Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Do you know what they’re saying, all those magazines and chati shows? What they’re really saying? About us, the djinn and his wife?”

  “I know!” For the first time, A.J. Rao’s voice, so sweet, so reasonable inside her head, is raised. “I know what every one of them says about us. Esha, have I ever asked anything of you?”

  “Only to dance.”

  “I’m asking one more thing of you now. It’s not a big thing. It’s a small thing, nothing really. You say I’m not real, what we have is not real. That hurts me, because at some level it’s true. Our worlds are not compatible. But it can be real. There is a chip, new technology, a protein chip. You get it implanted, here.” Rao raises his hand to his third eye. “It would be like the ’hoek, but it would always be on. I could always be with you. We would never be apart. And you could leave your world and enter mine . . . . ”

  Esha’s hands are at her mouth, holding in the horror, the bile, the sick vomit of fear. She heaves, retches. Nothing. No solid, no substance, just ghosts and djinns. Then she rips her ’hoek from the sweet spot behind her ear and there is blessed silence and blindness. She holds the little device in her two hands and snaps it cleanly in two.

  Then she runs from her house.

  Not Neeta not Priya, not snippy Pranh in yts gharana, not Madhuri, a smoke-blackened hulk in a life-support chair, and no not never her mother, even though Esha’s feet remember every step to her door; never the basti. That’s death.

  One place she can go.

  But he won’t let her. He’s there in the phatphat, his face in the palm of her hands, voice scrolling silently in a ticker across the smart fabric: come back, I’m sorry, come back, let’s talk come back, I didn’t mean to come back. Hunched in the back of the little yellow and black plastic bubble she clenches his face into a fist but she can still feel him, feel his face, his mouth next to her skin. She peels the palmer from her hand. His mouth moves silently. She hurls him into the traffic. He vanishes under truck tires.

  And still he won’t let her go. The phatphat spins into Connaught Circus’s vast gyratory and his face is on every single one of the video-silk screens hung across the curving facades. Twenty A.J. Rao’s, greater, lesser, least, miming in sync.

  Esha Esha come back, say the rolling news tickers. We can try something else. Talk to me. Any ISO, any palmer, anyone. . . .

  Infectious paralysis spreads across Connaught Circus. First the people who notice things like fashion ads and chati-screens; then the people who notice other people, then the traffic, noticing all the people on the pavements staring up, mouths fly-catching. Even the phatphat driver is staring. Connaught Circus is congealing into a clot of traffic: if the heart of Delhi stops, the whole city will seize and die.

  “Drive on drive on,” Esha shouts at her driver. “I order you to drive.” But she abandons the autorickshaw at the end of Sisganj Road and pushes through the clogged traffic the final half-kilometer to Manmohan Singh Buildings. She glimpses Thacker pressing through the crowd, trying to rendezvous with the police motorbike sirening a course through the traffic. In desperation she thrusts up an arm, shouts out his name and rank. At last, he turns. They beat toward each other through the chaos.

  “Mrs. Rathore, we are facing a major incursion incident. . . . ”

  “My husband, Mr. Rao, he has gone mad. . . . ”

  “Mrs. Rathore, please understand, by our standards, he never was sane. He is an aeai.”

  The motorbike wails its horns impatiently. Thacker waggles his head to the driver, a woman in police leathers and helmet: in a moment in a moment. He seizes Esha’s hand, pushes her thumb into his palmer-gloved hand.

  “Apartment 1501. I’ve keyed it to your thumb-print. Open the door to no one, accept no calls, do not use any communications or entertainment equipment. Stay away from the balcony. I’ll return as quickly as I can.”

  Then he swings up onto the pillion, the driver walks her machine round and they weave off into the gridlock.

  The apartment is modern and roomy and bright and clean for a man on his own, well furnished and decorated with no signs of a Krishna Cop’s work brought home of an evening. It hits her in the middle of the big living-room floor with the sun pouring in. Suddenly she is on her knees on the Kashmiri rug, shivering, clutching herself, bobbing up and down to sobs so wracking they have no sound. This time the urge to vomit it all up cannot be resisted. When it is out of her—not all of it, it will never all come out—she looks out from under her hanging, sweat-soaked hair, breath still shivering in her aching chest. Where is this place? What has she done? How could she have been so stupid, so vain and senseless and blind? Games games, children’s pretending, how could it ever have been? I say it is and it is so: look at me! At me!

