by Ian McDonald
‘Thank you, it’s a lovely thought. Are you worried about it?
‘No, it’s a routine excommunication. We want to nip it before panic spreads.’ Parvati nods, sucking in her lower lip in that way she does when she thinks about issues. ‘So what are you doing today?’
‘Well,’ she says, with a turn of her body indicating the nascent garden. ‘I’ve had an idea. Please don’t be cross with me, but I don’t think we need so many shrubs. I’d like some vegetables. A few rows of beans, some tomatoes and peppers - they’d give lots of cover - maybe even some bhindi and brinjal. Herbs - I’d love to grow herbs, tulsi and coriander and hing.’
In his reserved first class seat, Mr Nandha smiles. ‘A proper little urban farmer.’
‘Oh, nothing you would be ashamed of. Just a few rows of things until we move out to the Cantonment and get a bungalow. I could grow those salad vegetables you need. It would save money, they fly them in from Europe and Australia - I’ve seen the labels. Would that be all right?’
‘If you wish, my flower.’
Parvati claps her hands together in soft delight.
‘Oh good. This is a bit cheeky, but I’d already arranged to go with Krishan to the seedsman.’
Mr Nandha often questions what he has done, bringing his lovely wife into Varanasi’s rip-throat society, a country girl among cobras. The games among the Cantonment set - his colleagues, his social peers - appal him. Whispers and looks and rumours, always so sweet and well mannered, but watching, weighing, measuring. Virtues and vices in the most delicate of balances. For men it’s easy. Marry as well as you can - if you can. Mr Nandha has married within jati - more than Arora, his superior at the Ministry, more than most of his contemporaries. A good solid Kayastha/Kayastha marriage but the old rigours no longer seem to matter in new Ranapur. That wife of Nandha’s. Would you listen to the accent? Would you look at those hands? Those colours she wears, and the styles. She can’t speak, you know. Not a word. Nothing to say. Opens her mouth and flies buzz out. Town and country, I say. Town and country. Still stands on the toilet bowl and squats.
Mr Nandha finds his fists tight with rage at the thought of Parvati caught up in those terrible games of my husband this, my children that, my house the other. She does not need the Cantonment bungalow, the two cars and five servants, the designer baby. Like every modern bride, Parvati made her financial checks and genetic scans, but theirs was always a match of respect and love, not a desperate lunge for the first available wedding-fodder in Varanasi’s Darwinian marriage- market. Once the woman came with the dowry. The man was the blessed, the treasure. That was always the problem. Now after a quarter of a century of foetal selection, discreet suburban clinics and old fashioned Kashi back stair car aerial joints, Bharat’s middle class urban male population outnumbers the female four-fold.
Mr Nandha feels a slight shift in acceleration. The train is slowing.
‘My love, I’m going to have to go, we’re coming into Nawada now.’
‘You won’t be in any danger, will you?’ Parvati says, all wide-eyed concern.
‘No, no danger at all. I’ve performed dozens of these.’
‘I love you, husband.’
‘I love you, my treasure.’
Mr Nandha’s wife vanishes from inside his head. I’ll do it for you, he thinks as the train draws him into his showdown. I’ll think of you as I kill it.
A handsome woman jemadar of the local Civil Defence meets Mr Nandha with a sharp salute on the down line platform. Two rows of jawans hold onlookers back with lathis. Outriders fall in fore and aft as the convoy swings into the streets.
Nawada is a strip city, a name cast over the union of four cow-shit towns. Then out of the sky came a fistful of development grants, a slapped-down road grid, speed-built metal shed factories and warehouses stuffed with call centres and data-farms. String together with cable and satellite uplinks, hook into the power grid and let it grind out crores of rupees. It’s among the corrugated aluminium and construction carbon go-downs of Nawada, not the soaring towers of Ranapur, that the future of Bharat is being forged. In the big heavy army hummer Mr Nandha slips past the single unit stores and motor part workshops. He feels like a hired gun, riding into town. Scooters with country girls perched side-saddle on the pillion sway out of his path.
The outriders steer into an alley between spray-concrete go-downs, clearing a path for the hummer with their sirens. An electricity pylon slumps beneath illegal power-taps and siphons. Squatting women share chai and breakfast roti outside a huge windowless concrete box; the men gather as far from them as the geometry of the compound will allow, smoking. Mr Nandha looks up at the outspread blessing hands of the Ray Power solar farm. Salutation to the sun.
