by Ian McDonald
‘Because I’ve heard . . . Ah.’
‘You see what I mean? Everything comes through one medium or another. And, with respect, I am a real celebrity, in that my celebrity is indeed very real. In fact these days, I think it’s only celebrity that makes anything real, don’t you agree?’
Half a million person-hours have gone into Lal Darfan’s voice. It’s a voice calculated to seduce and it is laying orbits around Najia Askarzadah. It says, ‘Might I ask you a personal question? It’s very simple; what is your earliest memory?’
It’s never far, that night of fire and rush and fear, like a geological iridium layer in her life. Daddy scooping her out of her bed, the paper all over the floor and the house full of noise and the lights waving across the garden. That she remembers most; the cones of torchlight weaving over the rose bushes, coming for her. The flight across the compound. Her father cursing under his breath at the car engine as it turned and turned and turned. The flashlights darting closer, closer. Her father, cursing, cursing, polite even as the police came to arrest him.
‘I’m lying in the back of a car,’ Najia says. ‘I’m lying flat, and it’s night, and we’re driving fast through Kabul. My Dad’s driving and my Mum’s beside him, but I can’t see them over the backs of the seats. But I can hear them talking, and it sounds like they’re very far away, and they’ve got the radio on; they’re listening for something but I can’t make the voices out.’ The news of the raid on the women’s house and the issue of their arrest warrants, she knows now. When that bulletin came, they knew they would have only minutes before the police closed the airport. ‘I can see the streetlights passing over me. It’s all very regular and exact, I can see the light start, go over me and then up the back of the rear seat and out the window.’
‘That’s a powerful image,’ Lal Darfan says. ‘How old would you have been, three, four?’
‘Not quite four.’
‘I too have an earliest memory. This is how I know I am not Ved Prekash. Ved Prekash has scripts, but I remember a paisley shawl blowing in the wind. The sky was blue and clear and the edge of the shawl was blowing in from the side - it was like a frame, with the action out of shot. I can see it quite clearly, it’s flapping. I’m told it was on the roof of our house in Patna. Mama had taken me up to get away from the fumes down at the ground level, and I was on a blanket with a parasol over me. The shawl had been washed and was hanging on the line; odd, it was silk. I can remember it as clear as anything. I must have been two at the most. There. Two memories. Ah, but you will say, yours is manufactured but mine is experience. How do you know? It could be something you’ve been told that you’ve made into a memory, it could be a false memory, it could have been artificially manufactured and implanted. Hundreds of thousands of Americans believe they’ve been spirited away by grey aliens who stick machines up their rectums; utter fantasy, and undoubtedly false memories each and every one, but does that make them fake people? And what are our memories made of anyway? Patterns of charge in protein molecules. We are not so different there, I think. This airship, this silly elephant gimmick I’ve had built for me, the idea that we’re floating along over Nepal; to you it’s just patterns of electrical charge in protein molecules. But so is everything. You call this illusion, I’d call it the fundamental building blocks of my universe. I imagine I see it very differently from you, but then, how would I know? How do I know what I see as green looks the same to you? We’re all locked up inside our little boxes of self; bone or plastic, Najia; and none of us ever get out. Can any of us trust what we think we remember?’
I do, computer, Najia Askarzadah thinks. I have to trust, because everything I am comes from those memories. The reason I am here, talking in this ludicrous virtual-reality pleasure dome to a tivi soap star with delusions of significance, is because of those memories of light, moving.
‘But in that case are you - as Lal Darfan - sailing pretty close to the wind? I mean, the Hamilton Acts on Artificial Intelligence . . .’
‘The Krishna Cops? McAuley’s hijras,’ Lal Darfan says with venom.
‘What I’m saying is, for you to say you’re self-aware - sentient, as you seem to be claiming - is signing your own death warrant.’
‘I’m never said I was sentient, or conscious, whatever that is. I am a Level 2.8 aeai and it’s done very nicely for me. I’m only claiming to be real; as real as you.’
‘So you couldn’t pass a Turing test?’