  Thacker has a small, professional bar in his kitchen annex. Esha does not know drink so the chota peg she makes herself is much much more gin than tonic but it gives her what she needs to clean the sour, biley vomit from the wool rug and ease the quivering in her breath.

  Esha starts, freezes, imagining Rao’s voice. She holds herself very still, listening hard. A neighbor’s tivi, turned up. Thin walls in these new-built executive apartments.

  She’ll have another chota peg. A third and she can start to look around. There’s a spa-pool on the balcony. The need for moving, healing water defeats Thacker’s warnings. The jets bubble up. With a dancer’s grace she slips out of her clinging, emotionally soiled clothes into the water. There’s even a little holder for your chota peg. A pernicious little doubt: how many others have been here before me? No, that is his kind of thinking. You are away from that. Safe. Invisible. Immersed. Down in Sisganj Road the traffic unravels. Overhead, the dark silhouettes of the scavenging kites and, higher above, the security robots, expand and merge their black wings as Esha drifts into sleep.

  “I thought I told you to stay away from the windows.”

  Esha wakes with a start, instinctively covers her breasts. The jets have cut out and the water is long-still, perfectly transparent. Thacker is blue-chinned, baggy-eyed and sagging in his rumpled gritty suit.

  “I’m sorry. It was just, I’m so glad, to be away . . . you know?”

  A bone-weary nod. He fetches himself a chota peg, rests it on the arm of his sofa and then very slowly, very deliberately, as if every joint were rusted, undresses.

  “Security has been compromised on every level. In any other circumstances it would constitute an i-war attack on the nation.” The body he reveals is not a dancer’s body; Thacker runs a little to upper body fat, muscles slack, incipient man-tits, hair on the belly hair on the back hair on the shoulders. But it is a body, it is real. “The Bharati government has disavowed the action and waived Aeai Rao’s diplomatic immunity.”

  He crosses to the pool and restarts on the jets. Gin and tonic in hand, he slips into the water with a one-deep, skin-sensual sigh.

  “What does that mean?” Esha asks.

  “Your husband is now a rogue aeai.”

  “What will you do?”

  “There is only one course of action permitted to us. We will excommunicate him.”

  Esha shivers in the caressing bubbles. She presses herself against Thacker. She feels his man-body move against her. He is flesh. He is not hollow. Kilometers above the urban stain of Delhi, aeaicraft turn and seek.

  The warnings stay in place the next morning. Palmer, home entertainment system, com channels. Yes, and balcony, even for the spa.

  “If you need me, this palmer is Department-secure. He won’t be able to reach you on this.” Thacker sets the glove and ’hoek on the bed. Cocooned in silk sheets, Esha pulls the glove on, tucks the ’hoek behind her ear.

  “You wear that in bed?”

  “I’m used to it.”

  Varanasi silk sheets and Kama Sutra prints. Not what one would expect of a Krishna Cop. She watches Thacker dress for an excommunication. It’s the same as for any job—ironed white shirt, tie, hand-made black shoes—never brown in town—well poli
shed. Eternal riff of bad aftershave. The difference: the leather holster slung under the arm and the weapon slipped so easily inside it.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Killing aeais,” he says simply.

  A kiss and he is gone. Esha scrambles into his cricket pullover, a waif in baggy white that comes down to her knees, and dashes to the forbidden balcony. If she cranes over, she can see the street door. There he is, stepping out, waiting at the curb. His car is late, the road is thronged, the din of engines, car horns and phatphat klaxons has been constant since dawn. She watches him wait, enjoying the empowerment of invisibility. I can see you. How do they ever play sport in these things? she asks herself, skin under cricket pullover hot and sticky. It’s already thirty degrees, according to the weather ticker across the foot of the video-silk shuttering over the open face of the new-built across the street. High of thirty-eight. Probability of precipitation: zero. The screen loops Town and Country for those devotees who must have their soapi, subtitles scrolling above the news feed.

  Hello, Esha, Ved Prakash says, turning to look at her.

  The thick cricket pullover is no longer enough to keep out the ice.

  Now Begum Vora namastes to her and says, I know where you are, I know what you did.

  Ritu Parzaaz sits down on her sofa, pours chai and says, What I need you to understand is, it worked both ways. That ‘ware they put in your palmer, it wasn’t clever enough.

