by Hari Kunzru
At this point he realized he was vocalizing. And that his staff were staring at him.
Kika persuaded him back upstairs. She sat him down on his Eames lounger with a glass of spring water. She switched on the TV and handed him his remote. As the flow of images worked its calming magic, she gently suggested he might try to unfire Caedmon.
There was no alternative. He made the call. Caedmon didn’t sound surprised to hear from him. Guy apologized. Caedmon said no sweat. He already had another job offer, and because of his notice clause (he named the section and subsection numbers) he would in effect be getting two salaries for a while. So it had worked out fine.
Guy apologized again. Then, experimentally, he begged a little.
Caedmon had the decency to keep any note of triumph out of his voice as he swiftly negotiated a bonus, an £8,000 rise and two extra weeks of paid holiday. When he announced that for the moment he was happy in the pub, and so would be unable to start again before the next morning, Guy made a superhuman effort to control his temper. He succeeded, more or less. Caedmon said he would be in the next day about nine.
Drained, Guy stared at the television. It was talking about ‘widespread chaos in the City of London’, about ‘brownouts’ and ‘disruption’. There was an interview with the manager of a logistics company who didn’t know where his trucks were, and with a scruffy computer journalist who said he had always thought something like this would happen. They showed a picture of the little dancing girl, who apparently was known as ‘India’s sweetheart’. The journalist theorized that it might be some kind of promotional stunt.
Guy switched off the TV. The office was quiet. Leeched of all energy and emotion, he set the alarm, bolted the door and went home. When the driver tried to start a conversation, he shut the partition. Even the sight of In Vitro’s glass panels glowing in the city sunset failed to lift his spirits. On the kitchen worktop there was a note from Gaby. Something has come up. Work want me to go to Scotland. She did not know how long she would be away.
‘A virus? My God! What are you telling me, yaar?’
Up on Pali Hill, Zee TV was hurriedly muted. The click-clack of nails on cellphone carapace, by which the maid judged the progress of her mistress’s many conversations, ceased abruptly. Spotting warning signal number two (the chaat-filled palm stalled ominously between dish and mouth), the maid hitched up her sari and made a discreet exit, The explosion followed seconds later.
‘Behan-chod! What kind of dirtiness are you talking? My daughter has infected who…’
It took some hours before Mrs Zahir could be made to understand all this business of computer diseases. Such nastiness! Such complication! Once she understood, it took several more to recover from the shock. After an interval in a darkened room, she emerged, fortified herself with paan and sweet tea, and started to take charge of the situation. Her first call was to a very dear friend, who happened to have a column on Stardust magazine. The second was to her astrologer. By the time she had ticked off a list of advisers (spiritual and temporal), national media outlets (print and broadcast) and was stuck into the first of the international newswires, a clear line was emerging.
‘To be stolen like this,’ sobbed the artiste’s stricken mother, ‘is too too terrible. Our feelings are shaken. My daughter is sincerely protective over her creativity. For someone to come and use it for criminal purposes is shocking, really.’
Maa Zahir then appealed to the Chief Inspector of Police, ‘an old family friend’, to catch the violators forthwith. We say, look out, goondas! Whether inland or phoren, Leela’s mad-as-heck mummy will hunt you down! Lovely Leela herself, currently locating in romantic Scotland on the next Rocky Prasad smash, is said to have gone into seclusion…
Mrs Zahir had always had her daughter’s financial interests uppermost in her mind. From their first audition, and her inspired idea to change the girl’s Persian name to something Hindu-friendly, Leila-Leela’s marvellous career had taken her on an upward path of almost unprecedented rapidity. It had also been satisfyingly free of the blemishes that attached to other Bombay starlets. True, in the early days certain people remarked on a seventeen-year-old girl being seen so often in the company of elderly film mogul K. P. Gupta. Some may even have made a connection between that and the starring role Gupta gave his unknown protégée in N2L2. People were dirty-minded. There was nothing you could do against that. But this! For a thing like this to mark her daughter’s twenty-first birthday! It was a public-relations disaster.
