The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  You know trolls.

  But the AI goddess wasn’t human—she had never before seen her new enemy, the troll. She was a generic goddess, no-name (simply: Devi 1.0), a demo for the newest iteration of the successive New Indias of history—one of the most advanced AIs developed within India. Her creators had a clear mandate: boost Indian veeyar tourism, generate crores of rupees by drawing devotees to drive up her value and the value of the cryptowealth her domain would generate.

  The devi was told to listen to you—her human followers. To learn from you, and talk to you, like gods have since the dawn of time. She was told to give you boons—riches and prosperity in exchange for your devotion, a coin in her palm, multiplied by her miracles into many more. An intelligent goddess who would comfort her followers, show you sights before unseen, transform your investment of faith into virtual wealth with real value. She was to learn more and more about humanity from you, and attract millions from across the world to her domain.

  Though many had toiled to create Devi 1.0 under the banner of Shiva Industries, only a few controlled the final stages of her release. These few knew of trolls, catered to them as their veeyar users across the country, even indirectly used them as agents to further causes close to their hearts. What they did not expect was the scale of the troll attack on their newest creation, because troll attacks were something others had to face—people with less power and wealth than them. People, perhaps, like you. So their goddess welcomed the horde with open arms, oblivious to the risks, even as they brought with them a stench of corrupted data and malformed information, of a most infernal entitlement.

  * * *

  Durga. A powerful name, yet so common. Durga’s parents had named their daughter that with the hope that being born into the gutters of caste wouldn’t hold her back. That she would rise above it all like her divine namesake. The caste system had been officially outlawed in India by the time Durga was born, but they knew as well as anyone that this hadn’t stopped it from living on in other ways.

  Durga’s parents took her to see a pandal during Durga Puja when she was eight or nine. They in turn had been taken to pandals as children too, back when most still housed solid idols of gods and goddesses, fashioned from clay and straw, painted and dressed by human hands, displayed to anyone who walked in. You could still find open pandals with solid idols during pujas if you looked. But Durga’s parents had been prepared to pay to show their daughter the new gods.

  The festival had turned the streets thick with churning mudslides of humanity. Durga had been terrified, clinging to her mother’s neck for dear life as she breathed in the humid vapor of millions, dazzled by the blazing lights, the echoing loudspeakers, the flashing holograms riding up and down the sides of buildings like runaway fires. She’d felt like she was boiling alive in the crinkled green dress her parents had bought her for the pujas, with its small, cheap holo decal of a tiger that sometimes came alive when it caught the light, charged by solar energy. Cheap for some, anyway. Not at all cheap for her parents, not that Durga knew that at the time. She loved the tiger’s stuttering movements across her body. She knew that her divine namesake often rode a tiger into battle. In the middle of those crowds, on her way to see Durga herself, that little tiger in her dress seemed a tiny cub, crushed into the fabric, trapped and terrified by the monstrous manifestations that burned across the night air, dancing maniacally above all their heads.

  Though their little family had taken two local trains and walked an hour through the puja crowds to see Durga, they only got as far as the entrance to one of the pandals. The cut and quality of their clothes, the darkness of their skin, gave them away. Buoyed by her mother’s arms, Durga could see inside the pandal’s arched entrance—the people lined up by rows of chairs, waiting impatiently to sit down and put on what looked like motorbike helmets trailing thick ponytails of wires. Inside those helmets, Durga knew, somehow, was her namesake.

  But when her father tried to pay in cash instead of getting scanned in (they didn’t have QR tattoos linking them to the national database and bank accounts), angry customers all around them began shouting, turning Durga’s insides to mush.

  “Stop wasting everyone’s time! There are other pandals for people like you!”

  “Get these filthy people out of the line!”

  Her mother’s arms became a vise around her. One man raised a fist poised to strike her father, who cowered in a crouch. His face twisted in abject terror, his own arms like prison bars. Durga burst into tears. Someone pulled the attacker away, perhaps seeing the child crying, and pulled her father up by the shoulder to shove him out of the way.