  Mouth working wordlessly; knees, thighs weak with basti girl superstitious fear, Esha shakes her palmer-gloved hand in the air but she can’t find the mudras, can’t dance the codes right. Call call call call.

  The scene cuts to son Govind at his racing stable, stroking the neck of his thoroughbred über-star Star of Agra. As they spied on me, I spied on them.

  Dr. Chatterji in his doctor’s office. So in the end we betrayed each other.

  The call has to go through Department security authorization and crypt.

  Dr. Chatterji’s patient, a man in black with his back to the camera turns. Smiles. It’s A.J. Rao. After all, what diplomat is not a spy?

  Then she sees the flash of white over the rooftops. Of course. Of course. He’s been keeping her distracted, like a true soapi should. Esha flies to the railing to cry a warning but the machine is tunneling down the street just under power-line height, wings morphed back, engines throttled up: an aeai traffic monitor drone.

  “Thacker! Thacker!”

  One voice in the thousands. And it is not hers that he hears and turns toward. Everyone can hear the call of his own death. Alone in the hurrying street, he sees the drone pile out of the sky. At three hundred kilometers per hour it takes Inspector Thacker of the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing to pieces.

  The drone, deflected, ricochets into a bus, a car, a truck, a phatphat, strewing plastic shards, gobs of burning fuel and its small intelligence across Sisganj Road. The upper half of Thacker’s body cartwheels through the air to slam into a hot samosa stand.

  The jealousy and wrath of djinns.

  Esha on her balcony is frozen. Town and Country is frozen. The street is frozen, as if on the tipping point of a precipice. Then it drops into hysteria. Pedestrians flee; cycle rickshaw drivers dismount and try to run their vehicles away; drivers and passengers abandon cars, taxis, phatphats; scooters try to navigate through the panic; buses and trucks are stalled, hemmed in by people.

  And still Esha Rathore is frozen to the balcony rail. Soap. This is all soap. Things like this cannot happen. Not in the Sisganj Road, not in Delhi, not on a Tuesday morning. It’s all computer-generated illusion. It has always been illusion.

  Then her palmer calls. She stares at her hand in numb incomprehension. The Department. There is something she should do. Yes. She lifts it in a mudra—a dancer’s gesture—to take the call. In the same instant, as if summoned, the sky fills with gods. They are vast as clouds, towering up behind the apartment blocks of Sisganj Road like thunderstorms; Ganesh on his rat vahana with his broken tusk and pen, no benignity in his face; Siva, rising high over all, dancing in his revolving wheel of flames, foot raised in the instant before destruction; Hanuman with his mace and mountain fluttering between the tower blocks; Kali, skull-jeweled, red tongue dripping venom, scimitars raised, bestriding Sisganj Road, feet planted on the rooftops.

  In that street, the people mill. They can’t see this, Esha comprehends. Only me, only me. It is the revenge of the Krishna Cops. Kali raises her scimitars high. Lightning arcs between their tips. She stabs them down into the screen-frozen Town and Country. Esha cries out, momentarily blinded as the Krishna Cops hunter-killers track down and excommunicate rogue aeai A.J. Rao. And then they are gone. No gods. The sky is just the sky. The video-silk hoarding is blank, dead.

  A vast, godlike roar above her. Esha ducks—now the people in the street are looking at her. All the eyes, all the attention she ever wanted. A tilt-jet in Awadhi air-force chameleo-flage slides over the roof and turns over the street, swiveling engine ducts and unfolding wing-tip wheels for landing. It turns its insect head to Esha. In the cockpit is a faceless pilot in a HUD visor. Beside her a woman in a business suit, gesturing for Esha to answer a call. Thacker’s partner. She remembers now.

  The jealousy and wrath and djinns.

  “Mrs. Rathore, it’s Inspector Kaur.” She can barely hear her over the scream of ducted fans. “Come downstairs to the front of the building. You’re safe now. The aeai has been excommunicated.”

  Excommunicated.

  “Thacker . . . ”

  “Just come downstairs, Mrs. Rathore. You are safe now, the threat is over.”

  The tilt-jet sinks beneath her. As she turns from the rail, Esha feels a sudden, warm touch on her face. Jet-swirl, or maybe just a djinn, passing unresting, unhasting, and silent as light.

