it was the end. He stood up and threw the controller to the ground, smashing it to smithereens.

  Grabbing Dushita’s sword that was placed on the glass table in front of his throne, he came swinging wildly towards me, his mad eyes red, down the steps of the stage. ‘Don’t you even dare!’ I thundered. Instantly, my mace flew up and landed in my hands, hot and glowing in the light of the flames. I clamped my right hand around it. The fire licked my skin and long flowing hair. My blood oath vow was screaming to be completed. ‘For my ma and all the women who were taken before their time, you murderer, you will finally pay. Conquer for Life!’ The mace pointed itself at Arman and I could feel a pulse of energy burst out of its three prongs and hit him. I shook from the blast. I looked up to see the mad king. He fell when the bolts crashed into him, his hands twitching uncontrollably. The sword fell from his hand with a loud thud near where he stood. He tried to stand up and take a step but now convulsing violently, he rolled down the stairs that led from his throne pedestal to the termite hill.

  ‘He’s in the grip of an epileptic seizure. It is being created by an electrical storm in his brain that your mace has set off,’ said Tabah, peering at the man who was once the king but now a nobody.

  Quickly, Tabah grabbed the sword near my feet and sliced the top of the termite hill. The insects came swarming out and fell upon the twitching Arman.

  Tabah raised his arms up to the sky in front of the towering fire and shouted, ‘Tabah Tasal has finally got respect. The curtain now falls on the greatest natya performance ever.’

  ‘It is time.’ Tan announced, tearing away his purple robe. ‘Time to leave this death ruin.’

  The Pandavas looked at me, their general, for orders. I smiled. We powered up our suits and I grabbed my mace. As I flew straight up, the mortal screams of the rapidly disappearing Arman died a slow death. Together, we had won the war of the mind through the Niti stories of yore and the war of the heart through the love that only comes naturally to humans.

  I closed my eyes for a moment to feel the breeze on my face, ‘Maej, you got justice, and through your supreme power to create life, women everywhere have been avenged. You go from limbo to liberation. This victory is yours.’

  Sarga 15

  Anything Can Happen

  Amarnath Cave, Srinagar

  Tegh chuckled, ‘I knew that the heat energy limit would do AIman in. Force works, huh?’

  ‘Hold it! Hold it,’ Hafiz challenged, holding his hand up, ‘It is the paradox bombs that did it, brother. It is information that works,’ he said, tapping his forehead.

  ‘Right,’ Yaniv rolled his eyes. ‘And who would you say discovered the gap between the body reflex PNS and the mind-controlling CNS? The ancients used to say that time slays all. But in this case specifically, it was the quick response of the PNS that shut off the CNS and then the shikha men, which began the demise of AIman.’

  Tan, uncharacteristically, jumped in, ‘But who sang the beat that created the natural vibration and the dying notes within the men?’

  Tabah smiled. He was not to be left behind. ‘The actors should always bow to the stage director. Without Rasa, we would be nowhere.’

  I laughed observing the back-and-forth between the boys. The ordeal was over . . . somewhat . . . until our final face-off with the ultimate enemy. Right now was a time to rest and celebrate. ‘But who did the movement, you dolts?’ I said, trying to join in with a smile, but it wouldn’t come easily. I stood up and took a deep breath. ‘Have we forgotten Yuva, Kira, Idagali, Muladeva, Meghavahana and hundreds of others who showed us that desire beats the mind? Have we forgotten our teachers who opened our minds and hearts to Yoga, Rasa, to Maha and to the secret powers inside us that we have unlocked? Have we forgotten the little mosquito and his friends who taught us that we have to trust each other and all the stories that revealed the Niti secrets that have helped in defeating AIman and Arman?’

  The Pandavas instantly became apologetic. ‘We were just having some fun,’ said Yaniv, looking at the sky, his face red with shame.

  I smiled sadly; my heart was heavy. I didn’t want to be rude to my friends or take this victory away from them, but my conscience was weighing heavy on me. Was this even a victory? I thought bitterly. The death of billions was on my head. My hands were red with their blood. Again and again, my mother’s prediction of the final Great War came back to me, haunting me: Everyone will die.

  We had settled down in Jwala Devi’s centre in the village of Khaduvi, which had been renamed Khrew. The sanctum sanctorum had an eternal flame that kept us warm. I was so weary after the battle that the gentle warmth of the place was sorely welcome. Tabah had suggested the location to thank the energy of fire, which had kick-started the last dance. It also had an ancient temple at the entrance, which surprisingly had a commemorative statue of Yuva. I thought that it was very appropriate given what he had done for us. The place was quite stunning, bathed in natural beauty, whether aware or unaware of the death of its citizens, who knew? It just lived on like nothing had happened, like five billion people hadn’t perished. ‘With the advent of the ice age after the cooling of the earth, following global warming, many corrective action steps were initiated here,’ said Tan, eyes closed, taking in deep breaths. ‘Three hundred and sixty springs had been recreated in the neighbourhood along with the volcanic flame,’ said Tan, finally opening his eyes and walking back inside the inner sanctum. I looked around. It is indeed a very beautiful, restful stop. I wrapped a heavy robe, which had been hanging on a hook at the entrance, around my suit and followed him in.

  My attention had now turned towards Dushita.

  ‘He will no longer remain remote, having seen his entire work destroyed. His great creation is dead,’ said Tan, his hands white from the cold, seeking warmth in the eternal fire.

  ‘We have to put together our plans to face him,’ I said, dropping the robe and sitting down on it beside the flame, my skin and hair almost touching it. />
  Tan nodded and brought out some scrolls from his bag. He had checked all the ancient resources that he had on Dushita. ‘Sit everyone,’ he said in a calm but commanding voice. Hafiz raised an eyebrow and Tegh’s lips curled into a smile. Tabah shook his head gently, shepherding them around Yaniv who had already taken his seat.

  ‘The first representation of Dushita that we have is in Kashmir when he appeared in the form of Mara,’ Tan recited, his eyes closed. ‘He had sent his daughters to tempt Buddha, but he was defeated. Mara is from the word mrtyu, which means “death”.’

  ‘Death?’ Hafiz asked.

  ‘Yes. He was the joint strike force born of desire and death at the very moment when Life first appeared. His was the energy of temptation and violence. And now he has returned in the form of Dushita.’

  ‘So . . . wait!’ Yaniv said anxiously. ‘You’re saying Dushita is actually an ancient person . . . umm, entity? He’s not a real person like Arman?’

  Tabah shook his head and held out a picture of a relief fragment of Mara that he had found as part of his search for stage props. The stone sculpture showed the face of a handsome young man. He had an asymmetrical hairdo bunched on the left side of his face, and on his head was a turban richly adorned with jewellery. His bushy eyebrows met in the middle atop big round eyes. He had a square chin with a cleft in it, and his ears were relatively bigger than normal. He was so typical of any young member of the royalty that the portrait seemed ordinary except for a mark on his forehead that seemed to have come from a branding iron. What caused shivers to run down my back was the hint of two lower canine teeth that were jutting out. As if concealing them was a handlebar moustache that covered his upper lip, the mouth slightly open in a lewd, arrogant smile.