‘Shouldn’t pass a Turing test. Wouldn’t pass a Turing test. Turing test, what’s that prove anyway? Here, I’ll give you a Turing Test. Classic set-up, two locked rooms and a badmash with an old style print-display screen. Let’s put you in one room and Satnam from PR in the other - I presume it’s him giving you the tour, they always give him the girls. He fancies himself a bit. The badmash with the display types in questions, you type back answers. Standard stuff. Satnam’s job is to convince the badmash he’s a woman and he can lie, cheat, say anything he wants to prove it. I think you can see it’s not going to be that hard for him to do. So, does that make Satnam a woman then? I don’t think it does; Satnam certainly doesn’t think it does. How then is it any different from a computer to pass itself as sentient? Is the simulation of a thing the thing itself, or is there something unique about intelligence that it is the only thing which cannot be simulated? What does any of this prove? Only something about the nature of the Turing Test as a test, and the danger of relying on minimum information. Any aeai smart enough to pass a Turing Test is smart enough to know to fail it.’
Najia Askarzadah throws up her hands in mock defeat.
‘I’ll tell you one thing I like about you,’ Lal Darfan says. ‘At least you didn’t spend an hour asking me stupid questions about Ved Prekash as if he’s the real star. Speaking of which, I’m due in make-up . . .’
‘Oh, sorry, thank you,’ Najia Askarzadah says, trying to do the gushy girl journo thing while the truth is she’s glad to be out of the pedantic creature’s headspace. What she intended to be light and frothy and soapi has turned into existential phenomenology with a twist of retro po-mo. She wonders what her editor will say, let alone the passengers on the TransAm Chicago- Cincinnati red-eye when they pull their inflights out of the seatback pocket. Lal Darfan merely beams beatifically as his audience chamber comes apart around him until all that’s left is pure Lewis Carroll grin that fades into the Himalayan sky and the Himalayan sky rolls up into the back of Najia’s head and she’s back in the render farm, in the rocky swivel chair with the racked cylinders of the protein processors tramlining into the perspective: sci-fi bottled brains in jars.
‘He’s quite convincing, isn’t he?’ Satnam-Who-Fancies-Himself’s aftershave is a little assertive. Najia slips off the lighthoek, still a little mazy from the total immersion of the interview experience.
‘I think he thinks he thinks.’
‘Exactly the way we programmed him.’ Satnam has media style, dress and easy confidence. but Najia notes a little Siva trident on that platinum chain around his neck. ‘Truth is, Lal Darfan’s as tightly scripted as Ved Prekash.’
‘That’s my angle, appearance and reality. If folk can believe in virtual actors, what else’ll they swallow?’
‘Now don’t be giving the game away,’ Satnam smiles as he shows her into the next section. He’s almost cute when he smiles, Najia thinks. ‘This is the meta-soap department, where Lal Darfan gets the script he doesn’t think he follows. It’s got to the stage where the meta-soap’s as big as the soap itself.’
The department is a long farm of workstations. The glass walls are polarised dark, the soap-farmers work in the umbral light of low-level spots and screen-glow. Designers’ hands draw in neurospace. Najia suppresses a shudder at the thought of spending her working years in a place like this, shut off from the sun. Stray light on high cheekbones, a hairless head, a delicate hand catches her attention and it’s her turn to cut Satnam off.
‘Who’s that?’
Satnam cranes.
‘Oh, that’s Tal. He’s new here. He heads up visual wallpaper.’
‘I think the pronoun is “yt”,’ Najia says, trying to catch a better glance at the nute through the hand-ballet. She can’t say why she is surprised to find a third-sex in the production office - in Sweden nutes tended towards the creative industries and India’s premier soap undoubtedly exerts a similar gravity. She realises she has assumed that India’s long history of trans- and non-genders has always been hidden, veiled.
‘Yt, him, whatever. Yt’s full of it today, some invite to a big celebi party.’
‘Yuli. The Russian model. I tried to get invited to that, to interview him. Yt.’
‘So you settled for Fat Lal instead.’