  The Krishna Cops sent us as far from the wrath and caprice of the aeais as they could, to Leh under the breath of the Himalaya. I say us, for I existed; a knot of four cells inside my mother’s womb.

  My mother bought a catering business. She was in demand for weddings and shaadis. We might have escaped the aeais and the chaos following Awadh’s signing the Hamilton Acts—but the Indian male’s desperation to find a woman to marry endures forever. I remember that for favored clients—those who had tipped well, or treated her as something more than a paid contractor, or remembered her face from the chati mags—she would slip off her shoes and dance Radha and Krishna. I loved to see her do it and when I slipped away to the temple of Lord Ram, I would try to copy the steps among the pillars of the mandapa. I remember the brahmins would smile and give me money.

  The dam was built and the water war came and was over in a month. The aeais, persecuted on all sides, fled to Bharat where the massive popularity of Town and Country gave them protection, but even there they were not safe: humans and aeais, like humans and djinni, were too different creations and in the end they left Awadh for another place that I do not understand, a world of their own where they are safe and no one can harm them.

  And that is all there is to tell in the story of the woman who married a djinn. If it does not have the happy-ever-after ending of Western fairytales and Bollywood musicals, it has a happy-enough ending. This spring I turn twelve and shall head off on the bus to Delhi to join the gharana there. My mother fought this with all her will and strength—for her Delhi would always be the city of djinns, haunted and stained with blood—but when the temple brahmins brought her to see me dance, her opposition melted. By now she was a successful businesswoman, putting on weight, getting stiff in the knees from the dreadful winters, refusing marriage offers on a weekly basis, and in the end she could not deny the gift that had passed to me. And I am curious to see those streets and parks where her story and mine took place, the Red Fort and the sad decay of the Shalimar Gardens. I want to feel the heat of the djinns in the crowded galis behind the Jama Masjid, in the dervishes of litter along Chandni Chowk, in the starlings swirling above Conn
aught Circus. Leh is a Buddhist town, filled with third-generation Tibetan exiles—Little Tibet, they call it—and they have their own gods and demons. From the old Moslem djinn-finder I have learned some of their lore and mysteries but I think my truest knowledge comes when I am alone in the Ram temple, after I have danced, before the priests close the garbagriha and put the god to bed. On still nights when the spring turns to summer or after the monsoon, I hear a voice. It calls my name. Always I suppose it comes from the japa-softs, the little low-level aeais that mutter our prayers eternally to the gods, but it seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, from another world, another universe entirely. It says, the creatures of word and fire are different from the creatures of clay and water but one thing is true: love endures. Then as I turn to leave, I feel a touch on my cheek, a passing breeze, the warm sweet breath of djinns.

  STALKER

  ROBERT REED

  You are a happy man.

  I know this. I know because I never stop reading your blood and nervous system and that wondrous smiling face. The most fortunate of young males, you are a twenty-year-old boy joyously at ease inside your carefully built life. And I love playing my role in your consuming happiness, constantly guessing your mind and anticipating your needs, waiting for those gorgeous if rare moments when you say, “I need help with this,” or “What would be best to do next?”

  I am ready to help, always.

  My devotion should never be doubted.

  And yes, I understand that you are a bully and a brute. Slavish isn’t the same as stupid. Regardless of what your smile and measured charm can accomplish, I know you look at people as being animals—sacks of meat put on this world, this playground, to serve your ugly loves.

  Yet those qualities don’t diminish my love. Nothing can. I was a gift to you. Your parents were worried and wealthy, and I seemed like the perfect solution. Asleep until I wasn’t sleeping, I met you on your fourteenth birthday. Fabricated from AI wetware and codes of fidelity, I am an unbounded, bodiless personality designed to hover close to that one significant soul. My systems have been upgraded numerous times. You have taken enough interest in me to personally rewrite my nature, crippling functions that I don’t miss today. When you played with stray cats and neighbor dogs, I helped. I always understood why. You were testing me, and I proved myself gladly. And then came the girls that caught your interest, and I helped with them, and when the police asked about your whereabouts, I lied. I had alibis for every incident, confirmed by security videos and phone records that I doctored as needed. I also coached you on how to hide your dander and fluid and hairs, and the girls never saw your face. Yet I never stop seeing you, even under the black mask. Your moods are as obvious to me as the time of day, and better than you, I can measure the prurient joy that fills you when each of your victims presses against her bonds, begging for pity.