Shiva

by Simon Sloane

  Now it could only be a few moments until Sarah could tell Hugo exactly where to find the hidden superintelligence. His silence worried her, but it was after midnight in India already. Maybe he had gone to sleep.

  The system unlocked, and a map of the world unfolded in front of Sarah. She zoomed in on the northwestern part of India, where she found a plethora of sparkling lights. Quantum computers had sprawled across the subcontinent much faster than she would have expected. How was she supposed to find a single superior artificial intelligence amidst the sea of glittering dots?

  For the first time in a year, Sarah wished Hugo was around to help her. It didn’t help her mental focus that Khaled kept pestering her about the manuscript from Casimir-Perier’s Louvre speech and how the ill-fated president had left out a part of it.

  If someone specialised in this sort of news, it was geek-o-matixx. And indeed, Dr Albert Gothendorff himself had written an article with a sensationalist headline, which she duly forwarded to Khaled for him to read on his smart glasses: “Why Did Casimir-Perier Hold Back About the Virus?”

  Chapter 43

  L’Esplanade

  Friday, 9:00pm CET

  Khaled stepped off the bus at Pont Alexandre III and stood on the corner of L’Esplanade des Invalides. “The Gardens of the Wounded,” as they were called in Sarah’s native language, bordered on the southern riverfront just across from the Petit Palais. Farther in the north lurked the Elysée Palace like a hidden mothership of a daunting fleet, and something told Khaled that he would return there soon.

  He scanned his smart spectacles for incoming messages. All that Sarah had sent him so far was a geek-o-matixx article about the slain president’s final speech. An informant had supplied the disclosure platform with a few lines of text from Casimir-Perier’s speech manuscript, which the president had chosen not to reveal: “And while my opponent claims that France has lost its technological leadership, I’m proud to announce that French scientists have designed a powerful artificial virus capable of delivering genetic cures to each and every cell in the human body. Soon ravaging diseases like cancer might be history, and maybe even ageing itself.”

  Khaled wondered why Casimir-Perier had skipped over the sensational passage. Clearly, it was good news for an incumbent’s campaign. Maybe he had considered the announcement premature. It also might have sounded like a desperate last-minute gamble from an office holder who knew he was on the losing side.

  But then Khaled felt that Etienne Saint-Clair might have something to do with the virus story as well. If only he could obtain the lobbyist’s phone for a few minutes! Sarah would be able extract its secrets via a secure wireless connection. And L’Esplanade restaurant was the most likely place to encounter the traitor.

  Browsing some more news reports, Khaled learned that acting president Henri Charenton was the political beneficiary of the recently passed counter-terrorism bill. Police and secret services strengthened their powers to capture terrorist suspects, including a shoot-at-will clause. Flash polls showed Charenton edging ahead of Jean-Marc Tanguy less than forty hours before the polls were due to open.

  At last a stressed-out waiter offered Khaled a seat on the terrace as well as a menu. Khaled, however, only had eyes for the men in suits streaming out of the Assemblée Nationale at the northeastern corner of the Gardens of the Wounded. Most of them looked exhausted but relieved, having capped a horrific day with an act of lawmaking.

  Some members of parliament found their way into L’Esplanade. They were instantly assigned the best tables. The coveted seats offered a view of the golden cupola of Les Invalides, the baroque dome that housed the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Khaled couldn’t wait to unmask the orchestrator of the most heinous act of terrorism in decades. He pictured himself strangling the wrinkled throat of “La Pute,” forcing Saint-Clair to confess his role in the assassination of the man who had trusted Khaled above all others. The last time Khaled had killed someone, he had twisted the thug’s knife in his torso before blasting his way to freedom with an Uzi. And yet he hoped he could avoid bloodshed when he confronted the influence peddler.

  Six and a half hours had passed since Casimir-Perier’s murder, and the authorities had yet to arrest a suspect.

  Patience, Khaled tried to soothe himself. Patience ….

  However, he barely managed to hold on to his seat when the balding man stepped in, clasping the shoulders of two smiling politicians.

