River of Gods (30 page)

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.

"How did they die?" the dataraja asks.

"In a fire, on the fifteenth floor of."

"Stop. Badrinath? Radha?"

"No one survived."

"How?"

"We have theories."

Anreddy sits on the transparent plastic floor, head bowed. Mr. Nandha
shakes out the medallions, holds them up by the chain.

"You knew them, then."

"Knew of them."

"Names?"

"Something French, though she was Indian. They used to work at
the University but got into the free world. They had a big-name
project, there was a lot of money behind them."

"Have you ever heard of an investment company called Odeco?"

"Everyone's heard of Odeco. Everyone out in the wild, that is."

"Did you ever receive funding from Odeco?"

"I'm a dataraja man, big and wild and fierce. Public enemy
number one. Anyway, I wasn't their particular shade of blue sky. I
was into nanoscale robotics. They were high-level aeai; protein
circuitry, computer-brain interfaces."

Mr. Nandha holds the amulets against the plastic. "You know the
significance of this symbol?"

"The riderless white horse, the tenth avatar."

"Kalki. The final avatar that will bring the Age of Kali to an
end. A name from legend."

"Varanasi is a city of legends."

"Here is legend for our times. Might Badrinath, with funding
from this Odeco organisation, have been developing a Generation Three
aeai?"

J. P. Anreddy rocks back on his coccyx, throws his head back. Siddha
of the scuttling robots. He closes his eyes. Mr. Nandha lays out the
amulets on the tiles in Anreddy's full view. Then he goes to the
window and slowly pulls up the blind. It folds up on itself in a wide
concertina of sun-bleached fabric.

"I will tell you now our theory about how they died at
Badrinath. We believe it was a deliberate attack by a laser-armed
drone aircraft," Mr. Nandha says. He draws up the next blind,
admitting the blinding sun, the treacherous sky.

"You bastard!" J. P. Anreddy shouts, leaping to his feet.
Mr. Nandha moves to the third window.

"We find this theory convincing. A single high-energy shot."
He crosses the room to the opposite set of mullions. "Through
the living-room window. A precision attack. The aeai must have
targeted, identified, and fired in a few milliseconds. There's so
much traffic in the air since the train incident no one is ever going
to notice a drone slip out of its patrol pattern."

Anreddy's hands are spread on the plastic, his eyes wide, scanning
the white sky for flecks of betrayal.

"What do you know about Kalki?"

Mr. Nandha furls another blind. Only one remains. Burtresses of light
slant across the floor. Anreddy looks in pain, a cyber-vampire burned
by the sun.

"They'll kill you, man."

"We shall see about that. Is Kalki a Generation Three aeai?"

He takes the soft cotton cord of the last blind and hauls it in, hand
over hand. A wedge of light expands across the tiles. J. P. Anreddy
has retreated to the centre of his plastic cage but there is no
hiding from the sky.

"So?"

"Kalki is a Generation Three aeai. It exists. It's real. It's
been real and existent for longer than you think. It's out there. You
know what Generation Three means? It means an intelligence, measured
on standard assessment scales, between twenty and thirty thousand
times human baseline. And they're only the start. These are emergent
properties, man. Evolution is running a million times faster in
there. And if they want you, you cannot run, you cannot hide, you
cannot lie down and hope that they will forget about you. Whatever
you do, they can see you. Whatever identity you take, they know it
before you do. Wherever you go, they'll be there ahead of you,
waiting, because they'll have guessed it before you even think it
yourself. These are Gen Threes, man. These are the gods! You cannot
license gods."

Mr. Nandha lets the rant ebb before he collects the cheap,
heat-tarnished Kalki amulets and returns them to their bags.

"Thank you. I now know the name of my enemy. Good day."

He turns and walks away through the shafts of dusty white light. His
heels resound on the fine Islamic marble. Behind him he hears the
soft woof of fists on flexible transparent plastic, Anreddy's voice,
distant and muffled.

"Hey, the blinds man! Don't leave me, don't leave the blinds!
Man! The blinds! They can see me! Fuck you, they can see me! The
blinds!"

He has a desk big enough to land a fighter on. He has a top-level
wood and glass office. He has an executive elevator and an executive
washroom. He has fifteen suits made to the same design and fabric as
the one he wore when he inherited his empire, with matching
hand-tooled shoes. And he has for his personal assistant Inder who
has the disconcerting ability to be physically in front of him and at
the same time manifesting herself on his desk-top organiser and as a
ghost in his visual cortex. He's heard about these corporate PA
systems who are part human, part aeai. It's modern office management.

Vishram Ray also has a raging Strega hangover and an oval of sunburn
around his eyes where he looked too deep and too long into another
universe.

"Who are these people?" asks Vishram Ray.

"The Siggurdson-Arthurs-Clementi Group," says
Inder-on-the-carpet while Inder-in-the-desk opens her lotus-hands to
show him a schedule and Inder-in-the-head dissolves into mugshots of
well-fed white men with good suits and better dentistry.
Inder-on-the-carpet has a surprisingly deep voice for someone so very
Audrey Hepburn. "Ms. Fusco will brief you further in the car.
And Energy Secretary Patel has requested a meeting, as has the
Shivaji's energy spokeswoman. They both want to know your plans for
the company."

"I don't even know them myself, but the Honourable Secretary
will be the first to find out." Vishram pauses at the door. All
three Inders wait inquiringly. "Inder, would it be possible to
move this whole office right out of Ray Tower, to the Research
Facility?"

"Certainly, Mr. Ray. Is it not to your satisfaction?"

"No, it's a lovely office. Very. businesslike. I just feel a
bit. close to the family. My brothers. And while we're at it, I'd
like to move out of the house. I find it a bit. oppressive. Can you
find me a nice hotel, good room service?"

"Certainly, Mr. Ray."

As he leaves Inder's alters are already pricing corporate removal
firms and hotel penthouse suites. In the Ray Power Merc, Vishram
savours Marianna Fusco's Chanel 27. He can also sense that she is
pissed at him.

"She's a physicist."

"Who's a physicist?"

"The woman I had dinner with last night. A physicist. I'm
telling you this because you seem a little. snippy."

"Snippy?"

"Short. Annoyed. You know. Snippy."

"Oh. I see. And this is because you had dinner with a
physicist?"

"Married physicist. Married Hindu physicist."

"I'm interested why you felt you had to tell me that she was
married."

"Married Hindu physicist. Called Sonia. Whose pay-cheques I
sign."

"As if that makes any difference."

"Of course. We're professional. I took her to dinner and then
she took me back to hers and showed me her universe. It's small, but
perfectly formed."