‘Turn off the sirens,’ he orders the handsome jemadar, whose name is Sen. ‘The thing has at least animal-level intelligence. If it receives any advance warning, it will attempt to copy itself out.’ Sen winds down the window and shouts orders to the escort. The sirens fall silent.
The hummer is a steel sweat-box. Mr Nandha’s pants stick to the vinyl seat-covers but he’s too proud to squirm free. He slips his ’hoek over his ear, settles the bone transducer over the sweet spot on his skull and opens his box of avatars.
Ganesha, Lord of Auspicious Beginnings, Remover of Obstructions, throned upon his rat-vehicle, rears over the flat roofs and antenna farms of Nawada, vast as a thunderhead. In his hands are his qualities: the goad, the noose, a broken tusk, a rice flour dumpling and a pot of water. His pot belly contains universes of cyberspace. He is the portal. Mr Nandha knows the moves that summon each avatar by heart. His hand calls up flying Hanuman with his mace and mountain; Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, one foot away from universal destruction and regeneration; Durga the Dark One, goddess of righteous wrath, each of her ten arms bearing a weapon; Lord Krishna with his flute and necklace; Kali the disrupter, the belt of severed hands around her waist. In Mr Nandha’s mindsight the aeai agents of the Ministry bend low over tiny Nawada. They are ready. They are eager. They are hungry.
The convoy turns into a service alley. A scatter of police tries to part a press of bodies to let the hummer through. The alley is clogged with vehicles down the entry; an ambulance, a cop cruiser, an electric delivery jeepney. There’s something under the truck’s front wheel.
‘What is going on here?’ Mr Nandha demands as he walks through the scrum of police, Ministry warrant card held high.
‘Sir, one of the factory workers panicked and ran out into the alley, straight under,’ says a police sergeant. ‘He was shouting about a djinn; how the djinn was in the factory and was going to get all of them.’
You call it djinn, Mr Nandha thinks, scanning the site. I call it meme. Non-material replicators; jokes, rumours, customs, nursery rhymes. Mind-viruses. Gods, demons, djinns, superstitions. The thing inside the factory is no supernatural creature, no spirit of flame, but it is certainly a non-material replicator.
‘How many inside?’
‘Two dead, sir. It was the night shift. The rest escaped.’
‘I want this area cleared,’ Mr Nandha orders. Jemadar Sen flicks orders to her jawans. Mr Nandha walks past the body with the leather jacket draped over its face and the shaking truck driver in the back of the police Maruti. He surveys the locus. This bent metal shed makes tikka-pasta. An emigrant family run it from Bradford. Bringing the jobs back home. That’s what places like Nawada are all about. Mr Nandha finds the concept of tikka-pasta an abomination but British-Diaspora Asian cuisine is the thing this season. Mr Nandha squints up at the telephone cable box.
‘Have somebody cut that cable.’
While the rural police scramble for a ladder, Mr Nandha locates the night shift line manager, a fat Bengali pulling nervously at the tag-skin beside his nails. He smells of what Mr Nandha presumes must be tikka-pasta.
‘Do you have a cellular base-port or a satellite uplink?’ he asks.
‘Yes, yes, a distributed internal cell network,’ the Bengali
says. ‘For the robots. And one of those things that bounces signals off meteor trails; to talk to Bradford.’
‘Officer Sen, please have one of your men take care of the satellite dish. We may yet be in time to stop it out-copying.’
The police finally drive the basti folk back to the ends of the alley. A jawan waves from the roof, job done.
‘All communications devices off please,’ Mr Nandha instructs. Jemadar Sen and Rural Sergeant Sunder accompany him into the possessed factory. Mr Nandha straightens his Nehru-cut jacket, shoots his cuffs and ducks under the roller shutter into the combat zone. ‘Stay close and do exactly as I instruct.’ Breathing in the slow, stilling pranayama technique the Ministry teaches its Krishna Cops, Mr Nandha makes his initial visual survey.