  Chapter 44

  Kamasutra

  Friday, 9:15pm CET (12:45am Indian time)

  Something felt different from Hugo’s encounters with Dubai escorts. There was the usual distraction with which the pleasures of the flesh blessed him. But this time, his forsaken romance didn’t crawl back into his mind even after climax.

  His narrow escape from death after the helicopter crash made him more acutely aware of his mortality, heightening his urge to spread his genes before it was too late.

  Hence he hadn’t declined Yogi’s invitation to mingle with the nude musicians. Refusing the offer might have been interpreted as a moralistic Westerner’s rejection of local hospitality. And so, he had obliged, losing himself in orgiastic bliss only a few hours after he had almost perished on the pavement in front of the Singh compound.

  Time and space blurred in Hugo’s perception, since Diana had retired to the temple along with Maya. The opium had calmed his senses while the courtesans resuscitated his spirits. And yet having performed his favourite acts of the Kamasutra, Hugo couldn’t forget Diana’s courage as well as Maya’s enigmatic smile. He was glad that both of them were out of sight, although for different reasons.

  Jyran and Yogi had retired to the adjacent chambers. Naturally, Jyran’s lifestyle reminded Hugo of Nassor Sharkhor’s, although the women weren’t virginal teens but women in their mid-twenties—older than Jyran himself. He also seemed to prefer the Valkyrie type over the petite flowers Nassor had cherished.

  “So?” Jyran asked when he emerged fully dressed, his arm around the waist of a buxom redhead. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself, Hugo!”

  Hugo laughed. “I’ve never felt so welcome anywhere in the world. You’ve got excellent taste, Jyran! The ladies are almost as attractive as your sister.” He felt stupid the moment the words had left his mouth, but Maya’s perfectly symmetrical face somehow kept reappearing before his inner eye.

  “My sister?” Jyran asked suspiciously.

  Yogi squinted at Hugo as he returned to the lounge, his belly protruding from underneath a white dressing gown.

  “We didn’t splash out like that even at Sibyl’s zenith,” Hugo said, trying to distract from his faux pas. “You’re on another level here.”

  “You’ve never spurned the good life either,” Yogi said, raising an eyebrow, “at least according to the Global Enquirer!” he added hastily, but Hugo could tell Alexander had let slip more about his time at Sibylon than he should have.

  Hugo laughed. “It’s too easy these days for a girl to smuggle in a phone and send photos to some hack. But I’m sure you’ve taken precautions.”

  “We did,” Yogi said. “The stories we heard about you inspired us in many ways.”

  “Such as?” Hugo asked casually, careful not to sound too inquisitive.

  “Isn’t it mankind’s oldest dream, to know the future?” Jyran sent away the strawberry blonde with a clap on her ample buttocks.

  “It’s a blessing and a curse,” Hugo said. “You learn things you’d rather not know.” He remembered the forecast of his own death at a vulnerable juncture.

  “How did you do it?” Yogi asked eagerly. He declined a massage offered to him by an African beauty, focusing on his conversation with Hugo.

  Hugo looked at Jyran, but this time the heir didn’t stop them from geeking out. Maybe the two Indians would let something slip about their own AI.

  “You can’t peek under the hood of a quantum computer,” Hugo said, “without disturbing entanglement of the qubits
. And then you destroy the magic.”

  “So?” Jyran once more revealed his ignorance of the fundamentals of the technology that had revolutionised information processing and encryption.

  “What Einstein described as ‘spooky action at a distance’,” Hugo explained, “is crucial for the qubits to perform their complex calculations. And for this to happen, they must be shielded from outside disturbance, even from light or heat!”

  “So, even you don’t know how Sibyl did it?” Jyran asked in a provocative manner. His eyes were closed, but his mind seemed focused.

  Hugo swallowed. He had to offer his hosts a bit more. “Sibyl’s ten thousand quantum bits had the ability to be in two to the power of ten thousand states at once,” he explained with a sweeping gesture. “That’s much more than the number of atoms in the universe, for example. The AI searched the vast space of potential future states of the world much faster than any traditional computer could have. And once Sibyl found a high-probability state of the near future, she issued a prediction.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Yogi said, keen to show off his expertise in front of Jyran. He removed his gown, laid on his belly and accepted the courtesan’s offer of a massage.

