Turbulence

by Samit Basu

  He transfers money from defence budgets to development projects, leaving warning messages to government officials, bureaucrats, judges, police chiefs all over the world: This isn’t your money, don’t keep it. If you do, I’ll take away yours. He plunders through the amassed wealth of advertising and media agencies, starting with the decimation of cola marketing budgets. He slashes profit margins on all luxury goods, borrows idle savings. Not knowing what exactly to do with all the money he’s amassed, he attempts to read the works of various famous economists, but gets confused by the diagrams and assumptions and decides to wing it. Making it up as he goes along, he takes away money allocated for closed-circuit public surveillance worldwide, US Defence programmes for telepathic limb-controlling monkeys and neuroscientific mind-control, as well as all statues of living politicians.

  He attacks the media, removing celebrity fluff stories and paid articles from newspaper databases, adding instead stories of government, police, corporate and judicial corruption, making public any scam he can find. He points out, in strongly worded letters to editors, that he knows all about the shadier side of how media conglomerates and large businesses co-exist, that he feels entitled to a very large chunk of their profits, but is leaving them enough money to do their jobs in return for their discretion regarding his operations. Aman has never seen himself in the role of censor and media manipulator before, he feels suitably smug and villainous. While he’s at it, he shuts down all religion/ sexuality/race hate sites and resets all the links to right-wing political party websites to lead, instead, to the YouTube video of Rick Astley’s mental-collapse-inducing hit song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

  After loafing around on Twitter for a while, Aman decides to single-handedly tackle climate change. With an imperious wave of his digital hand, he sets up large companies that will manufacture sulphur aerosols to refreeze the polar icecaps, thus keeping a great many countries’ lands above water. He cuts science funding from universities that have won Ig Nobel prizes, and puts their money into research on whether his newly formed companies’ activities will kill plants and animals all over the world with acid rain and cause even higher temperatures in Africa.

  His other attempts at geo-engineering are hampered by his lack of superhero co-workers, but he tries to make arrangements for the cultivation of ocean-surface clouds of plankton blooms to absorb carbon dioxide in the oceans, and oil drillers to re-inject carbon dioxide into the earth. He reads about reducing global warming using visors, suspended ceramic discs in space, and sets pop-up reminders telling himself to discuss this with Vir later, along with his more ambitious plans for terraforming the Sahara and growing giant algae stomachs in the Pacific. He sets up funding for solar, wind and water energy plants all over India and China and changes the instructions for manufacture-controlling computers in German and Japanese car factories, replacing their design modules with schematics for electric and solar-powered vehicles.

  Aman’s thoughts churn, crackle, spin out of control, ever larger streams of data-bubbles fizz out in front of him and head off to their tasks. He is not sure what they are — software his mind is generating? Copies of his brain on the internet? But their creation fills him with a strange effervescence — he feels like laughing out loud, maniacal Mad Scientist laughter.

  As the cyber-ocean pulses around him, he sees the results of his instructions, watches powerful, violent people’s lives and fortunes implode and disappear under his onslaught. On separate bubble-panels, he downloads and reads manic, dark, deeply post-modern superhero comics written by insane British writers, and watches their characters flutter in data currents, their deliberately ironic costumes bizarre flags of his new nation, his new world.

  Yet even as Aman gleefully rearranges the world, he knows his reach, like the internet’s, is woefully limited — in his own country alone, he knows that the real power, the richest of the rich and the cruellest of the cruel don’t even exist on the internet or the banking system, that their billions are stashed away elsewhere, that their teenaged sons will continue to race on the streets of Delhi in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis mowing down pedestrians, and there is nothing he can do to touch either them or their money.

