Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Nandha.”

The voice says something about excessive zeal, use of weapons, endangering the public, questions and inquiries, too far Nandha too far, we know about your wife she turned up at Gaya Station but the word that rings, the word that chimes like the sword of that Christian, Renaissance angel against the dome of heaven, that cuts through the aircraft noise is Vik’s, repeating to the crew strapped into their seats in full combat armour: battling the Kalki aeazi .

He despises me, Mr. Nandha thinks. He thinks I am a monster. This is nothing to me. A sword requires no comprehension. He removes the ’hoek and with a swift, sharp jerk of his hands, snaps it in two.

The pilot turns her mirrored HUD visor to him. Her mouth is a perfect red rosebud.

The fourth quake shakes the Research Centre as Vishram hits the fire alarm. Bookcases topple, whiteboards drop from walls, light-fittings sway, cornices crack, wiring ducts splinter. The water-cooler teeter-totters this way, that way, then falls gracefully to the floor and bursts its distended plastic belly.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need for alarm, we’ve had a small report of an overheat in the electrical relay gear,” Vishram lies as wide-eyed people with their hands over their heads look for the exits. “Everything is under control. Our assembly point is outside on the quad, if we could make our way there in an orderly fashion. Walk slowly, walk carefully, don’t run, our staff are fully trained and will get you to safety.”

A swarm of hovercams beats everyone but Energy Minister Patel out the door. Sonia Yadav and Marianna Fusco want to wait for him but he orders them out. No sign of course of Surjeet. The Captain is always last to leave. As he turns the fifth and biggest tremor yet brings the roof screens crashing down in the lecture hall beyond. Vishram is afforded one burning, eternal glimpse on the message frozen on the falling screens.

Output seven hundred and eighty-eight percent. Universe 11276.

The light, spacious, elegant architectures of Ray Power warp and billow around Vishram Ray like his one and only mushroom trip as he runs—no decorum, no carefully, no good example, just hammering terror—for the door. The sixth tremor sends a crack racing up the centre of the Ramayana floor. Stressed parquet tiles spring apart, the glass door panels shatter into flying silicon snow as he comes running through. The shareholders, already far back from the building, retreat further. “This is no electrical overheat,” Vishram overhears from a plump Grameen woman in widow’s white as he hunts down Sonia Yadav. Her face is ash.

“What the fuck is happening?”

“They’ve taken over the system,” she says faintly. Many of the shareholders are lying flat on the still-wet grass, waiting for the next, even bigger shock.

“Who, what?” Vishram demands.

“We’re shut out of our network, something else is running it. There’s stuff coming in, we can’t stop it, all channels at once, something huge.”

“An aeai,” Vishram says and Sonia Yadav hears that it is not a question. The bolt-hole, the escape clause, the way out when the Generation Threes were faced with final annihilation. “Tell me, could Artificial Intelligences use the zero-point to build their own universe?”

“It couldn’t be a universe like this, it would have to be a universe where the computations and digits that make up their reality can become part of the fabric of the physical reality.”

“A universe that thinks?”

“A mindlike space, we call it, but yes.” She looks into his face, daring his disdain. “A universe of real gods.”

Sirens in the distance, racing in. Universe breaches, call the fire brigade. There is another sound over the fire engines; aircraft engines.

“Played for a fucking fool,” Vishram grimaces and then everything goes white in a pure, perfect, blinding flash of urlight and when his vision clears, there is a star, pure and perfect and dazzling, shining in the middle of the Research Centre Building.

White so bright, so searing it burns through the one-way mirror of the pilot’s visor and before he goes into white-out Mr. Nandha receives a retina-burned image of big brown eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose. Beautiful. A goddess. So many men must want to wed you, my warrior, Mr. Nandha thinks. The face recedes into afterimage, then the world returns in spots and blots of purple and Mr. Nandha feels tears of justification start in his eyes, for there is the sign and seal that he was right. A star burns in the heart of the city, from deep inside the earth. He signs to the pilot. Take us, down.

“Away from the people,” he adds. “We do not recklessly endanger life.”

Vishram thinks he might have seen this scene in a movie once. Or if he hasn’t, he should write it: a crowd of people standing in a wide green field, all facing the same direction, hands raised to shield their eyes from a dazzling, actinic spark in the distance. That’s a shot to build a story from. His eyes are squeezed half-shut, even so everything is reduced to strangely stretched silhouettes.

“If that’s what I think it is, there’s a lot more than bright light coming off it,” says Ramesh’s voice beside him.

“And what do you think it is?” Vishram asks, remembering his sunburn from peering into the observation window. That was a low level universe. A glance at Sonia Yadav’s palmer, still receiving data from the monitoring systems around the aperture, tells him this is universe 212255. Two and something lakh universes.

“A universe being born,” Ramesh says, dreamily. “The only reason we’re still here, there’s anything left, is the containment fields still have it. In terms of the subjective physics of that universe, it must seem like a super-gravity squeezing its space-time so it can’t expand. But that kind of expansion energy has to go somewhere.”

“How long can the cores hold it?” Vishram asks Sonia Yadav. He imagines he should be shouting. In the movies, they are always shouting. Her shrug tells all he needs to know and fear. A fresh tremor. People fall to the earth, though it is a traitor. Vishram hardly sees them. The star, the blinding star. It is now a tiny sphere. Then he does hear a shout, Sonia Yadav’s voice.

“Deba! Has anyone seen Deba?”

As the shout ripples out across the field, Vishram Ray finds he is running. He knows they will not find Deba among them. Deba is down there, in his hole, in his black hole under the earth, on the precipice of nothing. A voice cries his name, a voice he does not recognise. He looks around to see Marianna Fusco running after him. She has kicked off her shoes, she runs ponderously in her business skirt. He has never heard her shout his name before.

“Vish! Come back, there’s nothing you can do!”

The bubble expands again. It is now thirty metres across, rising out of the centre of the Research Unit like a Mughal dome. Like the dome of the Mughal Taj, it is empty inside, emptier even than the tomb of a grief-sick Emperor. It is nothing. It is annihilation so absolute the mind cannot contain it. And Vishram plunges towards it.

“Deba!”

A silhouette emerges out of the light-dazzle, limbs flailing, awkward. “To me!” Vishram yells. “To me!”

He seizes Deba in his arms. The kid’s face is badly burned, his skin smells of ultraviolet. He rubs incessantly at his eyes.

“It hurts!” he wails. “It hurts, it fucking hurts!”

Vishram spins him around and the bubble leaps again, a titanic quantum leap. Vishram is staring at a wall of light, brilliant, blinding, but within the light he thinks he can see shapes, patterns, flickering of bright and less bright, light and shadow. Black and white. He states, entranced. Then he feels his skin start to burn.