Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The cats were furious and yowling in unison when I returned, hot in their cages despite the shade of the awning. I let them hunt by the light of the breaking stars as I set up the ring and the seats, my lamps and sign and alms bowl, not knowing if a single soul would turn up. The pickings were meagre. Small game will be scarce in the Age of Kali.

My fine white Kalki, flowing over the hurdles like a riffle in a stream, it is written that you will battle and defeat Kali, but that seems to me too big a task for a mere cat. No, I shall take up that task myself, for if it’s your name, it’s also my name. Am I not Vishnu the ten-incarnated? Are not all of you part of me, cats? I have an appointment down this river, at the foot of that tower of light that spears up into the eastern sky.

Now come, sit down on this mattress – I have swept away the sand, and let the lamps draw away the insects. Make yourself comfortable. I would offer chai but I need the water for the cats. For tonight you will witness not only the finest cat circus in all of India – likely the only cat circus in all of India. What do you say? All they do is run in a circle? Brother, with cats, that is an achievement. But you’re right; running in a circle, nose to tail is pretty much the meat of my Cat Circus. But I have other ways to justify the handful of rupees I ask from you. Sit, sit and I will tell you a story, my story. I am Vishnu, and I was designed to be a god.

There were three of us and we were all gods. Shiv and Vish and Sarasvati. I am not the firstborn; that is my brother Shiv, with whom I have an appointment at the foot of the Jyotirlinga of Varanasi. Shiv the success, Shiv the businessman, the global success, the household name and the inadvertent harbinger of this Age of Kali; I cannot imagine what he has become. I was not the firstborn but I was the best born and therein lies the trouble of it.

Strife, I believe, was worked into every strand of my parents’ DNA. Your classical Darwinist scorns the notion that intellectual values can shape evolution, but I myself am living proof that middle-class values can be programmed into the genes. Why not war?

A less likely cyberwarrior than my father you would be hard-pressed to imagine. Uncoordinated; ungainly; portly – no, let’s not mince words, he was downright fat; he had been a content and, in his own way, celebrated designer for DreamFlower. You remember DreamFlower? Street Sumo; RaMaYaNa; Bollywood-SingStar . Million-selling games? Maybe you don’t. I increasingly find it’s been longer than I think. In everything. What’s important is that he had money and career and success and as much fame as his niche permitted and life was rolling along, rolling along like a Lexus, when war took him by surprise. War took us all by surprise. One day we were the Great Asian Success Story – the Indian Tiger (I call it the Law of Aphoristic Rebound – the Tiger of Economic Success travels all around the globe before returning to us) – and unlike those Chinese we had English, cricket and democracy; the next we were bombing each other’s malls and occupying television stations. State against state, region against region, family against family. That is the only way I can understand the War of Schism; that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their father’s throats. And the mother at her daughter’s, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty. I saw a diamond cutter in Delhi when I was young – apologies, when I was small. Not so young. I saw him set the gem in the padded vice and raise his cutter and pawl, which seemed too huge and brutal a tool by far for so small and bright an object. I held my breath and set my teeth as he brought the big padded hammer down and the gem fell into three gems, brighter and more radiant than their parent.

‘Hit it wrong,’ he said, ‘and all you have is dazzling dust.’

Dazzling dust, I think, has been our history ever since.

The blow came – success, wealth, population strain – and we fell to dust but Delhi didn’t know it. The loyalists resolutely defended the dream of India. So my father was assigned as Help Desk to a Recon Mecha Squad. To you this will sound unspeakably hot and glamorous. But this was another century and another age and robots were far from the shimmering rakshasa-creatures we know today, constantly shifting shape and function along the edge of human expectation. This was a squad of reconnaissance bots; two-legged joggers and jumpers, ungainly and temperamental as iron chickens. And Dadaji was the Help Desk, which meant fixing them and de-virusing them and unbugging them and hauling them out of the little running circles they’d trapped themselves in, or turning them away from the unscalable wall they were attempting to leap, all the while being wary of their twin flechette-gatlings and their close-defence nano-edged blades.

‘I’m a games coder,’ he wailed. ‘I choreograph Bollywood dance routines and arrange car crashes. I design star-vampires.’ Delhi ignored his cries. Delhi was already losing as the us-too voices of national self-determination grew loud in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, but she chose to ignore them as well.

Dadaji was a cyberwarrior, Mamaji was a combat medic. It was slightly more true for her than for Dadaji. She was indeed a qualified doctor and had worked in the field for NGOs in India and Pakistan after the earthquake and with M’decins Sans Frontières in Sudan. She was not a soldier, never a soldier. But Mother India needed front-line medics so she found herself at Advanced Field Treatment Centre 32 east of Ahmedabad at the same time my father’s recon unit was relocated there. My mother examined Tech-Sergeant Tushar Nariman for crabs and piles. The rest of his unit refused to let a woman doctor inspect their pubes. He made eye-contact with her, for a brave, frail second.

Perhaps if the Ministry of Defence had been less wanton in their calling-up of cyberwarriors and had assigned a trained security analyst to the Eighth Ahmedabad Recon Mecha Squad instead of a games designer, more would have survived when the Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force attacked. A new name was being spoken in old east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; Bharat, the old holy name of India; its spinning wheel flag planted in Varanasi, most ancient and pure of cities. Like any national liberation movement, there were dozens of self-appointed guerrilla armies, each named more scarily than the predecessor with whom they were in shaky alliance. The Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force was embryo Bharat’s ’lite cyberwar force. And unlike Tushar, they were pros. At 21:23 they succeeded in penetrating the Eighth Ahmedabad’s firewall and planted trojans into the recon mechas. As my father pulled up his pants after experiencing the fluttering fingers and inspection torch of my mother-to-be at his little rosebud, the Tiger-Strike-Force took control of the robots and turned then on the field hospital.

Lord Shiva bless my father for a fat boy and a coward. A hero would have run out onto the sand to see what was happening when the firing started. A hero would have died in the crossfire, or, when the ammunition ran out, by their blades. At the first shot, my father went straight under the desk.

‘Get down!’ he hissed at my mother who froze with a look part bafflement, part wonderment on her face. He pulled her down and immediately apologised for the unseemly intimacy. She had lately cupped his testicles in her hand, but he apologised. They knelt in the kneehole, side by side while the shots and the cries and the terrible, arthritic click click click of mecha joints swirled around them, and little by little subsided into cries and clicks, then just clicks, then silence. Side by side they knelt, shivering in fear, my mother kneeling like a dog on all fours until she shook from the strain, but afraid to move, to make the slightest noise in case it brought the stalking shadows that fell through the window into the surgery. The shadows grew long and grew dark before she dared exhale, ‘What happened?’