The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  In Kandy, they called this the ‘First Innings’.

  Broken Arm knew nothing of Hewage or Kandy or the drama that would unfold. All she knew was that they were beginning to starve, and that for some strange reason, Big People were killing them. She held them all close, even the new ones.

  ‘You should go check again,’ said Sky.

  There was murmured consensus.

  The Thing that Spoke in Music crackled feebly. Whoever ran it had long since given up on the pianos and violins: now a gentle Pali pleading filled the air. ‘Buddhang saranang gacchami … dhammand sarang gacchami …’ Words she had never understood, words that spoke of refuge in a tongue long since forgotten.

  She stalked out of their building and into the silence of the evening.

  As the moons had gone past, the other tribes had begun pulling back from the strip that connected them to the Chinese Port City. Why wait, after all, for a thing that clearly did not benefit them anymore? But she, for some reason, had stayed, haunting this place and hounding the Port City.

  Had she been aware of the fine machinery that made up her thoughts – the software that made up her soul – she would have described it in terms of attention cycles and backpropagation and feedback loops. Instead, she just walked, a little lopsided figure making its furtive way down what had once been called Galle Road, to the brown desert that had once been the Galle Face Green.

  As always, the Chinese Port City was waiting. Its lights were shining bright like miniature suns, reflected on the little strip of water between it and the bank she stood on.

  ‘WARNING,’ it told her in its strange, rambling voice, like it did to all the others who came to talk to it. It used to suffix this with ‘MAINTAIN DISTANCE FROM STATION’, but as of late it had started to say something different.

  She sat under the moonlight in Galle Face Green, now Galle Face brown, amidst the shattered roads and tumbled towers. The sea lapped away, eating at the edges of Colombo.

  ‘NO FOOD TODAY,’ it told her in its strange, rambling voice, like it did to all the others who came to talk to it. ‘CONTRACT FOR STATION HAS ENDED.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  There was silence. She wondered how the Port City ate. There were people in there. Some said they were Big People, like the ones Upwards, but some rudimentary classification had been made, and now she thought they were more like the tribes. They were metal and they did not bleed. They could not be fought; they could not be talked to. The Children of the Taj, once the greatest of the bot-tribes here, had found that out.

  ‘How do you live?’ she asked it. ‘Who gives you food?’

  ‘STATION IS SELF-SUSTAINING.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  She felt the Port City shift to its own language. Images played across its moonlit skin. Symbols. A tribe standing in the sunlight. A tribe eating the sunlight. Something like the sun inside the Port City. The Port City, a tribe unto itself, eating its own sun, but the sun never ran out. A maze of symbols she didn’t understand.

  She stared at it morosely, watching the waves lap at it. Always the same message.

  A runner arrived. It was from Sky. One of the tribes had heard there was food beyond this place, in Colombo 01. Should they go? There would be a fight. Probably several.

  What else was there to do?

  ‘WARNING,’ the Port City said. ‘NEW AGENT ACTIVITY DETECTED.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘NEW AGENT ACTIVITY DETECTED. THIS STATION IS NOT PERMITTED TO SHARE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION OUTSIDE CLASS-3 CONSTRUCTS,’ it said, gibberish she didn’t understand. ‘RECALIBRATE AUTONOMY.’

  And then it fell silent. No amount of pleading could coax an answer from it. The great floodlights dimmed, and all went silent in the ruined city of Colombo.

  TWO

  Kushlani de Almeida watched the broadcast screens, sipping her tea. Or rather, Hewage’s tea.

  He knew she didn’t like watching the carnage, and in a rather unexpected gesture had set two of the three screens to the stats: viewership, local, international.

  That she enjoyed. It displayed years of work, and this year was more successful that the last three years put together. Indonesia was watching. Siam was watching. Burma. Most of Tamil Nadu. Two hundred million people had tuned in, including, she knew, her own parents, and this was her triumph. Almost all the undersea lines from here to the British Raj must be jammed full of the data from this stream.

