Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

Sujay swings the gym bag over his sloping shoulder and strides out for the streetlights, leaving Deependra hunched and crying among the shredded plastic scraps.

‘How, what, that was, where did you learn to do that?’ Jasbir asks, tagging behind, feet sinking into the soft sand.

‘I’ve coded the move enough times; I thought it might work in meat life.’

‘You don’t mean?’

‘From the soaps. Doesn’t everyone?’

There’s solace in soap opera. Its predictable tiny screaming rows, its scripted swooping melodramas draw the poison from the chaotic, unscripted world where a civil servant in the water service can challenge a rival to a shooting duel over a woman he met at a shaadi. Little effigies of true dramas, sculpted in soap.

When he blinks, Jasbir can see the gun. He sees Deependra’s hand draw it out of the gym bag in martial-arts-movie slow motion. He thinks he sees the other gun, nestled among balled sports socks. Or maybe he imagines it, a cut-away close-up. Already he is editing his memory.

Soothing to watch Nilesh Vora and Dr Chatterji’s wife, their love eternally foiled and frustrated, and Deepti; will she ever realise that to the Brahmpur social set she is eternally that Dalit girl from the village pump?

You work on the other side of a glass partition from someone for years. You go with him to shaadis, you share the hopes and fears of your life and love with him. And loves turns him into a homicidal madman. Sujay took the gun off him. Big, clumsy Sujay took the loaded gun out of his hand. He would have shot Kishore. Brave, mad Sujay. He’s coding, that’s his renormalizing process. Make soap, watch soap. Jasbir will make him tea. For once. Yes, that would be a nice gesture. Sujay is always always getting tea. Jasbir gets up. It’s a boring bit, Mahesh and Rajani. He doesn’t like them. Those rich-boys-pretending-they-are-car-valets-so-they-can-marry-for-love-not-money characters stretch his disbelief too far. Rajani is hot, though. She’s asked Mahesh to bring her car round to the front of the hotel.

‘When you work out here you have lots of time to make up theories. One of my theories is that people’s cars are their characters,’ Mahesh is saying. Only in a soap would anyone ever imagine that a pick-up line like that would work , Jasbir thinks. ‘So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?’

Jasbir freezes in the door.

‘Oh, a Lexus.’

He turns slowly. Everything is dropping, everything is falling, leaving him suspended. Now Mahesh is saying,

‘You know, I have another theory. It’s that everyone’s a city. Are you Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?’

Jasbir sits on the arm of the sofa. The fetch , he whispers. And she will say …

‘I was born in Delhi…’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

Mumbai , murmurs Jasbir.

‘Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.’

‘Red, green, yellow, blue,’ Jasbir says.

‘Red.’ Without a moment’s hesitation.

‘Cat, dog, bird, monkey?’

She even cocks her head to one side. That was how he noticed Shulka was wearing the lighthoek.

‘Bird… no.’

‘No no no,’ says Jasbir. She’ll smile slyly here.

‘Monkey.’ And there is the smile. The finesse .

‘Sujay!’ Jasbir yells. ‘Sujay! Get me Das!’

‘How can an aeai be in love?’ Jasbir demands.

Ram Tarun Das sits in his customary wicker chair, his legs casually crossed. Soon, very soon , Jasbir thinks, voices will be raised and Mrs Prasad next door will begin to thump and weep .

‘Now sir, do not most religions maintain that love is the fundament of the universe? In which case, perhaps it’s not so strange that a distributed entity, such as myself, should find – and be surprised by, oh, so surprised, sir – love? As a distributed entity, it’s different in nature from the surge of neurochemicals and waveform of electrical activity you experience as love. With us it’s a more… rarefied experience, judging solely by what I know from my subroutines on Town and Country . Yet, at the same time, it’s intensely communal. How can I describe it? You don’t have the concepts, let alone the words. I am a specific incarnation of aspects of a number of aeais and sub-programmes, as those aeais are also iterations of sub-programmes, many of them marginally sentient. I am many, I am legion. And so is she – though of course gender is purely arbitrary for us, and, sir, largely irrelevant. It’s very likely that at many levels we share components. So ours is not so much a marriage of minds as a league of nations. Here we are different from humans in that, for you, it seems to us that groups are divisive and antipathetical. Politics, religion, sport, but especially your history, seem to teach that. For us folk, groups are what bring us together. They are mutually attractive. Perhaps the closest analogy might be the merger of large corporations. One thing I do know is that for humans and aeais, we both need to tell people about it.’

‘When did you find out she was using an aeai assistant?’

‘Oh, at once, sir. These things are obvious to us. And if you’ll forgive the parlance, we don’t waste time. Fascination at the first nanosecond. Thereafter, well, as you saw on the unfortunate scene from Town and Country , we scripted you.’

‘So we thought you were guiding us…’

‘When it was you who were our go-betweens, yes.’

‘So what happens now?’ Jasbir slaps his hands on his thighs.

‘We are meshing at a very high level. I can only catch hints and shadows of it, but I feel a new aeai is being born, on a level far beyond either of us, or any of our co-characters. Is this a birth? I don’t know, but how can I convey to you the tremendous, rushing excitement I feel?’

‘I meant me.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. Of course you did. I am quite, quite dizzy with it all. If I might make one observation; there’s truth in what your parents say. First the marriage, then the love. Love grows in the thing you see every day.’

Thieving macaques dart around Jasbir’s legs and pluck at the creases of his pants. Midnight metro, the last train home. The few late-night passengers observe a quarantine of mutual solitude. The djinns of unexplained wind that haunt subway systems send litter spiralling across the platform. The tunnel focuses distant shunts and clanks, uncanny at this zero hour. There should be someone around at the phatphat stand. If not he’ll walk. It doesn’t matter.

He met her at a fashionable bar, all leather and darkened glass, in an international downtown hotel. She looked wonderful. The simple act of her stirring sugar into coffee tore his heart in two.

‘When did you find out?’

‘Devashri Didi told me.’

‘Devashri Didi.’

‘And yours?

‘Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. A very proper, old fashioned Rajput gent. He always called me sir; right up to the end. My house-mate made him. He works in character design on Town and Country .’

‘My older sister works in PR in the meta-soap department at Jazhay. She got one of the actor designers to put Devashri Didi together.’ Jasbir has always found the idea of artificial actors believing they played equally artificial roles head-frying. Then he found aeai love.

‘Is she married? Your older sister, I mean.’

‘Blissfully. And children.’

‘Well, I hope our aeais are very happy together.’ Jasbir raised a glass. Shulka lifted her coffee cup. She wasn’t a drinker. She didn’t like alcohol. Devashri Didi had told her it looked good for the Begum Jaitly’s modern shaadi.