  He knows that the really poor people, the ones who need help most, haven’t even heard of the internet, let alone online banking, and the most he can do is to give lots of money to groups that claim to represent them — people who can reach them — and hope. He knows that he hasn’t transferred just billions of dollars, but all the corruption, greed and power that trail those dollars like seagulls; that he has set up new tyrants, new criminals, new thieves to replace the old; that no number of accompanying Big-Brother-is-watching-you warnings will prevent a lot of money from being misused. He knows that it is entirely possible that nothing will change. But at this point, he is too far in to even think of stopping, and the results he produces are drastic enough. By afternoon, he has erased Third World debt. He wishes he had paid more attention as an economics undergraduate — he is not sure whether this will revive or destroy the global economy.

  With a final flourish, he disables satellite navigation systems for nuclear missiles worldwide, confiscates half the income of all celeb-stars of reality shows based on their lives, virus-cleans the world and passes out.

  When Aman awakens, his head feels as if it’s on fire. He tries to open his eyes, but can’t; the world remains black except for a red bubble that trickles in slowly from the edge of his field of vision and hovers in front of him. The telecom hum in his ears has faded now, and he hears a dull thumping instead; a sluggishly beating heart completely in sync with his own.

  There’s writing on the bubble in front of him.

  What you did was wrong on so many levels.

  Who are you? Aman tries to say the words out loud, but hears them only in his head.

  The red bubble shimmers and more words appear.

  I don’t know. I am you, I think.

  Are you from my subconscious or are you some sort of independent online copy of my brain? Or some kind of artificial intelligence creature? Where did you come from?

  Your questions are foolish. I told you, I don’t know. What difference would it make if you knew the answer?

  True. Just curious. This is the weirdest chat session I’ve ever had. Like Skype when one person doesn’t have a mike.

  How can you be flippant at a time like this?

  Sorry. Go on, then.

  You have tampered with forces beyond your understanding and there will be a price to pay.

  Yes.

  Yes?

  What’s your point? Do you have a secret quest for me, or a message from beyond, or something like that?

  What?

  No? Okay. So you’re just here to moan about what I did?

  What gives you the right to do this?

  Aman blinks, the letters on the bubble are hurting his eyes. Also, the bubble seems to be trying to shift itself around and form a face, his face, which seems both unimaginative and rude.

  What gives me the right? The fact that I can, he says.

  The world’s bloodiest tyrants would have said the same to justify their most heinous acts.

  My aim is slightly different. I’m going to get everyone in the world electricity, food, water, medicine and access to education. Then I’m going to worry about whose toes I trod on. No one will know I did this — they’ll think it’s a miracle, or a global computer error or virus. I don’t want fame, or money, or anything for myself — I just want to do what I think is right. I’ve got to do something while I can, because I can.

  It’s all illegal.

  Do I look like I care?

  You are not qualified. You lack training, education, analytical skills, experience. You don’t know what you’re doing, or how, or even why.

  I didn’t pick my power. I’m just using it.

  Your actions are heavy-handed, ill-considered, naive. You are a moron with a loaded gun.

  Everyone’s a critic. You, my
friend, are a bubble.

  People will die because of you.

  More people will have a chance to live like human beings.

  And who are you to make these decisions?

  If I had other powers, I would have used them in other ways. If I had super-speed, I would have run on a treadmill and generated electricity for poor villages. If I had super-strength, I would have carried truckloads of food to the starving. I’m doing what I can with what I was given.

  And yet prior to this you never lifted a finger to help anyone but yourself. What makes you Mother Teresa now?

  I changed.

  Nothing is ever achieved by money alone. All you are trying to do here is assuage your own middle-class guilt. The money will find its way back to where it came from. There will be massive lawsuits. International conflict. Nothing will get better.

  It’s a start. I know a lot of it won’t work. I know there are a lot of things I forgot, or did wrong, or simply didn’t know enough to do at all. I’ll keep doing it until I get it right.

  What gives you the right to play video games with the world?

  You’re repeating yourself. Let’s talk about you, now. You just asked me a lot of questions I’ve been asking myself over the last few days. Even if you don’t know who you are, do you know what you want?

  To stop you. To warn you.

  Warn me about what?

  You.

