Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Hanging round with those badmashes all day, never seeing a wink of sun, that’s not good for you,’ his mother said, sweeping round the tiny top-floor living room before her next lesson. ‘Your dad needs the help more; he may have to hire a boy in, what kind of sense does that make, when he has a son of his own? They do not have a good reputation, those robot-boys.’

Then Sanjeev showed her the money he had got for one day.

‘Your mother worries about people taking advantage of you,’ Sanjeev’s dad said, loading up the handcart with wood for the pizza oven. ‘You weren’t born to this city. All I’d say is, don’t love it too much, soldiers will let you down, they can’t help it. All wars eventually end.’

With what remained from his money when he had divided it between his mother and father and put some away in the credit union for Priya, Sanjeev went down to Tea Lane and stuck down the deposit and first payment on a pair of big metally leathery black and red and flame-pattern boots. He wore them proudly to work the next day, stuck out beside the driver of the phatphat so everyone could see them, and paid the owner of the Bata Boot and Shoe store assiduously every Friday. At the end of twelve weeks they were Sanjeev’s entirely. In that time he had also bought the Ts, the fake-latex pants (real latex hot hot far too hot and sweaty for Varanasi, baba), the Kali bangles and necklaces, the hair gel and the eye kohl but the boots first, the boots before all. Boots make the robotwallah.

‘Do you fancy a go?’

It was one of those questions so simple and unexpected that Sanjeev’s brain rolled straight over it and it was only when he was gathering up the fast-food wrappers (messy messy boys) that it crept up and hit him over the head.

‘What, you mean, that?’ A nod of the head toward the harnesses hanging like flayed hides from the feedback rig.

‘If you want; there’s not much on.’

There hadn’t been much on for the better part of a month. The last excitement had been when some cracker in a similar go-down in Delhi had broken through the Kali Cav’s aeai firewall with a spike of burnware. Big Baba had suddenly leaped up in his rig like a million billion volts had just shot through (which, Sanjeev discovered later, it kind of had) and next thing the biocontrol interlocks had blown (indoor fireworks, woo) and he was kicking on the floor like epilepsy. Sanjeev had been first to the red button and a crash team had whisked him to the rich people’s private hospital. The aeais had evolved a patch against the new burnware by the time Sanjeev went to get the lunch tins from the dhabawallah and Big Baba was back on his corner of the sofa within three days suffering nothing more than a lingering migraine. Jemadar-woman sent a get well e-card.

So it was with excitement and wariness that Sanjeev let Rai help him into the rig. He knew all the snaps and grips, he had tightened the straps and pulled snug the motion sensors a hundred times, but Rai doing it made it special, made Sanjeev a robotwallah.

‘You might find this a little freaky,’ Rai said as he settled the helmet over Sanjeev’s head. For an instant it was black-out, deafness as the phonobuds sought out his eardrums. ‘They’re working on this new thing, some kind of bone induction thing so they can send the pictures and sounds straight into your brain,’ he heard Rai’s voice say on the com. ‘But I don’t think we’ll get it in time. Now, just stand there and don’t shoot anything.’

The warning was still echoing in Sanjeev’s inner ear as he blinked and found himself standing outside a school compound in a village so like Ahraura that he instinctively looked for Mrs Mawji and Shree the holy red calf. Then he saw that the school was deserted, its roof gone, replaced with military camouflage sheeting. The walls were pocked with bullets down to the brickwork. Siva and Krishna with his flute had been hastily painted on the intact mud plaster, and the words, 13th Mechanised Sowar: Section Headquarters . There were men in smart, tightly belted uniforms with moustaches and bamboo lathis. Women with brass water pots and men on bicycles passed the open gate. By stretching Sanjeev found he could elevate his sensory rig to crane over the wall. A village, an Ahraura, but too poor to even avoid war. On his left a robot stood under a dusty neem tree. I must be one of those , Sanjeev thought; a General Dynamics A8330 Syce; a mean, skeletal desert-rat of a thing on two vicious clawed feet, a heavy sensory crown and two gatling arms – fully interchangeable with gas shells or slime guns for policing work, he remembered from War Mecha ’s October 2023 edition.

Sanjeev glanced down at his own feet. Icons opened across his field of vision like blossoming flowers: location elevation temperature, ammunition load-out, the level of methane in his fuel tanks, tactical and strategic satmaps – he seemed to be in south-west Bihar – but what fascinated Sanjeev was that if he formed a mental picture of lifting his Sanjeev-foot, his Syce-claw would lift from the dust.

Go on try it it’s a quiet day you’re on sentry duty in some cow-shit Bihar village.

Forward , he willed. The bot took one step, two. Walk , Sanjeev commanded. There . The robot walked jauntily toward the gate. No one in the street of shattered houses looked twice as he stepped among them. This is great! Sanjeev thought as he strolled down the street, then, This is like a game . Doubt then: So how do I even know this war is happening? A step too far; the Syce froze a hundred metres from the Ganesh temple, turned and headed back to its sentry post. What what what what what? he yelled in his head.

‘The onboard aeai took over,’ Rai said, his voice startling as a firecracker inside his helmet. Then the village went black and silent and Sanjeev was blinking in the ugly low-energy neons of the Kali Cavalry battle room, Rai gently unfastening the clips and snaps and strappings.

That evening, as he went home through the rush of people with his fist of rupees, Sanjeev realised two things; that most of war was boring, and that this boring war was over.

The war was over. The jemadar visited the video-silk wall three times, twice, once a week where in the heat and glory she would have given orders that many times a day. The Kali Cav lolled around on their sofas playing games, lying to their online fans about the cool exciting sexy things they were doing, though the fans never believed they ever really were robotwallahs, but mostly doing battle-drug combos that left them fidgety and aggressive. Fights flared over a cigarette, a look, how a door was closed or left open. Sanjeev threw himself into the middle of a dozen robotwallah wars. But when the American peacekeepers arrived Sanjeev knew it truly was over because they only came in when there was absolutely no chance any of them would get killed. There was a flurry of car-bombings and I-war attacks and even a few suicide blasts but everyone knew that that was just everyone who had a grudge against America and Americans in sacred Bharat. No, the war was over.

‘What will you do?’ Sanjeev’s father asked, meaning, What will I do when Umbrella Street becomes just another Asian ginza?

‘I’ve saved some money,’ Sanjeev said.

With the money he had saved, Godspeed! had bought a robot. It was a Tata Industries D55, a small but nimble anti-personnel bot with detachable free-roaming sub-mechas, Level 0.8s, about as smart as a chicken, which they resembled. Even second-hand it must have cost much more than a teenage robotwallah heavily consuming games, online time, porn and Sanjeev’s dad’s kofta pizza could ever save. ‘I got backers,’ Godspeed! said. ‘Funding. Hey, what do you think of this? I’m getting her pimped, this is the skin-job.’ When the paint dried the robot would be road-freighted up to Varanasi.