Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The police finally drive the basti folk back to the ends of the alley. A jawan waves from the roof, job done.

“All communications devices off please,” Mr. Nandha instructs. Jemadar Sen and Rural Sergeant Sunder accompany him into the possessed factory. Mr. Nandha straightens his Nehru-cut jacket, shoots his cuffs and ducks under the roller shutter into the combat zone. “Stay close and do exactly as I instruct.” Breathing in the slow, stilling pranayama technique the Ministry teaches its Krishna Cops, Mr.Nandha makes his initial visual survey.

It is a typical development-grant job. Plastic barrels of feedstuff on one side, main processing in the middle, packaging and shipping on the other. No safety guards, no protective wear, no noise abatement equipment, no air-conditioning; one bathroom male, one restroom female.

Everything stripped down to accountancy-minimum. Minimal robotics: human hands have always been cheaper in the strip cities. On the right, a row of glastic cubes house the offices and aeai support. Water coolers and fans, all dead. The sun is well up. The building is steel oven.

A forklift is run into a wall to his extreme left. A body is just visible between the truck and the corrugated metal bulkhead, half-erect. Blood, glossy and furious with flies, is coagulated beneath the wheels The man has been bayoneted at belly height by the forklift’s tines.

Mr.Nandha purses his lips in distaste.

Camera eyes everywhere. Nothing to be done about it now. It is watching.

In his three years as a rogue-aeai hunter, Mr. Nandha has seen a sizeable number of the bodies that result when humans and artificial intelligences cross. He draws his gun. Jemadar Sen’s eyes widen. Mr. Nandha’s gun is big, black, heavy and looks as if it were cast in hell. It has all the knobs and details and bits a Krishna Cop needs on his weapon, it is self-targeting and dual action. The lower barrel kills the flesh: low-velocity explosive bullets. One hit in any part of the body is an impact trauma sure kill. Dum-Dum, after all, is a district of Kolkata. The upper barrel destroys the spirit. It is an EM pulse gun; a googlewatt of power poured into a three-millisecond directed beam. Protein chips crisp. Quantum processors heisenberg out. Carbon nanotubes vaporise. This is the gun that annihilates rogue aeais. Steered by GPS-oriented gyroscopes and controlled by a visual avatar of Indra, lord of the thunderbolt, Mr. Nandha’s gun always kills and never misses.

The reek of Bradford pasta-tikka tugs urgently at the base of Mr. Nandha’s stomach. How can this muck, this pollution, be all the thing? One of the big stainless steel industrial cooking pots is tipped over, its contents spilled on the floor. Here the second body lies. Its upper half is smothered in pasta-tikka. Mr. Nandha smells cooked meat, flicks out his handkerchief to cover his mouth. He notes the corpse’s good trousers, fine shoes, pressed shirt. That will be the IT wallah, then. In Mr. Nandha’s experience, aeais, like dogs, turn on their masters first.

He beckons Sen and Sunder in. The rural policeman looks nervous, but the jemadar raises her assault rifle resolutely.

“Can it hear us?” Jemadar Sen asks, circling.

“Unlikely. Level One aeais seldom possess language skills. We’re dealing with something with about the intelligence of a monkey.”

“And the attitude of a tiger,” Sergeant Sunder comments.

Mr Nandha summons Siva out of the spatial dimensions of the food factory, moves his hands into a mudra, and the go-down springs to life with a glowing nervous system of information conduits. It’s the work of a moment for Siva to access the factory intranet, trace the server; a small featureless cube in a corner of a desk, and insinuate himself through the firewall into the factory system. File registers blur across Mr. Nandha’s back-brain. There. Password protected. He summons Ganesha. At once the Remover of Obstacles runs into a quantum key. Mr. Nandha is vexed. He dismisses Ganesha and sends in Krishna. There could be a djinn hiding behind that quantum wall. Equally, there could be three thousand pictures of Chinese girls having sex with pigs. Mr.Nandha’s fear is that the rogue aeai has reproduced.

One mail-out and it will take weeks to grub it all up. Krishna reports the outgoing traffic log as clean. It is still in the building, somewhere. Mr. Nandha disconnects the wireless web, unplugs the server, and tucks it under his arm. His people back at the Ministry will pry out its secrets.

He pauses, sniffs. Is the reek of pasta-tikka stronger, more acrid? Mr. Nandha coughs, something has caught at the back of his throat, burning chilli. He sees Sen sniff, frown. He hears a hum of heavy electrical drain.

“Everyone out!” he shouts and at that moment the chain drive on the roller shutter jerks into action just as the number two cooking vat bursts into choking black chilli smoke. “Quick quick!” he commands, blinking away searing tears, handkerchief pressed to mouth. “Out, out.” He follows the others out under the descending shutter with millimetres to spare. In the alley he irritably dusts street grime from his ironed suit.

“This is most annoying,” says Mr. Nandha. To the pasta-tikka workers he calls, “You, there. Is there another way in?”

“Round the side, sahb,” replies a teen with a skin-condition Mr. Nandha would not want near anything human-consumable.

“No time to lose,” he says raising his weapon. “It may have already used the diversion to escape. With me, please.”

“I’m not going back in that place,” Sunder says, hands on thighs. He’s a middle-aged man, putting on middle-body fat and none of this is in the Nawada district police procedure manual. “I’m not a superstitious man, but if you haven’t got djinn in there, I don’t know what you have.”

“There are no djinns,” says Mr. Nandha. Sen falls in behind him. Her suit camouflage is the exact shade of pasta-tikka. They cover their faces, squeeze down the fetid side alley paved with cigarette butts and in through the fire exit. The air is acrid with chilli smoke. Mr. Nandha can feel it claw the back of his throat as he delves into his avatars for his most potent programme, Kali the Disrupter. He taps into the factory net and releases her into the system. She’ll go through the web, wire and wireless, copy herself into every mobile and stationary processing unit. Anything without a licence she will tag, trace, and erase. There will be only rags left of Pasta-Tikka Inc. by the time Kali has done. She is a reason Mr. Nandha isolated the factory. Let loose on the global web, Kali could wreak crores of rupees of havoc across the continental net within seconds. No better hunter of an aeai than another aeai. Mr. Nandha cradles his gun. The mere scent of Kali, a mongoose after a snake, has often been enough to flush a laired aeai from cover.

On full lighthoek resolution Kali is a startling sight, girdled with severed hands, scimitars raised, tongue out and eyes wide, towering up through a slowly settling pall of chilli smoke as data constellations go out around her, one by one. This is what death must be like, thinks Mr. Nandha. One by one the delicate blue glows of information flow flicker and go out. One by one the nerve impulses fail, the sensations fade, consciousness disintegrates.

Spooked by machine sounds falling silent all around her, Sen draws close to Mr. Nandha. There are forces and entities here she cannot comprehend. When nothing has made a noise or gone dark for a full minute, Sen says, “Do you think they’re all gone now?”

Mr. Nandha checks a report from Kali.

“I have deleted two hundred suspect files and programs. If even one percent of those are aeai copies.” But something more than chilli throat is tugging at his sensibilities.