  The letters on the red bubble dissolve, and the bubble expands, filling Aman’s mind with pain. He cries out, feels as if he’s being hurled across a great distance. He forces his eyelids open, breaks off the connection, his vision still a red haze, and then the red fades to black, and he sinks again into unconsciousness, the silence in his mind warm, welcoming, all-encompassing.

  It is night when Tia shakes Aman awake.

  “You all right? I heard you call out,” she says.

  “I’m fine. I think.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I either wasted a lot of time or fundamentally changed the world as we know it.”

  Tia nods. “Cool.”

  “And I had a very weird experience which might have been a dream, I’m not sure.”

  “You’ll find out eventually.”

  “Also, I might have made the internet self-aware, which can only lead to machines rising up against man and ending the world.”

  “That’s nice, darling,” Tia says. “What do you want for dinner?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Four days have passed since Aman’s internet adventure. He has spent most of this time stealing money from the people he forgot to take from during his first day’s burst of Robin-Hooding — and writing press releases on behalf of all his victims of the last few days, warm, heartfelt messages explaining to the world that their sudden, unprecedented acts of charity were a response to the global economic recession; that their collective realisation of how badly the world had been using its money all these years had spurred them into action.

  Several of Aman’s victims have accepted their fate and their new roles as the world’s saviours for the time being, too stunned by the appreciation thrown at them to demand investigations; others are eerily silent.

  This evening, however, Aman has decided to give himself a break from the internet. He’s at the Wankhede Cricket Stadium in South Mumbai, sitting with Tia in a small wooden cubicle in the new, swanky press box, both of them armed with identity cards from all the world’s most famous newspapers. In front of him is a wide glass window, and beyond it is a carnival of noise.

  It’s a Giga League Gully Cricket match, Mumbai Mad Men versus Kolkata Kool Kats, and about fifty thousand of Mumbai’s loudest have arrived with banners, drums and voices trained by years of life in India to achieve tremendous decibel levels with no apparent effort. Mexican waves sweep through the crowd at a frequency of one a minute. Chants merge with other chants, punctuated by booms from huge drums to form the beat of one giant, pulsating, crowd heart.

  Cheerleaders from all around the world, decorously clad in bodysuits to avoid inflaming innocent, susceptible Indian minds, wave pom-poms at the lustful masses in time to screeching megahits from the latest Bollywood blockbusters. Some of the stars of these blockbusters are also present, either as team owners or as hired smile-and-wavers.

  The Wankhede Stadium itself is a topic of much discussion: scheduled to host the Cricket World Cup final in 2011, it was supposed to be renovated by the end of 2010. Instead, it is ready now, shiny, sparkly and bright, a whole year and a half ahead of schedule — which in India is nothing short of miraculous. The man responsible for this, Andy Kharkongor, an architect best known for designing huge, self-sufficient residential complexes outside large cities — where India’s most prosperous live in glittering luxury, sheltered from palpitation-inducing visions of average people by high walls and armed guards — was also on that ill-fated flight with Aman. He is now missing.

  Aman’s not here because of his love for cricket. He had been obsessed with the sport when he was younger, primarily because cricket was the only thing India was any good at apart from chess, kabaddi and women’s weightlifting, and because he thought Sachin Tendulkar was a god among men. But he has been left cold by the arrival, two years ago, of the Indian Premier League, the quick-fix twenty-over version of the game, with its endless advertising, asinine commentators and general chaos. He has seen every match, of course, but just to be able to complain more effectively. And he has never whined more vociferously than earlier this year when the Giga League Gully Cricket Tournament, “A mind-blowing, rocking, fully dynamic totally NEW fun-tastic form of the classic game” — essentially a clone of the Indian Premier League with innings of ten overs instead of twenty — arrived to further satisfy the cravings of a nation with an ever-shortening attention span.

