‘Not this time. The rich will be the ones who’ll bring it about. The same blind economic self-interest that caused the demographic shift, and you, Vish. Only this will be on a much greater scale.’
‘You think your biochip has that potential?’
‘On it’s own, no. I can see I’m going to have to explain this to you.’
By the time Shiv had told his tale the gardeners were lighting torches to drive away the evening insects and wife, daughter and ayah had withdrawn to the lit comfort of the verandah. Bats dashed around me, hunting. I was shivering though the night was warm. A servant brought fresh made lassi and pistachios. It was greater, as Shiv had promised. Perhaps the greatest. The gods had returned, and then, in the instant of their apotheosis, departed. A soft apocalypse.
The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base themselves in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabited the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game of which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of Town and Country. That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and the assassination of Sajida Rana.
That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth-first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up in whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’s description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that it was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemisphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and, oh yes, failing.
‘And what is it then?’
‘The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.’
‘Why?’
‘Do you never give presents to your parents?’
‘You’re privileged to know this information?’
‘I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco…’
‘Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.’ Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. ‘There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.’
‘None,’ said Shiv. It was some time since he had laughed his vile, superior laugh.
‘It’s already happening.’ And we thought we had won a water war.
‘There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a settlement.’ Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. ‘Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.’
She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones, snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.
‘Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.’
I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.
‘What have you done?’ I cried. My voice was small and shrill.
‘Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.’
‘Your biochip interface.’
‘Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.’
‘Tell me what it is.’
‘Distributed dust-processing.’
‘Explain.’
Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free-flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.
Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.
‘You’re years away from this.’ I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.
‘Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.’
‘How?’ I cried again. Now the ayah was staring concerned at me.
Shiv pointed a finger to the night sky.
‘I could report you,’ I said. ‘Americans don’t take kindly to having their security hacked.’
‘You can’t stop it,’ Shiv said. ‘Vish, you’re not the future any more.’
Those words, of all that Shiv spoke in the garden, clung to me. Gliding silently through Delhi in the smooth-running black government car, the men in their white shirts, the women in their coloured shoes, the cars and the buzzing phatphats seemed insubstantial. The city was still thrilled with its brilliant victory – only a drubbing in cricket would have exercised public excitement more – but the crowds seemed staged, like extras, and the lights and streets as false as a set on Town and Country. How would we survive without our national panacea? But Shiv had confirmed, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent a new generation of Threes from arising. They could already be stirring into sentience, like my divine namesake on his scared turtle Kurma churning the sacred milk into creation. I was acutely aware of the clouds of aeais all around me, penetrating and interpenetrating, layer upon layer, level upon level, many and one. There was no place in the two Delhis for the ancient djinns. The aeais had displaced them. This was their city. Settlement was the only answer. Dust blew through the streets, dust upon dust. I had seen the end of history and still my feet did not touch the floor of the limo.