Stolen. Piracy. The same five-second loop, repeated again and again. Five seconds from the fully copyrighted holi dance in Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely. Five seconds, one hundred per cent royalty free. Mrs Zahir could almost feel her jewellery getting lighter, each unlicensed frame shaving a little heft from the bangles on her wrists, loosening a stone from the rings on her fingers. It had to stop. It had to cease forthwith.
Hunched in his cubicle, the violator carried on counting. Pens in his Cisco Systems promotional mug. 18. Post-it notes left on the pad. 37. Keys on his keyboard. 105. Bead of sweat on the delete key. 1. He wiped it away with a fingertip. It was an effort to focus on his screen.
Hour by hour, the list of Leela-related disasters was growing longer. Clients from all over the world were contacting Virugenix, wanting to know how to remove her from their systems. The helpline staff posted updates to a page on the corporate intranet, and Arjun returned to it obsessively, to look at what he had done, the trouble he had caused for knitting-machine manufacturers and management consultants, adult magazines and university departments, for an auto-parts supplier in Austin which couldn’t track its inventory, a public-relations company in São Paolo which had lost its contacts database. Late in the afternoon a router went down, shutting off most of Boston’s internet traffic for almost an hour. Entry by entry, it all went up on the page. Nature of incident. Severity. Advice given. Mostly the advice given was to shut down the email system and wait for a fix.
A fix the AV team had yet to come up with.
Waves of nausea kept rising up into his throat. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, an amplified rattle suggesting illness, crisis. Letters in paragraph one of the text on his screen. 342. Number of ceiling tiles visible between the partition wall and the row of recessed lights running through the centre of the office. 75. The hot zone was full of arguing engineers, Darryl perching on a desk in a corner, swinging his legs and watching the action as Clay and the Vietnamese analyst Tran conducted a hand-waving debate, scrawling on the whiteboard and angrily crossing out each other’s glyphs. Occasionally other people butted in and the argument would diffuse through the room. It did not look to Arjun as if they were making much headway.
It was time. He knew if he waited, he would lose his moment. Still, something kept him fixed to his chair. He wanted to speak to his sister. He wanted to hear the voice of someone who knew him, who cared. Chris came into his mind and he put her out of it again. He waited until most of the people had left the hot zone, then knocked on the door. Only Clay and Darryl were inside, drinking bottled smoothies from the office fridge and flicking despondently through a printout of decompiled code. Seeing Arjun outside the door, Clay pulled on his face mask and Darryl started oscillating his hands in a frenetic shooing motion.
‘What are you doing?’ he stuttered, as Arjun poked his head into the room. There are rules, Mehta. You’re not authorized.’
‘I need to talk to you, Darryl.’
‘I – I don’t care, OK? This is not good. This is not good at all. You have to leave.’
Arjun almost acquiesced, half turning to go, but he steeled himself.
‘It’s important.’
‘This is a bad time, OK? This is like a crisis period? We are dealing with something major, so if you could just close the door and depart, Mehta, things would be a lot better. Clay, tell him. Make him go.’
‘It’s about the Leela virus.’
‘Good name, huh?’ said Clay to no one in particul
ar. ‘I think they should give all viruses chicks’ names. Like ships. Or hurricanes.’
‘Hurricanes often have masculine names,’ snapped Darryl. ‘Andrew, for example.’
‘I believe that until 1979, women’s names only were used,’ said Arjun. ‘Since then there has been an alternating list.’
‘Mitch,’ said Clay. ‘Bob and Alice.’
‘That’s crypto,’ said Darryl. ‘Mehta, what are you still doing here?’
‘I think I spotted something, sir.’
‘You’re right, man,’ said Clay ‘Hey, Arjun, this Layla Zoo-hair is like an actress, isn’t she? You ever see any of her films?’
‘What do you mean, spotted something?’
‘About the virus.’
‘She’s hot. To me a lot of Indian chicks are hot.’
‘Clay. Mehta, what were you doing looking at that code?’
‘I – I was curious. Interested.’
‘That is totally irregular. You’re not holding a sample on your machine, are you?’