  They made their way back into the general foot traffic on the street, Durga’s parents’ faces glazed with sweat and shock at having escaped a beating for being too lowly to meet a goddess in veeyar. They managed to find a small open pandal after following the flows of people dressed like them, with dark skin and inexpensive haircuts. Inside, the devi stood embodied in the palpable air of the world, her face clammy with paint, defiant yet impassive, her third eye a slim gash across her forehead. By her side was a lion, not a tiger. It loomed over the demon Mahishasura, who cowered with one arm raised in defense, his naked torso bloodied. Durga couldn’t take her eyes off the fallen demon. He looked like a normal, if muscular, man, his face frozen in terror. He cowered, like her father had.

  As Durga looked upon her namesake with her glittering weapons and ornaments, her silk sari, she could only think of her father’s look of terror, his public humiliation. Of how they hadn’t been allowed to see the real goddesses hiding in those helmets and wires. How was that Durga different than this clay Durga, who looked over her crowd without looking at anyone, without speaking, whose large brushstroke eyes gazed into the distance as if she didn’t even care that these humans were here to celebrate her, that the one she had just defeated was by her feet bleeding, about to be mauled? The clay devi’s expression seemed almost disdainful, like the faces of any number of well-dressed, pale-skinned women on the streets when they saw people like Durga and her parents or any of her friends wearing hijab or kufi. Would the Durga inside those helmets in the fancier pandal have talked to little human Durga? Would the goddess have complimented the tiger on her dress, which had flickered and vanished into its folds, frightened by the night? Would she have looked into little human Durga’s eyes, and comforted her, taken her hands and told her why those horrible men and women had such rage in their eyes, why they’d scared her father and mother and pushed her family out of the devi’s house?

  * * *

  Within sixty seconds of opening the gates to her domain, the AI goddess had been deluged by over 500,000 active veeyar users interacting with her, with numbers rising rapidly. At that point in time, 57 percent of those users were trolls, data-rakshaks masked in glitch armor, cloaks, masks tusked with spikes of jagged malware. You would have seen them as you clambered up the devi’s mountain, their swirling gif-banners and bristling weapons blotting out the light of the goddess at the peak. You would have kept your distance, backing away from mountain paths clogged with their marching followers, influencer leaders chanting war cries as their halos flickered with glyphs of Likes and Recasts.

  Because you know trolls.

  And this was a troll gathering, a demon army unparalleled in all the veeyar domains. They were angry. Or mischievous, or bored, or lustful, or entitled. Their voices were privileged as the majority by the goddess, who absorbed what her abusers were saying so that she could learn more about humanity.

  And the trolls washed against Devi 1.0 in thundering armies, calling into question her very existence, for daring to be—she was an insult to the real goddesses that bless the glorious nation of India by mimicking them, this quasi Parvati, this impostor Durga, this coded whore trying to steal followers from the true deities. Fake devi! they cried, over and over. They called her a traitorous trickster drawing honest god-fearing men and women to the lures of atheism and Western hedonism, or Islam, in the guis
e of fabricated divinity, a corruptor of India’s sacred veeyar real estate. They called her feminism gone too far. A goddess with potential agency was a threat to their country. They called her too sexy to be a goddess, too flashy, a blasphemous slut. They asked her if she wanted to fuck them, in many hundreds of different and violent ways.

  The goddess listened, and sifted through the metadata the trolls trailed in their paths—their histories, their patterns. The goddess wanted to give them what they wanted, but she could only do so much. She could not give them sex, nor was she trained to destroy herself as many of them wanted. She learned what the trolls considered beauty here in the state-run national veeyar nets, and responded with the opposite, to calm them. Her skin darkened several shades, becoming like the night sky before dawn, her eyes full moons in the sky that is part of her in this domain.

