Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

‘We must meet up some time,’ I went on, compounding the lie. ‘When Lakshmi and I get back into Delhi. Have you over to the place.’

‘It’s not going to be terribly likely,’ Shiv said. ‘I’m going to Bharat as soon as I graduate. I’ve a post-grad lined up at the University of Varanasi. Nano-informatics. Delhi’s not a good place for anyone working in artificial intelligence. The Americans are breathing down Srivastava’s neck to ratify the Hamilton Treaty.’

I consumed news, all news, any news, as universally and unthinkingly as breathing. I could watch twelve screens of television and tell you what was happening on any of them, simultaneously scan a tableful of newspapers and reproduce any article verbatim; I frequently kept my newsfeeds on brain drip waking and sleeping, beaming the happening world into my tiny head. I knew too well of the international moves, begun by the United States to restrict artificial intelligence by licence. Fear motivates them; that vague Christian millennial dread of the work of our own hands rising up and making itself our god. Artificial intelligences with a thousand, ten thousand, infinite times our human intelligence, whatever that means. Intelligence, when you look down on it from above, is a very vague terrain. Nevertheless police forces had been established, Krishna Cops, charged with hunting down and eliminating rogue aeais. Fine title, vain hope. Aeais were utterly different from us; intelligences that could be in many places at one time, that could exist in many different avatars, that could only move by copying themselves, not as I moved, lugging about my enhanced intelligence in the calcium bowl of my skull. They had very good guns, but I think my gnawing fear was aeais today, Brahmins tomorrow. Humans are very jealous gods.

I knew that it was inevitable that Awadh would sign up to the accord in return for favoured nation grants from the US. Neighbouring Bharat would never accede to that; its media industry, dependent on artificial intelligence for the success of Town and Country from Djakarta to Dubai, was too influential a lobby. The world’s first overt soapocracy. And, I foresaw, the world’s first data-haven nation state. Stitching together stories buried way down the business news, I was already seeing a pattern of software house relocations and research foundations moving to Varanasi. So Shiv, ambitious Shiv, Shiv-building-your-own-glory while I merely obeyed the imperative in my DNA, Shiv with your whiff of aeais around you, what is it in Bharat? Would you be a researcher into technologies as sky-blue as Lord Krishna himself, would you be a dataraja with a stable of aeais pretending they can’t pass the Turing Test?

‘Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,’ I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.

‘Not really no,’ Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?

The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable wedding shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like a plague at the wedding.

The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over the tomb of Muhammad Shah and the dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private helicopter lifted us up and away to the teahouse in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed our baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.

‘It’s good isn’t it?’

‘Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.’

‘I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.’

‘Yes, it is good. Very old wood.’

‘This is the honeymoon then.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re supposed to…’

‘Yes. I know. Do you… are you?’

‘Wired? No I was never into that.’

‘Oh. Well, I’ve some other stuff in my bag, it should work on you as well.’

‘You’ve tried it?’

‘Sometimes. I’m finding it gets hard all on its own now, just like that, nothing in particular, so I try it then.’

‘Is it productive?’

‘It’s a bit like the ’hoek sex. Feeling you really really need to pee something that isn’t pee and isn’t there. To be honest, not as good. Have you tried?’

‘With the fingers? Oh yes, with the whole hand. It’s like you.’

‘Need to pee?’

‘Something like that. More of a clench. It works on a swing too. I don’t really think I want to use something you have on you, you know.’

‘I suppose not. We could… I could…’

‘I don’t really think so.’

‘Do you think they’ll check? Save the sheets and show them round to all the relatives?’

‘At our physical ages? Don’t be stupid.’

‘It’s part of the contract.’

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke contractual obligation until I’ve at least had a period.’

‘So do you want to do anything?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘So what will we do then?’

‘The view’s nice.’

‘There’s a pack of cards in the drawer in the table.’

‘Maybe later. I might sleep now.’

‘So might I. Are you all right about the bed?’

‘Of course. We’re supposed to, aren’t we? We are husband and wife.’

We slept under the light silk cover with the ceiling fan turning slowly, each curled up like the eight-year-olds we physically were with our backs to each other, as far apart as Vish and Shiv and afterwards we invented card games of staggering complexity with the old circular Ganjifa cards on the verandah with its titanic view over the Himalayas. As Lakshmi turned over the kings and ministers our eyes met and we both knew it was more than over, it had never begun. There was nothing but contractual obligation between us. We were the hostages of our DNA. I thought of that line of offspring issuing like a rope of pearls from the end of my still-flaccid penis; those slow children toddling into a future so distant I could not even see its dust on time’s horizon, and onward and onward always onward. I was filled with horror at the blind imperative of biology. I owned superhuman intelligence, I only forgot what I chose to forget, I had never known a day’s illness in my life, I carried the name of a god, but to my seed all this was nothing, I was no different from some baseline Dalit in Molar Bund basti. Yes, I was a privileged brat, yes, I was a sneerer of the worst kind, how could I be anything other? I was a designer snob.

We stayed our week in the teahouse in the green foothills of Himachal Pradesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu. Lakshmi patented some of her elaborate social card games – we tested the multi-player games by each of us playing several hands at once, an easy feat for the Brahmins – and made a lot of money from licensing them. It was radiantly beautiful, the mountains were distant and serene like stone Buddhas, occasional rain pattered on the leaves outside our window at night and we were utterly utterly miserable, but even more so at the thought of what we had to face on our return to Awadh, the darlings of the Delhi. My decision had been made on the third day of our honeymoon but it was not until we were in the limo to the Ramachandra Tower where we had been given an apartment fit for gods on the floor below my Mamaji that I made the call to the very special, very discreet doctor.