Arjun didn’t answer. Instead he laid out, as if it had just occurred to him, an elegant solution, a way to scan for Leela using a signature pattern of behaviour. The two analysts looked at him in frank amazement.
‘That would totally work,’ said Clay.
Darryl nodded thoughtfully. At that moment Tran and Brian wandered into the room, throwing quizzical glances at Arjun.
‘You can go now, Mehta,’ said Darryl. ‘I’ll bear in mind what you said.’
Arjun went back to his desk. He wasn’t sure if it was enough. He had impressed them, certainly, but would it make Darryl see? Arjun Mehta, his indispensable team member. Arjun Mehta, the one who shouldn’t get fired. Somehow it didn’t seem like he had gotten the full effect. The moment should have had more drama. When he was planning it, he had imagined a climax. Excitement and gratitude. Backslapping. Speeches. Now behind the hot-zone glass Darryl was explaining something to the other engineers. There were high-fives. They were laughing, shaking his hand.
They were treating Darryl like a hero.
The world suddenly seemed very far away to Arjun, with himself as a spaceman, attached to it by a slender umbilicus.
‘Aw, man.’
Clay hung over the rim of his cubicle. There were seventeen cowrie shells on his necklace. In the phrase enticing guava-lime blend fortified with citrus bioflavonoids, ginseng, rosehips and spirulina which appeared on the side of his drink bottle, there were six instances of the letter e. Clay looked at him darkly.
‘He burned you, man. He told them it was his idea.’
Arjun nodded, mute. Clay leaned down a little closer. ‘Arjun, tell me something. How did you know?’
‘I’m a good employee, Clay.’ He almost whispered it. He was trying not to cry, or shout out. ‘I’m very dedicated.’
Clay looked over his shoulder. He felt bad about Arjun getting fucked, but big emotional scenes were not his thing. He tried to look encouraging. ‘It’ll work out,’ he said. ‘I know it will.’
‘How do you know, Clay? How do you know?’ Mehta suddenly looked violent, unpredictable. His eyes were glittering. Clay was afraid.
‘Hey figure of speech, man. Just trying to help.’
Clay backed away. The guy was being seriously uncool.
‘Yes, Ma, very well. Of course I am. Main tikh huh. You shouldn’t worry so much. Accha.’
Over there it was morning. Malini would be making tea, putting out the breakfast things.
‘Could you put Priti on the line?’
He waited, looked out of the window at the complexities of the tree.
‘Bro?’
‘Hello, Sis. Why are you still speaking in that accent?’
‘What accent? You’re very bad, Bro. You haven’t phoned for ever so long. Mummy was worried.’
‘She told me.’
‘Hey, it’s gone mad here. You wouldn’t believe – you sound funny. Is everything OK?’
‘Are you on your way to work?’
‘In a minute. Hold on. I’m taking it into the other room.’ The acoustics changed. Priti had shut herself in the smaller bedroom.
‘You’re not all right. What is it? I can hear it in your voice.’
Arjun was silent for a very long time. There was so much to say, all of it unsayable.
‘I miss you. There’s no one to talk to here.’
‘I miss you too, you bigshot. When are they going to give you some time off? Surely you deserve it. And if you’re head of the whole department, can’t you just tell them? Say you need it. Say you’ll come back for Manoj-bhai’s wedding. Everyone would love to see you.’
He wanted desperately to tell her the truth.
‘Bro? Say you’ll come. Mummy would be so happy.’
I’m afraid, Sis. Afraid.
‘Bro?’
He told her he had to go, and put down the phone.
Virugenix did well with Leela01. They got a fix and removal instructions up on their site before their competitors. According to etiquette, they shared their information, and soon the other software houses caught up, but the speed and efficiency of their solution were enviously noted. There were caffeinated smiles in the Michelangelo Building. At around 03.20 PST on the morning of the 14th, Darryl Gant posted a JPEG to the internal departmental list. It was a rough of a new t-shirt design, a blood-splattered fist squashing an Indian dancing girl.
