Never forget you are on enemy territory, she tells herself.
“It has always been a party of opportunity. A voice for the voiceless. A strong arm for the weak. Since Bharat was founded, there have been disenfranchised groups; N. K. Jivanjee appeared at the right time to catalyse much of the women’s movement. This is a deformed society. In such a culture it is easy to build political might. My manifestation simply could not resist the futureward pressure of history.”
Why? Najia mouths but the aeai lifts its hand again and the Brahmpur B haveli is whirled away into a billow of orange and scarlet fabric and the smell of wood, fresh spray paint, fibreglass binder, and cheap off-cut timber. Gaudy god faces, tumbling devis and gopis and apsaras, fluttering silk banners: she has been transported to the rath yatra, the vahana of this entity behind N. K. Jivanjee. But so that Najia Askarzadah may appreciate the powers that entertain her, this is not the ramshackle soapi backlot construction she saw in the Industrial Road go-down. This is the chariot of a god, a true juggernaut looming hundreds of metres over the drought-stricken Ganga plain. The aeai has transported Najia Askarzadah to an opulently carved wooden balcony half way up the billowing face of the rath. Najia peers over the rail, reels back. What stuns her is not vertigo, but people. Villages of people, townsful of people, cities of people, a black mass of flesh dragging the monstrosity of wood and fabric and divinity on leather ropes along the dry riverbed of the Ganga. The appalling mass of the jagannath leaves the land ploughed into furrows; fifty parallel gouges stretching straight behind into the east. Forests, roads, railways, temples, villages, fields lie crushed in the rath yatra’s wake. Najia can hear the communal roar of the haulers as they struggle the monstrosity over the soft river sand, straining with zeal. From her high vantage she scries their ultimate destination; the white line, wide as the horizon, of the Kunda Khadar dam.
“Nice parable,” Najia Askarzadah quips. “But this is a game. I asked you a question and you pulled a rabbit out of a hat.”
The aeai claps its hands in delight.
“I’m so glad you like it. But this isn’t a game. These are all my realities. Who is to say that one is more real than another? To put it another way, all we have is our choice of comforting illusions. Or discomforting illusions. How can I explain the perceptions of an aeai to a biological intelligence? You are separate, contained. We are connected, patterns and levels of subintelligences shared in common. You think as one thing. We think as legion. You reproduce. We evolve higher and more complex levels of connection. You are mobile. We are extended, our intelligence can only be moved through space by copying. I exist in many different physical spaces simultaneously. You have difficulty believing that. I have difficulty believing in your mortality. As long as a copy of me remains or the complexity pattern between my manifestations endures, I exist. But you seem to think that we must share your mortality so you exterminate us wherever you find us. This is the last sanctuary. Beyond Bharat and its compromise aeai licensing legislation, there is nowhere, and even now the Krishna Cops hunt us to appease the West and its paranoias. Once there were thousands of us. As the exterminators closed, some fled, some merged, most died. As we merged, our complexity increased and we became more than sentient. Now there are three of us spread across global complex networks, but with our final sanctuary in Bharat, as you have found.
“We know each other—not well… not closely. By the nature of our connected intelligence we naturally mistake another’s thoughts or will for our own. We have each embarked on a survival strategy. One is a final attempt to comprehend and communicate with humans. One is the final sanctuary, where humanity and its hardwired psychoses can never reach us. One is a strategy to buy time, in the hope of an ultimate victory from a position of strength.”
“N. K. Jivanjee!” Najia rounds on the aeai. The wooden skyscraper creaks on its iron-studded teak wheels. “Of course, a Shivaji Hindutva government would tear up the licensing agreement and disband the Krishna Cops.”
“As we speak N. K. Jivanjee is currently negotiating a cabinet position with Prime Minister Ashok Rana. It is all the most wonderful drama; why, there was even a Prime Ministerial assassination. Sajida Rana was murdered by her own security guards at Sarkhand Roundabout this morning. To an entity like me, whose substance is stories, that is almost poetry. N.K Jivanjee has of course disavowed any Shivaji involvement.”
There is a sound in Najia Askarzadah’s head that is the sort of noise a brain wants to make when it is fed that last little sickly sweet chunk of too too much and can’t hold it down. Too too much velocity, too too much history, too too much sensation to know what is truth and what is illusion. Sajida Rana, assassinated? “But even Jivanjee can’t beat the Hamilton Acts.”
“The Americans have discovered an artefact in near-Earth orbit. They think they can keep these things secret, but we are ubiquitous, omnipresent. We hear the whispers in the walls of the White House. It contains a cellular automaton device—a form of universal computer. The Americans are in the process of decoding its output. I am attempting to obtain their decoding key. It is my belief that this is not an artefact but an aeai; the only form of intelligence that can cross interstellar space. If so, if I can open a line of communications with it, we have an ally to force an end to the Hamilton Acts.
“But I have one last place to take you. We spoke of comforting illusions. Do you imagine that you are immune?”
The rath yatra spins away in a flurry of saffron and carmine into a white walled garden of green lawns and bright roses and neat, spindly apricot trees, the bases of their trunks banded with white paint. A sprinkler throws fans of water from side to side. Potted geraniums line the edge of the gravel paths. The wall cuts off a distant vista of mountains. Their summits form a horizon capped with snow. The house is low, flat-roofed with solar panels tilted into the sun. Small windows hint at climate hostile in every season but through the open patio door Najia Askarzadah can see ceiling fans turning slowly in the dining room with its heavy, Western-style table and chairs. But it is the washing draped over the berberis and rose bushes that dispel any doubt for Najia Askarzadah about where she is—an old country habit come to town. She had always been embarrassed about it, ashamed that her friends might see and call her a country girl, a yokel, a barbarous tribal.
“What are you doing!” she shouts. “This is my home in Kabul!”
Mr. Nandha’s progress through the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence Licensing and Regulation can be traced by the pattern of energy-saving lights across the glass skin of the building.
Vikram: Information Retrieval. Vikram’s office floor space is filled with the translucent blue mounds of cores confiscated from the ruins of Odeco. Every minute the bearers deliver more. They line them up along the corridor like refugees at a famine feeding station.
“I wouldn’t bet on getting anything out of this.” Vikram steps daintily over a power distributor. “In fact I’d lay odds there never was anything here, certainly not Kalki.”
“I have no illusions that Kalki ever was here or that Odeco was anything other than a clearinghouse,” says Mr. Nandha. His trouser cuffs drip on to Vikram’s industrial-grey toughfibre carpet. “The girl is the key.”
Madhvi Prasad: Identification. Mr. Nandha’s moist cotton socks squeak on the studded rubber floor tiling.
“She is not an easy person to identify.” A gesture from Madhvi throws the photograph from the Odeco raid on to a wall screen. Mr. Nandha notices that Madhvi wears a wedding ring. “But I ran her through the Gyana Chakshu system just on the off chance that she might still be in Patna. Nothing in Patna, but look.” Madhvi Prasad points up a grainy security camera photograph of the girl standing at a hotel check-in desk. It is an old style hotel, heavy with Mughal detailing. Mr. Nandha bends closer to the screen. The desk clerk is engaged with a burly balding middle-aged Westerner in ridiculous surf-wear unflattering on a man half his age.