  And this month would be night shifts all the way through until the end, so watching the numbers climb was a favourite pastime.

  It was the other screen that she hated. This one she had set to track a specific bot. The girl – the Explorer model she had autopsied, patched up and sent out.

  It was … not heartbreaking. She would never have allowed herself a feeling that melodramatic, but she felt both a perverse sense of pride and a sickness in her stomach. Pride, because that little bot had turned out to be such a capable leader – an underdog good enough to seriously flip the balance – and she knew a lot of people had a lot of money riding on her. The sickness came from when she saw it caring for others. Talking to them. Making sure the bots were armed and equipped, and when a bot fell, dragging it back to safety and trying to repair it. Kushlani could still remember the memories it had. Watching the sunset. Helping that other bot learn and adapt to the ruins of Colombo. So much love in so alien a thing; so much humanity in wires and printed circuit boards and processor cores provided by the lowest bidder.

  The viewership jumped every time a repair scene came on. She knew that her friends – or at least the few she didn’t actively despise – were all at watch parties in the big hotels, drinking Nipponese sake and flirting and cheering for the crowd favourite. Broken Arm was one of the biggest draws of the year. The audience loved her.

  Survive, Kushlani willed in her mind. Just survive.

  THREE

  Jacob Bengali woke up and tried to swing himself out of bed. Something was odd … the bed was a lot larger than it should have been. He flailed about, disoriented. His hand hit wood, smashed a glass off something …

  And then he realized he wasn’t in Goa anymore.

  He opened his eyes cautiously. A net. A white expanse resolved itself into a four-poster bed, and beyond that, wooden walls; real wood, not fake. A cavernous room, dimly lit by a soft gold filtering through heavily curtained windows. Motes of dust danced in an errant sunbeam lancing across his new abode. It touched the broken porcelain on the floor – the tea had spilled out onto the red cement beneath, taking on the colour of blood.

  He pushed the curtains aside, saw a slope of dark grass that fell away, and beyond that, mountains wreathed in dark clouds, turning gold and pink in the dawn light. ‘Ah, bugger,’ he said softly to himself, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  It took him a while to get ready. The bathroom mirror showed a worried man. Toothpaste. Shave? No. Clothes. A shirt, freshly ironed. Pants. Shoes? Yes. He pushed open the heavy, creaking wooden door and began his descent.

  They had moved him out of the hotel and put him up in some sort of massive colonial bungalow not too far from the Kandy Fort. Bengali had never paid much attention to architecture, but he’d heard the name Minnette de Silva enough to appreciate the history of the place, if not the subtler nuances of design. It was a far cry from the kind of quarters you got from the India Mission.

  And to top it off, Penhaligon had assigned Bengali his very own Inquisitor. As he made his way downstairs, cringing slightly at the old wooden creaks, smelling the strangely still oldness of the house around him, a vision materialized: a breakfast table laid out for a small village, with seven clay pots of curry orbiting a vast mound of—

  ‘String hoppers, sir,’ said the Inquisitor. Mason, the thin one who had served them dinner. One of the more human ones. His copper-streaked face glinted dully when he moved. ‘There is also milk rice and roast paan, if sir wants.’

 
; He came forward and began to pour himself a cup of tea with milk in it.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I was waiting for sir,’ said Mason.

  The Ceylonese clearly knew how to treat a guest, thought Bengali, biting into his potato curry and string hoppers. And, for good measure, there was the milk rice with the fish curry, both of which sat in his belly like ballast. It was just like Indian food, yet different, the coconut milk making every curry subtly crisper. Bloody hell. Even if he got nothing out of this trip, the chance to wake up in such a house and eat this much made it all worth it. Mason watched him.

  ‘If sir is done,’ he said politely, ‘we should begin.’

