Cyberabad Days (37 page)

     The Water War, the War of '47, whatever we call it, for me marked the end of human history and the return of the age of miracles to Earth. It was only after the smoke had cleared and the dust settled and our diplomatic teams arrived among the tall and shining towers of Ranapur to negotiate the peace that we realized the immensity of events in Bharat. Our quiet little water war was the least of it. I had received one terse communication down the Grand Trunk Road: I am ruined, I have failed, 1 have resigned. But there was Shaheen Badoor Khan, five paces behind his new prime minster, Ashok Rana, as I trotted like a child behind our Srivastava.

     "Rumors of my demise were exaggerated," he whispered as we fell in beside each other while the politicians formed up on the grass outside the Benares Polo and Country Club for the press call, each jostling for sratus-space.

     "War does seem to shorten the political memory." A twenty-year-old in the body of a boy half his age may say pretty much whatever he likes. It's the liberty granted to fools and angels. When I first met Shaheen Badoor Khan, as well as his decency and intelligence, I had sensed a bone-deep sadness. Even I could not have guessed it was a long-repressed and sterile love for the other, the transgressive, the romantic and doomed, all wrapped up in the body of a young Varanasi nute. He had fallen into the honeytrap laid for him by his political enemies.

     Shaheen Badoor Khan dipped his head. "I'm far from being the first silly, middle-aged man to have been a fool for lust. I may be the only one to have got his prime minister killed as a consequence. But, as you say, war does very much clarify the vision and I seem to be a convenient figure for public expiation. And from what I gather from the media, the public will trust me sooner than Ashok Rana. People like nothing better than the fallen Mughal who repents. In the meantime, we do what we must, don't we, Mr. Nariman? Our countries need us more than they know. These have been stranger times in Bharat than people can ever be allowed to know."

     Bless your politician's self-deprecation. The simultaneous collapse of major aeai systems across Bharat, including the all-conquering Town and Country, the revelation that the country's rampant Hindutva opposition was actually a cabal of artificial intelligences, chaos at Ray Power, and the mysterious appearance of a hundred-meter hemispherical crater in the university grounds, of mirror-bright perfection, and, behind all, rumors that the long-awaited, long-dreaded Generation Three aeais had arrived. There was only one who could make sense of it to me. I went to see Shiv.

     He had a house, a shaded place with many trees to push back the crowding, noisy world. Gardeners moved with slow precision up and down the rolled gravel paths, deadheading a Persian rose here, spraying aphids there, spot-feeding brown drought-patches in the lawn everywhere. He had grown fat. He lolled in his chair at the tiffin table on the lawn. He looked dreadful, pasty and puffy. He had a wife. He had a child, a little pipit of a girl waving her tiny fat fists in the snap-together plastic fun park on the lawn under the eye of her ayah. She would glance over at me, unsure whether to smile or cry at this a strange and powerful uncle. Yes, wee one, I was a strange creature. That scent, that pheromone of information I had smelled on Shiv the day he came to my wedding, still clung to him, stronger now. He smelled like a man who had spent too much time among aeais.

     He welcomed me expansively. Servants brought cool homemade sherbet. As we settled into brother talk, man-to-eleven-year-old talk, his wife excused herself in a voice small as an insect's and went to hover nervously over her daughter exuberantly throwing around brightly colored plastic blocks.

     "You seem to have had a good war," I said.

     "There was war?" Shiv held my gaze for a moment, then exploded into volcanic laughter. Sweat broke out on his brow. I did not believe it for an instant. "I've got comfortable and greasy, yes."

     "And successful."

     "Not as successful as you."

     "I am only a civil servant."

     "I've heard you run Srivastava like a pimp."

     "We all have our sources."

     "Yes." Again that affected pause. "I spotted yours pretty early on. Not bad for government 'ware."

     "Disinformation can be as informative as information."

     "Oh, I wouldn't try anything as obvious as that with you. No, I left them there; I let them look. I've nothing to hide." "Your investors are interesting."

     "I doubt some of them will be collecting on their investment." He laughed again.

     "I don't think I understand."

     "It transpires that one of my key investors, Odeco, was nothing more than a front for a Generation Three aeai that had developed inside the international financial markets."

     "So it wasn't just a rumor."

     "I'm glad you're still listening to rumors."

     "You say this all very casually."

     "What other way is there to treat the end of history? You've seen what happens in India when we take things seriously." The laugh was annoying me now. It was thick and greasy.

     "The end of history has been promised many times, usually by people rich enough to avoid it."

     "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 its 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, and had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting, and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyperintelligent 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 them in the data-havens 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, inhabits 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 server farms of Bharat's Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudocast 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 twenty-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 I 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 rumors 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 with 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."

     "Nothing," 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 are never good solutions. 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 to Daddy. This is Uncle Vish."

     Shiv's docile wife carried the baby over to us, the ayah two paces behind. Nirupa was a blinking, smiling child, fat-cheeked and wheat-complexioned, the purest of skin colors. She put her fingers in her mouth. I waved mine back in a small hello. Then I noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong color. I bent forwards 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. Thank my love. You can go now. I've made Nirupa for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it's not going to be the future they imagined."

     "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 to the molecular scale and beyond. The end point 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, nonlocalized; 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, but, as I said, we had a little help." 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 anymore."

     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 colored 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 divine 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.

     I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji had bought for me were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society, this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv's way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the backseat of the limo, I realized my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India's brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for success. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.