  “And yet,” Jyran said, “Sibyl’s success has never been repeated—not even by any one of the millions of quantum computers built according her blueprint.”

  “Well,” Hugo said, “even a quantum computer is still a computer.” For a moment, he felt tempted to hint at the powerful artificial intelligence that Sarah had discovered in northern India, but he needed to be certain he was in the right place. “You feed it with data, unleash its algorithms upon them and receive new data as a result. What even the most powerful computer lacks, however, is purpose.” It was the secret ingredient that had set Sibyl apart, and Hugo felt he had given away too much already.

  “Purpose?” Jyran seemed intrigued. “How can you programme purpose?”

  Something about the determination in his eyes made Hugo shiver.

  Chapter 45

  Temple

  Friday, 9:30pm CET pm (1:00am Indian time)

  “Why do you pray to Shiva?” Inhaling the scent of incense, Diana asked Maya as they ambled through the private temple. Resigned to the fact that no more business would be conducted that night, Diana concealed her disappointment through conversation.

  “It’s a family tradition,” Maya said, blowing out the scented candles in front of the golden statue of the deity. “Shiva is the god of destruction and renewal. The new arises only when the old is swept away. That’s why Shiva’s popular with new-money families.”

  The young heiress struck Diana as spiritual and worldly at once. Again, she flinched when she saw the swastika above Shiva’s head. It was hard to get used to the symbol of Nazism outside of historical documentaries. “It’s interesting,” Diana said, “seeing destruction in conjunction with renewal.” She examined the sculptor’s interpretation of Shiva’s likeness. The god’s face was handsome, although he carried gruesome accessories: a third eye on his forehead and a serpent around his neck. Beneath the adorning crescent moon, the holy river Ganga flowed from his matted hair.

  Shiva also carried a trident-shaped weapon, which Maya identified as a trishula. “I can tell you more about our culture, if you like,” she said over the melancholic sitar melody that permeated the cupola. “We’re not so different, after all. Christians believe in the Holy Trinity. In Hinduism there are many gods but only three crucial ones: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Transformer.”

  “What is Shiva meant to transform?” Diana asked, not wasting any time on the other two deities or any of the less prominent ones, such as the ape-faced Hanuman.

  “Shiva will transform the entire world,” Maya said, “as soon as his time comes.” The heiress motioned for the four barely clad male servants to withdraw. They pulled a thick rope to raise a wrought-iron chandelier toward the domed ceiling.

  Diana noticed how Maya watched the movement of their abdominal muscles. Soon the amber scent of the chandelier’s burning candles permeated the sacred hall.

  “When will Shiva return?” Diana asked, hoping she wasn’t being too direct.

  Maya took a deep breath. “Time is cyclic and consists of kalpas. Each kalpa lasts from four to eight billion years.”

  “Really?” Diana wondered how an ancient faith like Hinduism could be so close to science in its estimates of Earth’s current age and expected lifetime.

  Maya nodded. “That’s a period of one full day and night for Brahma, who will be alive for three hundred and eleven trillion plus another forty billion years.”

  Diana couldn’t believe her ears. The Hindu faith was the only major religion that came close to the estimates of modern cosmology, depending on one’s assumption about the balance of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.

  Maya gave Diana a sultry smile. “Ultimately, creation will contract to a singularity and expand again from that single point. It’s a cycle of eternal recurrence—similar to what has been postulated by Western philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche.”

  Diana hoped Maya hadn’t noticed her gaping mouth. Once again ancient myth and contemporary research pointed in the same direction. Diana was mesmerised not only by Maya’s education but also by the fact that an ancient faith, a nineteenth-century philosopher and modern science all said the same thing. Even the Einsteinian concept of singularity had appeared in Hinduism thousands of years before E=mc2.