  Every day began the same way. The waking and the fumbling, and then what he thought of as purgatory, that was the preparation before he descended to the real task at hand: watching the streams of what these people called the Big Match.

  He watched, first with sickness, then with fascination. It was slaughter and carnage, hundreds of child-sized bodies throwing themselves at each other with wild savagery. Presumably while entire families cheered in front of their televisions and called bets. He watched them kill each other, over and over again.

  He had never seen machines move like this before.

  The first order of business was to get Hewage to tell him what exactly he had done to make the bots behave like this, but the first few days went by and nothing happened. Except, perhaps, his waistline gaining an inch or two. Invitations to lunch went unanswered. Requests for documentation were answered with the same canned statement: the government of Ceylon had a lengthy and complicated process for making its intellectual property available to auditors. The process had been set in motion, but it would take a while.

  Fine. He was no stranger to red tape. He turned to Kushlani de Almeida. Interesting background: local university, no formal robotics training as far as he could make out, and if she knew about the finer workings of the models, she certainly wasn’t discussing it with him, certainly not over daily radiogram calls.

  But Bengali had dealt with students and staff, after all. He began asking how the Big Match was doing. How many bots were out there? How did they handle repairs? What were their timelines like? The answers she gave were too specific to be that of a government PR person: she clearly knew a great deal about both the hardware and the administration side of things.

  Very well, then. “If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill,” he told himself, and, summoning the Inquisitor, went off to find Kushlani.

  This proved to be a little more difficult than he had anticipated. The university, for all its flaws, had generally been a model of order. Project plans and key information discussions were confirmed days in advance, and whoever he was supposed to be meeting presumably had the same knowledge. Here it was a lot more chaotic.

  For starters, it seemed like there was some sort of court action going on that mysteriously took Hewage and Kushlani completely beyond his sphere for a week. The various sub-functionaries they left behind seemed to have absolutely no idea who he was or why they should bother helping him. There was a huge to-do involving some high-ranking government official – or was it just some rich fellow? The name ‘Bandaranaike’ came up repeatedly, and every so often Mason would vanish, only to return the next day, shaking his head. ‘No luck, sir. Tomorrow?’

  So he did the rational thing, which was to scrounge this half-mansion guesthouse for books, find a decent chair, and read. After all, Drake was footing the bill, and it was nice to stretch out for once and not have to think about classes.

  But the books he found were dull. Half of them were of caricature, written by British explorers licking their lips at the exotic. To understand a country, one had to read what its people wrote of it, not what tourists saw. The one local history he found on Ceylon was a long essay on kings and the temples they built, and reservoirs and princes and princesses and miracles, and then, suddenly, around the seventeenth century, it switched to tactics, geography, incursions, tales of traitors and byzantine political games. Then it leaped centuries and began talking of rebellion: one from the North, led by scholars from Yarl; one from the South, led by fishermen. And then it stopped.

  Frustrated, he went outside.

  The guard at the black iron gate was an amicable old man. In exchange for a couple of cigarettes, he popped the gate open and let Bengali out with a ‘Mahatthaya gihilla ennawane?’ Bengali didn’t speak the language, but the tone was clear. Yes, he assured the guard. Just a walk to stretch his legs.

  The road cut diagonally downwards, offering him the option of going either back upwards to even more remote climes, or further downwards to Kandy. He set off downwards. At first it was it had been pleasant – sloping roads, coconut trees, a sense of silence that was completely unlike what he was used to in Goa. Then it became oppressive. The city centre might have been worth seeing, but between that place and him was an endless string of little villagelets that seemed to be made entirely of salons, barbershops and grocery stores, all stuffed to the brim with people who paused and watched Bengali labour with mild amusement. Houses painted with hideously bright colours perched precariously along roads that wound around far too often. Packs of motorbikes – most of them looked Indian – overtook him every so often. Packs of excessively friendly dogs leaped out of the many bends, sniffed around and left. Wedding reception halls appeared to grow in this wilderness like fungi. The heat of the sun was not a pleasurable bite, but a heavy, dull siege against the senses.