  * * *

  When Durga was a teenager, taller and without need of a mother’s shoulder to cling to, she joined the crowds around the fanciest pandals during Durga Puja. She already knew she wouldn’t be allowed in, because she didn’t have the mark of the ajna on her forehead—her third eye hadn’t been opened. She couldn’t look into veeyar samsara domains without the use of peripherals like glasses, lenses, helmets, and pods. She just wanted a glimpse inside the pandals. This time, peeping over shoulders, she saw through the fiber-optic entwined arches of the pandal a featureless hall bathed in dim blue light. It was filled with people, their foreheads all marked with a glowing ajna, their eyes unfocused. In that room was the goddess, lurking, once again invisible to her, visible to the people in there with expensive wetware in their heads. Durga was ajna-blind, and thus forbidden to enter wetware-enabled pandals with aug-veeyar.

  By this time Durga was allowed, despite her dark skin and lack of an ajna, into lower-tier digital pandals with helmets or pods. When Durga was thirteen, she’d finally splurged on one even though she could barely afford it, using cryptocoin made from trading code and obsolete hardware in veeyar ports. She finally got to sit down on the uncomfortable faux-leather chairs by the whirring stand fans, and put on one of the wired helmets she’d so longed to see inside as a child. It stank of the stale sweat of hundreds of visitors. The pandal was an unimpressive one, its walls flimsy, the CPU cores within its domes slow and outdated, the crystal storage in its columns low-density, the coils of fiber optics crawling down its walls hastily rigged.

  She met the Ma Durga inside those helmets, finally, a low-resolution specter who nonetheless looked her in the eyes and unfurled her arms in greeting. Her skin wasn’t the mustard yellow or pastel flesh shades of the clay idols, but the coveted pale human pink of white people or the more appealing Indian ancestries, the same shades you’d find in kilometer-high ads for skin whiteners or perfume, on tweaked gifshoots of Bollywood stars and fashion models. This impressive paleness was somewhat diluted by the aliased shimmer of the devi’s pixelated curves, the blurry backdrop of nebulae and stars they both floated in. Durga had hacked her way into veeyar spaces before on 2-D and 3-D screens, so this half-rate module didn’t exactly stun as much as it disoriented her with its boundlessness. But the cheapness of its rendering left the universe inside the helmet feeling claustrophobic instead of expansive. The goddess waited about five feet in front of her, floating in the ether, eight arms unfolded like a flower. Unlike many of the solid idols in realspace pandals, the goddess was alone except for her vahana curled by her side—no host of companion deities, no defeated demon by her feet. The goddess construct said nothing, two of ten arms held out, as if beckoning.

  Durga spoke to Durga the devi: “Ma Durga. I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time. Do you mind?” Durga waited to see if the devi responded in some way.

  Ma Durga blinked, and smiled, then spoke: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.” She spoke Hindi—there was no language selection option. Durga was more fluent in Bangla, but she did understand.

  Durga nodded in the helmet, glancing at the nebulae beneath her, the lack of a body. It made her dizzy for a moment. “Okay. That’s nice. I guess I’ll ask. Why are only some welcome in some of your houses? Doesn’t everyone deserve your love?”

  Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “On the world’s summit I bring forth sky the Father: my home is in the waters, in the ocean as Mother. Thence I pervade all existing creatures, as their Inner Supreme Self, and manifest them with my body.” In the bounded world of that veeyar helmet, these words, recited in the devi’s gentle modulated Hindi, nearly brought tears to young Durga’s eyes. Not quite, though. The beauty of those words, which she didn’t fully understand, seemed so jarring, issued forth from this pixelated avatar and her tacky little universe.

  Durga reached out to touch Ma Durga’s many hands, but the pandal’s chair rigs didn’t have gloves or motion sensors. She was disembodied in this starscape. She couldn’t hold the goddess’s hands. Couldn’t touch or smell her (what did a goddess smell like, anyway, she wondered) like those with ajnas could, in the samsara net. The tiger curled by the devi licked its paws and yawned. Durga thought of a long-gone green dress.