‘No, I really am interested in the psychology of aeai actors.’ Najia looks over at the nute. Yt glances up. Yts eyes meet hers for a moment. There is no recognition, no communication. Yt looks back into its work again. Yts hands sculpt digits.
‘What Fat Lal doesn’t know is the characters and plot are basic packages,’ Satnam continues, ushering Najia along between the glowing workstations. ‘We franchise them out and different national broadcasters drop their own aeai actors in on top of them. There are different actors playing Ved Prekash in Mumbai and Kerala and they’re as mega down there as Fat Lal is up here.’
‘Everything’s a version,’ Najia says, trying to decipher the beautiful dance of the nute’s long hands. Out in the corridor, Satnam tries the chat.
‘So, are you really from Kabul?’
‘I left when I was four.’
‘It’s not a thing I know very much about. I’m sure it must have been . . .’
Najia stops dead in the corridor, turns to face Satnam. She’s half-a-head shorter, but he takes a step back. She grabs his hand, scrawls a UCC across his knuckles.
‘There, my number. You call it, I may answer. I may suggest we go out somewhere, but if we do, I choose where. Okay? Now, thanks for the tour, and I think I can find my way back to the front door.’
He’s where and when he said he would be as she cruises in to the kerb in the phatphat. He’s dressed in nothing he’s too fond of, as Najia requested, but he still wears his trishul. She’s been seeing a lot of those, on the streets, around men’s necks. He settles in the seat beside her; the little autorickshaw rocks on its home-brew suspension.
‘My shout, remember?’ she says. The driver pulls out into the swarm of traffic.
‘Mystery tour, okay, that’s fine,’ Satnam says. ‘So, did you get your article written?’
‘Written, done, off,’ Najia says. She banged it out this afternoon on the terrace at the Imperial International, the Cantonment backpackers’ hostel where she has a room. She’ll move out when the payment comes in from the magazine. The Australians are getting to her. They moan about everything.
The thing is, Najia Askarzadah has a boyfriend. He’s called Bernard. He’s a fellow Imperialist, a gap-yearer whose twelve months turned into twenty, forty, sixty. He’s French, indolent, overly convinced of his own genius and has atrocious manners. Najia suspects he only stays at the hostel to pull fresh girls like her. But he practises Tantric sex and can keep his dick up any woman for an hour while chanting. So far Tantra with Bernard has involved her squatting on his lap for twenty, thirty, forty minutes tugging on a leather thong looped around his cock to keep it hard hard hard until his eyes roll up and he says Kundalini has risen, which means the drugs are finally kicking in. It’s not Najia’s idea of Tantra. He’s not Najia’s idea of a boyfriend. Neither is Satnam, and for many of the same reasons, but it’s an idea, a game, a why not? Najia Askarzadah has steered as many of her twenty two years as she’s been allowed responsibility for by why nots? They steered her to Bharat, against the advice of her tutors, friends and parents.
New Varanasi runs into old Kashi in a series of discontinuities and juxtapositions. Streets begin in one millennium and end in another. Vertiginous corporate spires lean over shambles of alleys and wooden houses unchanged in four centuries. Metro viaducts and elevated expressways squeeze past the sandstone linga of decaying temples. The cloy of rotting petals permeates even the permanent jizz of alcohol-engine fumes, dissolving into an urban perfume that cities dab behind their cloacal bits. Bharat Rail employs sweepers with besoms to keep flower petals off the track. Kashi generates them by the billion and the steel wheels can’t cope. The phatphat turns down a dark laneway of clothing shops; pale plastic dummies, armless and legless but smiling nevertheless, swing from racks overhead.
‘Am I allowed to ask where you’re taking me?’ Satnam says.
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ Truth is, Najia Askarzadah has never been, but ever since she heard the Australians crowing about how bold they were in going to it and they weren’t grossed out, not at all, she’s looked for an excuse to find this back-ofbackstreet club. She has no idea where she is but she reckons the driver is taking her in the right direction when dangling shop dummies give way to hookers in open storefronts. Most have adopted the Western standard uniform of lycra and overemphatic footwear, a few cling to tradition, in the steel cages.