  When he did manage to cross this great waste, he found a city equal parts colonial nostalgia and nationalism. A veneer of police control had been laid over anti-British graffiti in the process of being scrubbed off. Faux colonial-era lamps lined the pavements, and in places gave way to a darkness lit by ancient LED signage piled higgledly-piggledy over one another, advertising everything from doctors to dresses. These, too, tapered off, and then it was the temples and hotels that competed with each other. Everywhere he turned, there were Chinese or English tourists taking photos of themselves next to Buddha statues.

  He tried a hotel. The lounge was full. Screens had been set up on grassy lawns; arrack flowed, and parties clustered around tables, drinking loudly. He saw millions being traded, and bookies in suits and their patrons watching the televisions hung everywhere, cheering mightily.

  Time passed in cigarettes, burned one after the other, until Kushlani de Almeida invited him to dinner.

  FOUR

  ‘He says he’s been writing a book,’ said Kushlani. ‘About the bots. Well, mostly about the bots, but mostly about himself as well. We’re celebrating a good run for this Big Match. I suppose he felt generous.’

  She showed up at the house in a magnificent red and black saree, and in the shielded privacy of the car, Bengali had found himself wanting to ask about her, but not daring to. So he had asked about Hewage and his annoying secrecy instead.

  ‘I see,’ he said, trying not to let his disappointment show. Books were PR. He flipped through the pages on the microchip she had offered him. Tracts of text; nothing that looked even remotely similar to code or equations or even a complex diagram. Layman fluff.

  ‘I understand you’re busy,’ he told her. ‘All I need is the source code and compute, and I’ll be able to function pretty much independently. Figure out what to do, make recommendations, and, you know, you decide whether to take me up on them or not.’

  ‘Again, I’d like to help you, but only Hewage has the source.’

  ‘If this doesn’t happen soon, I’m going to have it to report to Drake.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Look around you.’

  He did.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘People celebrating … party of some sort?’

  ‘Semi-final of the Big Match,’ she said. ‘Everything’s running smoothly, everyone’s caught up in it. This is probably one of the best we’ve ever pulled off. People are enjoying themselves, Jacob. You’re not going to ge
t anything right now.’

  ‘What do we do right now, then?’

  ‘Food,’ she said. ‘Because we’ve got maybe a month before all the bots end up back in the Watchtower, and I’m enjoying wearing this saree and having a nice dinner while I can. And if you want to make this nicer, you can tell me about your university and how it fits into all this. And if you do a good job, I might bug Hewage on my way home on your behalf. Here. This is where we get out.’

  The doors opened to a gray sky and a Kandyan hotel, stretching its verandahs out towards them. The wind blew at Kushlani as she emerged from the vehicle, making her saree trail its long tail. For a moment, she looked like a dragon.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  And so the next day Mason rumbled up the hills in a long, black car – a hearse more than anything.

  ‘Kushlani miss sends her regards,’ he said.

  Bengali smiled and climbed in. The car took him past the maze of shops and hotels he had seen so far, up into the hills, and beyond, to a place where the houses fell away and the buildings seemed to hide behind large walls and autocannon and barbed-wired fences. They passed one embassy, then another, then another. Then came a dreary grey building, stark and Brutalist, shaped with rings upon rings of concrete reaching up like a giant funnel planted there to catch the rain. There was an electrified fence outside it – a new addition, apparently – and an ugly gate with armed guards in front of it.

  ‘Ministry of Reconciliation,’ it read. It looked like a hotel built by a man who had spent his entire life designing bunkers.

  This, Mason assured him, was where the entire bot operation had been run from. ‘Around are normal ministry work buildings,’ he said, clearly struggling with English. ‘Inside, big building and here,’ he gestured at the big Brutalist spiral – ‘Watchtower. Big Match laboratory, operations, transmission.’