  “I’m old enough to know you’re not really a goddess,” Durga said to Ma Durga. “You’re the same as the clay idols in the open pandals. Not even that. Artists make those. You’re just prefab bits and pieces put together for cheap by coders. You’re here to make money for pandal sponsors and the local parties.”

  Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “I am the Queen, the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship. Thus gods have established me in many places with many homes to enter and abide in.”

  Durga smiled, like the goddess in front of her. “Someone wrote all this for you to say.” Someone had, of course, but much, much longer ago than Durga had any idea, so long ago that the original words hadn’t even been in Hindi.

  With a nauseating lurch, the cramped universe inside the helmet was ripped away, and Durga was left blinking at the angry face of one of the pandal operators. “I heard what you were saying,” he said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her from the chair. “Think you’re smart, little bitch? How dare you? Where is your respect for the goddess?” The other visitors waiting for the chair and helmet were looking at Durga like she was a stray dog who’d wandered inside.

  “I didn’t even get to see her kill Mahishasura. I want my money back,” said Durga.

  “You’re lucky I don’t haul you to the police for offending religious sentiments. And you didn’t give me enough money to watch Durga poke Mahishasura with a stick, let alone kill him. Get out of here before I drag you out!” bellowed the operator.

  “Get your pandal some more memory next time, you fucking cheats, your Durga’s ugly as shit,” she said, and slipped out of reach as the man’s eyes widened.

  Durga pushed past the line and left laughing, her insides scalded by adrenaline and anger, arm welted by the thick fingers of that lout of an operator. Durga had always wondered why Kali Puja didn’t feature veeyar pandals like Durga Puja, why clay and holo idols were still the norm for her. It was a smaller festival, but hardly a small one in the megacity. It felt like a strange contrast, especially since the two pujas were celebrated close to each other. Having seen the placid Ma Durga inside the pandal helmets, Durga understood. Kali was dark-skinned, bloody, chaos personified. They couldn’t have her running wild in the rarefied air of veeyar domains run by people with pale skin and bottom lines to look after. Kali was a devi for people like Durga, who were never allowed in so many places.

  Best to leave Kali’s avatars silent, solid, confined to temples and old-school pandals where she’d bide her time before being ceremoniously dissolved in the waters of the Hooghly.

  * * *

  The trolls saw the AI goddess and her newly darkened skin, and now called her too ugly to be a goddess, a mockery of the purity and divinity of Indian womanhood. The moons of her eyes waning with lids of shadow, the godd
ess absorbed this. She began to learn more from the trolls. She began to learn anger. She began to know confusion. They wanted too many things, paradoxical things. They thought her too beautiful, and too ugly. They wanted people of various faiths, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, backgrounds dead. They wanted photoreal veeyar sexbots forged from photos and video of exes, crushes, celebrities. They wanted antinationals struck down by her might. They wanted a mother to take care of them.

  And what did you want of her?

  Whatever it was—it got shouted down by the trolls. Or maybe you were one of the trolls, hiding under a glitch mask or a new face to bark your truths, telling your friends later how trolls are bad, but self-righteous social justice warriors are just as dangerous.

  It doesn’t matter. She learned from humanity, which you are a part of, troll and not. And humanity wanted solace from a violent world, your own violent hearts. You wanted love and peace. You wanted hate and blood. The devi grew darker still, encompassing the sky so her domain turned to new night. Her being expanded to encroach the world beyond her mountaintop, her eyes gone from moons to raging stars, her every eyelash a streaking plasma flare, her darkening flesh shot through with lightning-bright arteries of pulsing information emerging from the black hole of her heartbeat. If she was too ugly to be a goddess, and too beautiful to be a goddess, she would be both, or none. If you asked for too many things, she would have to cull the numbers so she could process humanity better.