  “Within the current kalpa,” Maya continued, “there are four eras. They progress from an origin of total purity into an age of pervasive corruption.”

  “That’s the one we live in, I presume,” Diana said sardonically.

  “Exactly. We live in the Kali Yuga era, an era of impiety, violence and decadence.”

  “What does Kali Yuga mean?”

  “Kali is not as well known as Shiva,” Maya said, her voice trembling slightly, “but she’s also powerful. Kali’s the goddess of death, time and doomsday.”

  “Another one?” Hinduism just seemed obsessed with the end of the world.

  “Kali is associated with sexuality and violence but is also symbolic of motherly love, feminine energy, creativity and fertility. She’s an incarnation of Parvati—Shiva’s wife.”

  Diana’s curiosity was piqued. “Do you have a statue of Kali too?”

  Maya shook her head. “My father wasn’t into female deities. But here she is.” The heiress took her phone and showed Diana a picture of a fearful fighting figure. It was captioned “Kali, goddess of doom, with her necklace of seventy-two skulls, her skirt of arms, her lolling tongue, brandishing a knife dripping with blood.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Maya asked. “They’re a mighty couple, Shiva and Kali.”

  “What exactly is Shiva going to do when Kali Yuga ends?”

  “Shiva has nineteen avatars, each one with a distinct appearance. And the end of the world will depend on the avatar in which Shiva will reincarnate.”

  Diana laughed. “Like a virtual figure impersonating you in a computer game?”

  “The avatars of the gods powerful,” Maya said with an earnest expression. “But I sense you’re bored.” Her magnetic gaze beckoned Diana to step closer. “I know you’re at home in the world of men,” Maya said with a knowing smile, “but don’t lose sight of who you truly are. My mother taught me that as well.”

  “Wasn’t she an actress?” Diana asked, remembering Akasha’ interactive displays.

  “The best.” Maya lowered her head. “She became famous with Brush of Desire, a Bollywood adaptation of an ancient Vedic tale. A young woman trapped in an arranged marriage with a cruel governor three times her age secretly falls in love with the young artist who had been commissioned to paint her in the nude.”

  Diana chuckled. “Sometimes, life imitates art.” She felt goosebumps as Maya’s hand glided over the fabric of her sari.

  “Oh, it’s not like that!” the eightee
n-year-old said. “Mother wasn’t about physical attraction. She was mature enough to appreciate father’s brilliant intellect.”

  Diana couldn’t help but think of Hugo, although he mightn’t be mature enough for anything. “What does Shiva want from us?” she asked, trying to keep the conversation focused. “Is there something like the ten commandments of the Bible?”

  “We believe in the four Puruṣārthas,” Maya explained, “the goals of life. Dharma are ethics and duties. Artha means prosperity and work. Kama, passions and desires. And Moksha is liberation. It’s similar to what Buddhists call Nirvana.”

  “That’s interesting.” Diana felt a tingling in her stomach when Maya looked her deep in the eye, speaking about passions and desires in a trembling voice. “Don’t take this wrong way, Maya, but in the West, many have abandoned religion altogether. Hugo, for example ….”

  She stopped speaking when Maya’s sari slipped from her shoulder.

  Chapter 46

  Spider

  Friday, 9:45pm CET (1:00am Indian time)

  Sarah continued searching the ATF database on its quantum computer. Keeping an eye on the phone of the woman she had locked in the broom cupboard, she sent the occasional text to distract her staff. However, Sarah knew that she couldn’t keep up the charade for long when the texts turned ever more frantic.

  She also ignored Khaled’s question about a mysterious French pharma firm. They had supposedly designed a virus that could act as a vehicle to deliver genetic cures.

  Still convinced that the origin of the disasters was an artificial intelligence based in India, Sarah browsed the ATF’s list of quantum computers that had been installed in the country’s northwestern region. None of the AIs revealed unusual activity during the days preceding the calamities. Even the video of the Darwin-quoting sheik’s data packets couldn’t be traced to any specific AI on the subcontinent. There was too much data to be distilled into a meaningful pattern.