‘Here,’ says the phatphat driver. The little wasp-coloured plastic bubble rocks on its suspension.
Fight! Fight! exclaim the alternating neons above the tiny door between the Hindu icon shop and the hookers drinking Limka at the chai stall. A cashier sits in a tin cubby by the door. He looks thirteen, fourteen, and already he’s seen everything from under his Nike beanie. Beyond him, stairs lead up into stark fluorescent light.
‘One thousand rupee,’ he says, hand out. ‘Or five dollar.’
Najia pays local.
‘This isn’t exactly what I imagined for a first date,’ Satnam says.
‘Date?’ Najia says as she leads him up the stairs that climb, turn, dip, turn again and finally empty on the balcony over the pit.
The large room had once been a warehouse. Sick green paint, industrial lamps and conduiting, louvred skylights all tell its history. Now it’s an arena. Ranged around a five-metre hexagon of sand are ranks of wooden pews, tiered as steeply as a lecture hall. Everything’s new built from construction timber stolen from the cash-starved Varanasi Area Rapid Transit. The stalls are faced with packing case panels. When Najia lifts her hand from the railing it comes away sticky with resin.
The warehouse is heaving, from betting booths and fighters’ stalls down at the ringside to the back row of the balcony where men in check workshirts and dhotis stand on their benches for a better look. The audience is almost entirely male. The few women are dressed to please.
‘I don’t know about this,’ Satnam says but Najia has the scent of close packed bodies, sweat, primal fluids. She pushes to the front and peers down into the pit. Money changes owners over the betting table in a blur of soft, worn notes. Fists wave fans of rupees and dollars and euros; the sattamen keep track of every paisa. All eyes are on the money, except for one man, diagonally opposite her on the ground floor, who looks up as if he has felt the weight of her regard. Young, flashy. Obvious Hood, thinks Najia. Their eyes meet.
The barker, a five year-old boy in a cowboy suit, stalks the pit hyping up the audience as two old men with rakes turn the bloody sand into a Zen garden. He has a bindi mike on his throat; his weird little voice, at once old and young, rattles from the sound system through a wash of tabla-and-mix anokha. From his tone of innocence and experience, Najia wonders if he might be a Brahmin. No: that’s the Brahmin in the front row booth, a seeming ten year-old dressed twentysomething flanked by tiviwannabe girlis. The barker is just another street boy. Najia finds she’s breathing fast and shallow. She no longer knows where Satnam is.
The din, already staggering, ratchets up a level as the teams go out on the sand to parade their fighters. They hold them high over their heads, stalking around the ring, making sure everyone can see where their money is going.
The microsabres are appalling creatures. A small California gentech company owned the orig
inal patent. Cut standard Felis Domesticus with reconstructed fossil DNA from Smilodon Fatalis. Result: bonsai sabretooth, something the size of a large Maine Coon with Upper Palaeolithic dentistry and manners to match. They enjoyed a brief star-pet celebrity until their owners found them taking out their and their neighbours’ cats, dogs, Guatemalan domestics, babies. The engineering company filed for bankruptcy before the writs took to the air but the patent had already been massively infringed in the battle clubs of Manila and Shanghai and Bangkok.
Najia watches an athletic girl in cropped muscle top and parachute baggies parade her champion head-high around the ring. The cat is a big silver tabby, built like a strike aircraft. Killing genes, gorgeous monster. Its fangs are sheathed in leather scabbards. Najia sees the girl’s pride and love, the crowd’s roaring admiration redirected on to her. The barker retires to his commentary podium. The bookies issue a rush of slips. The competitors slide back into their boxes.
Muscle-top girl jabs a needle of stimulant into her cat while her male colleague waves a bottle of poppers under its nose. They hold their hero. They hold their breaths. Their opponents drug up their contender, a low lean black microsabre, mean as midnight. There is absolute silence in the arena. The barker gives a blast on his air horn. The combatants let slip the leather guards and throw their battle cats into the pit.