Veritable shitfuls of holy monkeys pour off the trees and come loping on their soft knuckles to greet the Ministry Lexus as it draws up outside the old Mughal hunting palace. The bot steps out of the scrub rhododendrons to scan the driver’s credentials. The staff has let the gardens go to weed and wild again. Few gardeners pass the security vetting and those that do don’t work long for Ministry money. The machine squats down in front of the car, drawing a line on Mr. Nandha with its arm-turret. Its left-leg piston vents intermittently, giving it a lopsided bob as it interrogates the clearances. Maintenance slipping also. Mr. Nandha purses his lips as the monkeys swarm the car, prying for crannies with their mannikin fingers. They remind him of the hands of the burned corpses in Chauhan’s clean morgue, those black, withered fists. A langur perched over the radiator like a hood ornament masturbates furiously as the St. Matthew Passion swirls around Mr. Nandha.
Lack upon slack upon slop breeds lapse. It was scruffy maintenance and shoddy security that let the prisoner escape those other two times. That, and stealthy robots the size and agility of cockroaches.
The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery like some late Cretaceous hunter. Mr. Nandha jerks the car forward to scare off the monkeys. He has a horror of one getting trapped in his wheel-arch. Lord High Masturbator takes a tumble from the bonnet. Mr. Nandha peers to see if it has left a vile squiggle of monkey-jizz on the paintwork.
When he was thirteen and hammered flat by hormones and doubt, Mr. Nandha had entertained a fantasy about catching a sacred monkey, keeping it in a cage, and slowly and excruciatingly breaking every one of its tiny, birdlike bones. He can still feel a glow of the joyous anger of that delight.
A persistent few monkeys ride the Ministry Lexus all the way up the curving drive to the lodge. Mr. Nandha kicks them away as he steps out on to the crunching red gravel and slips on his dark glasses. The white Mughal marble is dazzling in the afternoon light. Mr. Nandha steps away from the car to enjoy the uninterrupted view of the palace. It is a hidden pearl, built in 1613 by the Shah Ashraf as a game retreat. Where hunting cheetahs rode atop howdahs and Mughal lords hawked over the marshes of Kirakat, now factory units and pressed-aluminium go-downs nudge up to the low, cool lodge on every side. But the genius of the architect endures: the colonnaded house remains enfolded, separate in its jungled gardens, unseen by any of them, unseeing in return. Mr. Nandha admires the balance of the pillared cloister, the understatement of the dome. Even among the English Perpendicular and Baroque triumphs of Cambridge, he had still considered the Islamic architects the masters of Wren and Reginald of Ely. They built as Bach composed, strong and muscular, with light and space and geometry. They built timelessly and for all time. Mr. Nandha thinks that he might not mind confinement in such a prison as this. He would have solitude, here.
Sweepers bow around him, twig besoms busy as Mr. Nandha goes up the shallow steps to the cool cool cool of the cloister. The Ministry staff greet him at the door; discreetly scanning him down with their palmers. Mr. Nandha commends their thoroughness but they look bored. They are EO1 civil servants, but they did not join the Ministry to guard a mouldering pile of Mughal masonry. Mr. Nandha waits for the warder to cycle the transparent plastic lock that sits like an ugly sex-toy yoni in the wall of exquisitely carved alabaster. The last security check lights green. Mr. Nandha steps into the banqueting hall. As ever, he catches his breath at the white stone jalis, the bandied masonry, the low generous spaciousness of the onion arches, the geometries of the azure roof tilings, the tall pointed windows shaded by fabric blinds. But the true focus of the room is not the radiant harmony of the design. It is not even the Faraday cage painstakingly woven into the fabric of the architecture. It is the transparent plastic cube that stands in the centre. It is five metres long and five metres high, a house within a house divided by transparent plastic partitions into see-through rooms, with transparent plumbing and wiring and chairs and tables and a transparent bed and a transparent toilet. In the midst of this transparency sits a dark, heavily bearded man, running to fat. He is dressed in a white kurta and is barefoot and reads a paperback book. His back is turned to Mr. Nandha but hearing his footfalls on the cool marble he rises. He peers short-sightedly, then recognises his visitor and drags his chair to the transparent wall. He pokes the broken-backed paperback with a toe. He wears a transparent toe ring.
“The words still don’t move.”
“The words don’t need to move. It is you who is moved by them.”
“It is a very effective way of compressing a virtual reality experience, I’ll give it that. All this for one-point-four megs? It’s just so non-interactive.”
“But it is different for everyone who reads it,” says Mr. Nandha.
The man in the plastic cube nods his head, pondering.
“Where’s the shared experience in that? So, what can I do for you, Mr. Nandha?”
Mr. Nandha glances up as he hears the mosquito drone of a hovercam. It rolls its lens-eye at the plastic cage, climbs away towards the fantasia of the domed roof. Light falls in dusty shafts through the mullions. Mr. Nandha takes the plastic evidence bags out of his jacket pocket, holds them up. The man in the plastic chair squints.
“You’re going to have to bring them closer, I can’t see anything without my glasses. You could at least have left me them.”
“Not after last time, Mr. Anreddy. The circuitry was most ingenious.”
Mr. Nandha presses the bags against the plastic wall. The prisoner kneels down. Mr. Nandha sees his breath mist the transparency. He gives a small, hushed gasp.
“Where did you get these?”
“From their owners.”
“They’re dead, then.”
“Yes.”
J. P. Anreddy is a short, dumpy asthmatic in his midtwenties with too little hair on his head and far too much around his soft jowls and he is Mr. Nandha’s greatest professional triumph. He was Dataraja of the Sinha sundarban, a major station on the aeai underground railway when Awadh ratified the Hamilton Acts and outlawed all artificial intelligences above Level 2.0. He had made a cosmological amount of money rebranding high-level aeais as low and faking their licence idents. Man-machine fusion had been his peccadillo, an extension of his one hundred and fifty kilos of mostiy middle-body fat into lither, nimbler robot bodies. When Mr. Nandha came to arrest him for licence violations, he had cut his way through charge after charge of service robots. He remembers the clicking plastic peds, conflates them with the little black monkey hands besieging his Ministry car. Mr. Nandha shivers in the bright, warm, dust-fragrant room. He had run the dataraja down through his suite off chambers until Indra locked on to the protein matrix chips seeded across the underside of Anreddy’s cranium that allowed him to interface directly with his machine extensions and fused them all with a single EM pulse. J. P. Anreddy had lain in a coma for three months, lost fifty percent of his body mass, and regained consciousness to find that the court had confiscated the house and turned it into his prison. Now he lived at the centre of his beautiful Mughal architecture in a transparent plastic cube where every move and breath, every mouthful and motion, every scratch and flea and insect crawling upon it could be monitored by the hovercams. He had twice escaped with the help of bug-sized robots. Though he could no longer control them by will alone, J. P. Anreddy had never lost his love for little scuttling sentiences. Here he would remain under house arrest until he expressed remorse for what he had done. Mr. Nandha confidently expected he would die and rot in his plastic wrap. J. P. Anreddy genuinely had no comprehension that he had done anything wrong.