  Aman is here for several reasons. Uzma is the first: two days ago she accepted Saheli’s friend’s brother Bruno’s offer to become a Gully Glamour Girl, and is currently standing in front of a camera in a tiny dress, reading match forecasts, contest results and made-up gossip off a teleprompter, and drawing admiring stares from everyone in the room.

  Uzma is here despite fervent protests from Aman and Tia. She has had enough of lying low and being forgotten, and is now on a mission to re-ignite her Bollywood aspirations by becoming a known and loved face all over India and the rest of the cricket-watching world. That her brothers are massive fans of Gully Cricket — players from both England and Pakistan are also involved — is an added incentive. Her job mostly involves smiling, making sure her dress doesn’t slip and fending off the advances of amorous cricketers; Uzma’s right on top of it.

  Aman and Tia have come along to protect her from nefarious supervillains. They have not yet figured out exactly how they will do this, but being there is definitely a start.

  Another reason for Aman’s presence is the man now walking out from the Garware Pavilion at the Wankhede Stadium’s south end, raising his bat to salute the cheering crowd. Prashant Reddy, captain of the Kolkata Kool Kats, is India’s newest cricket icon, a comeback story like no other.

  His first stint as an international cricketer had been an unmitigated disaster. After a long career playing domestic cricket and rising through the ranks, he had reached the national team at just the time when its selectors had decided to kick out senior players to give youth a chance. By the vagaries of regional cricket politics, he had been chosen to captain the Indian team during a tour of cricket minnows the Netherlands, a wrap-it-up-quickly tournament that most of the team’s stars had feigned sudden injuries to avoid. Reddy had made headlines by leading his blue-clad boys to a series of ignominious defeats. He’d been dropped unceremoniously from Team India, and had spent several years in the wilderness before coming back as a B-level player for the Kool Kats Gully Cricket team. But, when the tournament started, Reddy had proved to be a revelation. Who could have expected that this veteran, last seen coaching a county youth team in Middlesex, would suddenly emerge as the tour
nament’s undisputed hero?

  “He’s very cute,” Tia says, idly chewing on a Giggly Jujube, the Official Sweet of the Giga League Gully Cricket Tournament. “Is he married?”

  “No, but you are,” Uzma points out, throwing herself into a chair beside Aman. “Besides, he’s mine. Dating a cricketer is a well-known shortcut to the Indian glamour world.”

  “You’re interviewing him at some stage, right?” Aman asks. “We need to meet him.”

  “Yes, I am, after the match,” Uzma replies. “But why don’t you just ring him? Surely you of all people could get his number.”

  “Number, email, official Twitter — I’ve tried everything. He doesn’t answer.”

  “But he’ll agree to meet you because he’ll like me, Super-Like-Me Girl,” Uzma says. “I should charge you a fee.”

  “Pay me half rent this month,” Aman says. “Don’t you have to do commentary?”

  “No, I’m just a Glamour Girl. I’m free until their inning, or whatever they call it, ends.”

  Reddy takes guard. The Mumbai Mad Men bowler, a burly, menacing Australian pacer, starts his run-up. The audience claps as one, the rhythm of the claps matching the bowler’s strides and then accelerating into a crescendo as the white ball flashes from the bowler’s hand towards Reddy, who takes a step forward and drives, sending the ball over the bowler’s head, screaming over the field, over the sightscreen and out of the stadium — the ultimate insult to a fast bowler. The audience howls and hollers — the party’s started.

  Reddy is unstoppable. The remaining five balls of the over are treated with similar disdain, as Reddy cuts, pulls, drives, hooks a bouncer and finally, laughing, sweeps an attempted yorker over deep square leg. Thirty-six runs off a single over, six sixes, the kind of over every batsman dreams of — except Reddy’s had at least one over like this in every Giga League match he’s played. The crowd’s cheering with an almost religious frenzy. They know this is historic. They know that barring some unforeseen disaster like a tsunami, an emotional meltdown or a Bollywood starlet, Reddy is fated to lead India to glory at the World Cup finals, two years hence, at this very ground.