It is a typical development-grant job. Plastic barrels of feedstu ff on one side, main processing in the middle, packaging and shipping on the other. No safety guards, no protective wear, no noise abatement equipment, no air- conditioning; one bathroom male, one restroom female. Everything stripped down to accountancy-minimum. Minimal robotics: human hands have always been cheaper in the strip cities. On the right, a row of glastic cubes house the offices and aeai support. Water coolers and fans, all dead. The sun is well up. The building is a steel oven.
A forklift is run into a wall to his extreme left. A body is just visible between the truck and the corrugated metal bulkhead, half-erect. Blood, glossy and furious with flies, is coagulated beneath the wheels. The man has been bayoneted at belly height by the forklift’s tines. Mr Nandha purses his lips in distaste.
Camera eyes everywhere. Nothing to be done about it now. It is watching.
In his three years as a rogue-aeai hunter, Mr Nandha has seen a sizeable number of the bodies that result when humans and artificial intelligences cross. He draws his gun. Jemadar Sen’s eyes widen. Mr Nandha’s gun is big, black, heavy and looks as if it were cast in hell. It has all the knobs and details and bits a Krishna Cop needs on his weapon, it is self- targeting and dual action. The lower barrel kills the flesh: low-velocity explosive bullets. One hit in any part of the body is an impact trauma sure kill. Dum-Dum, after all, is a district of Kolkata. The upper barrel destroys the spirit. It is an EM pulse gun; a googlewatt of power poured into a three- millisecond directed beam. Protein chips crisp. Quantum processors heisenberg out. Carbon nanotubes vaporise. This is the gun that annihilates rogue aeais. Steered by GPS-oriented gyroscopes and controlled by a visual avatar of Indra, lord of the thunderbolt, Mr Nandha’s gun always kills and never misses.
The reek of Bradford tikka-pasta tugs urgently at the base of Mr Nandha’s stomach. How can this muck, this pollution, be all the thing? One of the big stainless steel industrial cooking pots is tipped over, its contents spilled on the floor. Here the second body lies. Its upper half is smothered in tikka-pasta. Mr Nandha smells cooked meat, flicks out his handkerchief to cover his mouth. He notes the corpse’s good trousers, fine shoes, pressed shirt. That will be the IT wallah, then. In Mr Nandha’s experience, aeais, like dogs, turn on their masters first.
He beckons Sen and Sunder in. The rural policeman looks nervous, but the jemadar raises her assault rifle resolutely. ‘Can it hear us?’ Jemadar Sen asks, circling.
‘Unlikely. Level One aeais seldom possess language skills. We’re dealing with something with about the intelligence of a monkey.’
‘And the attitude of a tiger,’ Sergeant Sunder comments.
Mr Nandha summons Siva out of the spatial dimensions of the food factory, moves his hands into a mudra and the go-down springs to life with a glowing nervous system of information conduits. It’s the work of a moment for Siva to access the factory intranet, trace the server; a small featureless cube in a corner of a desk, and insinuate himself through the firewall into the factory system. File registers blur across Mr Nandha’s back-brain. There. Password protected. He summons Ganesha. At once the Remover of Obstacles runs into a quantum key. Mr Nandha is vexed. He dismisses Ganesha and sends in Krishna. There could be a djinn hiding behind that quantum wall. Equally, there could be three thousand pictures of Chinese girls having sex with pigs. Mr Nandha’s fear is that the rogue aeai has reproduced. One mail-out and it will take weeks to grub it all up. Krishna reports the outgoing traffic log as clean. It is still in the building, somewhere. Mr Nandha disconnects the wireless web, unplugs the server and tucks it under his arm. His people back at the Ministry will pry out its secrets.
He pauses, sniffs. Is the reek of tikka-pasta stronger, more acrid? Mr Nandha coughs, something has caught at the back of his throat, burning chilli. He sees Sen sniff, frown. He hears a hum of heavy electrical drain.
‘Everyone out!’ he shouts and at that moment the chain drive on the roller shutter jerks into action just as the number two cooking vat bursts into choking black chilli smoke. ‘Quick quick!’ he commands, blinking away searing tears, handkerchief pressed to mouth. ‘Out, out.’ He follows the others out under the descending shutter with millimetres to spare. In the alley he irritably dusts street grime from his ironed suit.
‘This is most annoying,’ says Mr Nandha. To the tikkapasta workers he calls, ‘You, there. Is there another way in?’
‘Round the side, sahb,’ replies a teen with a skin-condition Mr Nandha would not want near anything human-consumable.