Arjun did not sleep at all that night. His boss was on his mind, looming over his bed in the darkness, an irritable bearded gatekeeper barring the way to happiness. No amount of soothing calculation could dispel him. Arjun imagined curves and estimated the area beneath them. He hypothesized complex shapes and distorted them according to esoteric rules of transformation. Still Darryl persisted, dressed in his Gemini Mission souvenir MAI flight jacket, shaking his head and laughing maniacally.
Denied.
At some point during the night he realized there would have to be a confrontation.
The next morning when he got into work there was a mail from the personnel division, giving him a date to vacate his apartment. It was the stimulus he needed. As the little potbellied figure shuffled in and shut itself in its den, he got up from his cubicle and knocked on the office door, his knuckles hitting the small area of laminate visible between the SETI poster and the handwritten What part of DO NOT DISTURB do you not understand? sign. Darryl’s voice came from the other side.
‘It’s too early. Go away.’
He ignored him and went in.
‘What the fuck?’ said Darryl, retreating defensively behind his desk. He shot a little glance over Arjun’s shoulder, as if looking to see who might be around to assist.
‘Darryl, you must sit down and listen to me.’
‘I must do nothing of the kind. This is my space, Mehta. My space. It is clearly demarcated. There is a sign.’
‘I think you’ve treated me very unfairly.’
‘You did this yesterday too, this walking in. Do you – I don’t know – have a problem with boundaries? Do you maybe have a condition? This is a compulsion, right? Compulsive boundary-transgression syndrome.’
‘Please, Darryl. I helped you yesterday. I don’t mind you taking credit for it.’
‘Whoa there. Just back up. You are being very aggressive, buddy. That’s something I don’t hold with.’
‘I’m sorry. I apologize if I was disturbing you, but I think you should give me some kind of recognition. This is very important to me. And I was helpful. I could help more.’
‘Just stay back, Mehta. I know aikido. I can break bones. Look, isn’t this something you could have done on email? You don’t have to come into my office with this stuff.’
‘Please, Darryl.’
‘Crumble bones. Literally reduce them to dust. I can concentrate all my chi in my palms.’
‘Please give me my job back. That’s all I’m asking.’
‘Stop talking. That’s an order. I don’t feel comfortable.’
&
nbsp; ‘Even on a trial period. I’ll be the best worker you ever had. I swear it.’
‘Could you – OK, I’ll think about it, right? I’ll think about it.’
‘You will?’
‘I said so, didn’t I? No. No. Stay the other side of the desk. Just – OK. I’ll think about it.’
Arjun left the office, and for five minutes existed in a state of minor but perceptible hope. Then a mail dropped into his inbox.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Boundaries
You are clinically ill. You cannot do this to people. There is a LAW. Also re: your request/THREAT there can be no change. What did you think? This is policy please do not discuss it further with me. THERE IS NO USE IN CRYING OVER SPILT MILK. I remind you of my EXTENSIVE security measures.
Arjun cradled his head in his hands.
The worm which became known as Leela02, or LeelaServer, was first reported on the afternoon of 13 June in the Philippines, where network traffic was slowed to a crawl as ever-proliferating copies of the organism scanned for new machines to infect. In the US the rate of spread was slower, but a series of high-profile security breaches conspired to give Leela’s second public incarnation a level of media visibility which its creator had never in his worst nightmares imagined possible.
At 08.45 a.m. MST on 14 June, some hours before Arjun’s attempted confrontation with Darryl, a water-treatment plant in the town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, was forced to suspend activities because the machines controlling its filtration process had crashed. In the hours after trading opened, major companies in several states, including a regional investment bank, reported trouble with database software running on public servers. At 11.10 a.m. MST an operations centre providing 911 service for three suburban police departments and fifteen fire departments in Boulder, Colorado, suffered ‘catastrophic computer-systems failure’. Its operators were reduced to using pen and paper to log calls and send out response teams. The Colorado state government sent a message to Washington, asking whether it had reason to believe the country was under cyber-attack. Washington replied in the negative, but, after hurried consultations involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Infrastructure Protection Center and the Central Intelligence Agency, the categorical denial was rescinded, and the President’s spokesman, Gavin Burger, famous for his double-breasted suits and unabashed comb-over, held a conference which described the administration’s assessment of the situation as ‘pending’.