‘No time to lose,’ he says raising his weapon. ‘It may have already used the diversion to escape. With me, please.’
‘I’m not going back in that place,’ Sunder says, hands on thighs. He’s a middle-aged man, putting on middle-body fat and none of this is in the Nawada district police procedure manual. ‘I’m not a superstitious man, but if you haven’t got djinn in there, I don’t know what you have.’
‘There are no djinns,’ says Mr Nandha. Sen falls in behind him. Her suit camouflage is the exact shade of pasta-tikka. They cover their faces, squeeze down the fetid side alley paved with cigarette butts and in through the fire exit. The air is acrid with chilli smoke. Mr Nandha can feel it claw the back of his throat as he delves into his avatars for his most potent programme, Kali the Disrupter. He taps into the factory net and releases her into the system. She’ll go through the web, wire and wireless, copy herself into every mobile and stationary processing unit. Anything without a licence she will tag, trace and erase. There will be only rags left of TikkaPasta Inc. by the time Kali has done. She is a reason Mr Nandha isolated the factory. Let loose on the global web, Kali could wreak crores of rupees of havoc across the continental net within seconds. No better hunter of an aeai than another aeai. Mr Nandha cradles his gun. The mere scent of Kali, a mongoose after a snake, has often been enough to flush a laired aeai from cover.
On full lighthoek resolution Kali is a startling sight, girdled with severed hands, scimitars raised, tongue out and eyes wide, towering up through a slowly settling pall of chilli smoke as data constellations go out around her, one by one. This is what death must be like, thinks Mr Nandha. One by one the delicate blue glows of information flow flicker and go out. One by one the nerve impulses fail, the sensations fade, consciousness disintegrates.
Spooked by machine sounds falling silent all around her, Sen draws close to Mr Nandha. There are forces and entities here she cannot comprehend. When nothing has made a noise or gone dark for a full minute, Sen says, ‘Do you think they’re all gone now?’
Mr Nandha checks a report from Kali.
‘I have deleted two hundred suspect files and programs. If even one per cent of those are aeai copies . . .’ But something more than chilli throat is tugging at his sensibilities.
‘What makes them do this? Why do they turn rabid all of a sudden?’ Sen asks.
‘I’ve always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty,’ Mr Nandha says, turning slowly, trying to identify what it is that has provoked his suspicions. ‘I suspect our friend has been buying in illegal aeai hybrids from the sundarbans. In my experience, no good ever comes out of the data-havens.’
Sen has anothe
r question but Mr Nandha hushes her. Very faint, very distant, he hears a movement. Kali has left just sufficient of the office ware for Siva to be able to link into the security system. Nothing on the cameras, as he suspected, but in the diffuse world of infra-red, something stirs. His head snaps to the crane gantry at the rear of the go- down.
‘I can see you,’ he says, gesturing to Sen. She goes up one end of the gantry. Mr Nandha takes the other. The thing seems to be somewhere up in the ceiling. They walk towards each other.
‘At some point, it will break for it,’ warns Nandha.
‘What will break?’ Sen whispers, cradling her powerful weapon.
‘I suspect it has copied itself into a robot and intends to escape by that means. Expect something small and fast-moving.’
Mr Nandha can hear it now between the clanks of the human footsteps; something scrabbling at the roof, trying to tear a way out. Mr Nandha raises a hand for Jemadar Sen to proceed with caution. He feels as if he is right under it. Mr Nandha squints up into the nest of wires and ducting. A camera-eye on a boom stabs down at him. Mr Nandha starts back. Sen raises her weapon; before thought, she lets off a burst into the ceiling. An object drops out so close to Mr Nandha it almost strikes him, a thing all limbs and thrashing and skittering movement. It’s an inspection robot, a little clambering spider-monkey thing. Individual companies usually can’t afford them but development corporations keep one to service all the clients in a block. The thing will have access to every unit in this industrial zone. The machine rears, darts at Mr Nandha, then turns and zigzags pell-mell down the gantry towards Sen. All it knows is that these creatures want to kill it and it wants to exist. Panicked by her wild firing, all military sense flies from Sen as the thing bounces towards her. She fumbles at her assault rifle. Mr Nandha can see with perfect, still clarity that her panic will kill him.