Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“The words still don’t move.”

“The words don’t need to move. It is you who is moved by them.”

“It is a very effective way of compressing a virtual reality experience, I’ll give it that. All this for one-point-four megs? It’s just so non-interactive.”

“But it is different for everyone who reads it,” says Mr. Nandha.

The man in the plastic cube nods his head, pondering.

“Where’s the shared experience in that? So, what can I do for you, Mr. Nandha?”

Mr. Nandha glances up as he hears the mosquito drone of a hovercam. It rolls its lens-eye at the plastic cage, climbs away towards the fantasia of the domed roof. Light falls in dusty shafts through the mullions. Mr. Nandha takes the plastic evidence bags out of his jacket pocket, holds them up. The man in the plastic chair squints.

“You’re going to have to bring them closer, I can’t see anything without my glasses. You could at least have left me them.”

“Not after last time, Mr. Anreddy. The circuitry was most ingenious.”

Mr. Nandha presses the bags against the plastic wall. The prisoner kneels down. Mr. Nandha sees his breath mist the transparency. He gives a small, hushed gasp.

“Where did you get these?”

“From their owners.”

“They’re dead, then.”

“Yes.”

J. P. Anreddy is a short, dumpy asthmatic in his midtwenties with too little hair on his head and far too much around his soft jowls and he is Mr. Nandha’s greatest professional triumph. He was Dataraja of the Sinha sundarban, a major station on the aeai underground railway when Awadh ratified the Hamilton Acts and outlawed all artificial intelligences above Level 2.0. He had made a cosmological amount of money rebranding high-level aeais as low and faking their licence idents. Man-machine fusion had been his peccadillo, an extension of his one hundred and fifty kilos of mostiy middle-body fat into lither, nimbler robot bodies. When Mr. Nandha came to arrest him for licence violations, he had cut his way through charge after charge of service robots. He remembers the clicking plastic peds, conflates them with the little black monkey hands besieging his Ministry car. Mr. Nandha shivers in the bright, warm, dust-fragrant room. He had run the dataraja down through his suite off chambers until Indra locked on to the protein matrix chips seeded across the underside of Anreddy’s cranium that allowed him to interface directly with his machine extensions and fused them all with a single EM pulse. J. P. Anreddy had lain in a coma for three months, lost fifty percent of his body mass, and regained consciousness to find that the court had confiscated the house and turned it into his prison. Now he lived at the centre of his beautiful Mughal architecture in a transparent plastic cube where every move and breath, every mouthful and motion, every scratch and flea and insect crawling upon it could be monitored by the hovercams. He had twice escaped with the help of bug-sized robots. Though he could no longer control them by will alone, J. P. Anreddy had never lost his love for little scuttling sentiences. Here he would remain under house arrest until he expressed remorse for what he had done. Mr. Nandha confidently expected he would die and rot in his plastic wrap. J. P. Anreddy genuinely had no comprehension that he had done anything wrong.

“How did they die?” the dataraja asks.

“In a fire, on the fifteenth floor of.”

“Stop. Badrinath? Radha?”

“No one survived.”

“How?”

“We have theories.”

Anreddy sits on the transparent plastic floor, head bowed. Mr. Nandha shakes out the medallions, holds them up by the chain.

“You knew them, then.”

“Knew of them.”

“Names?”

“Something French, though she was Indian. They used to work at the University but got into the free world. They had a big-name project, there was a lot of money behind them.”

“Have you ever heard of an investment company called Odeco?”

“Everyone’s heard of Odeco. Everyone out in the wild, that is.”

“Did you ever receive funding from Odeco?”

“I’m a dataraja man, big and wild and fierce. Public enemy number one. Anyway, I wasn’t their particular shade of blue sky. I was into nanoscale robotics. They were high-level aeai; protein circuitry, computer-brain interfaces.”

Mr. Nandha holds the amulets against the plastic. “You know the significance of this symbol?”

“The riderless white horse, the tenth avatar.”

“Kalki. The final avatar that will bring the Age of Kali to an end. A name from legend.”

“Varanasi is a city of legends.”

“Here is legend for our times. Might Badrinath, with funding from this Odeco organisation, have been developing a Generation Three aeai?”

J. P. Anreddy rocks back on his coccyx, throws his head back. Siddha of the scuttling robots. He closes his eyes. Mr. Nandha lays out the amulets on the tiles in Anreddy’s full view. Then he goes to the window and slowly pulls up the blind. It folds up on itself in a wide concertina of sun-bleached fabric.

“I will tell you now our theory about how they died at Badrinath. We believe it was a deliberate attack by a laser-armed drone aircraft,” Mr. Nandha says. He draws up the next blind, admitting the blinding sun, the treacherous sky.

“You bastard!” J. P. Anreddy shouts, leaping to his feet. Mr. Nandha moves to the third window.

“We find this theory convincing. A single high-energy shot.” He crosses the room to the opposite set of mullions. “Through the living-room window. A precision attack. The aeai must have targeted, identified, and fired in a few milliseconds. There’s so much traffic in the air since the train incident no one is ever going to notice a drone slip out of its patrol pattern.”

Anreddy’s hands are spread on the plastic, his eyes wide, scanning the white sky for flecks of betrayal.

“What do you know about Kalki?”

Mr. Nandha furls another blind. Only one remains. Burtresses of light slant across the floor. Anreddy looks in pain, a cyber-vampire burned by the sun.

“They’ll kill you, man.”

“We shall see about that. Is Kalki a Generation Three aeai?”

He takes the soft cotton cord of the last blind and hauls it in, hand over hand. A wedge of light expands across the tiles. J. P. Anreddy has retreated to the centre of his plastic cage but there is no hiding from the sky.

“So?”

“Kalki is a Generation Three aeai. It exists. It’s real. It’s been real and existent for longer than you think. It’s out there. You know what Generation Three means? It means an intelligence, measured on standard assessment scales, between twenty and thirty thousand times human baseline. And they’re only the start. These are emergent properties, man. Evolution is running a million times faster in there. And if they want you, you cannot run, you cannot hide, you cannot lie down and hope that they will forget about you. Whatever you do, they can see you. Whatever identity you take, they know it before you do. Wherever you go, they’ll be there ahead of you, waiting, because they’ll have guessed it before you even think it yourself. These are Gen Threes, man. These are the gods! You cannot license gods.”

Mr. Nandha lets the rant ebb before he collects the cheap, heat-tarnished Kalki amulets and returns them to their bags.

“Thank you. I now know the name of my enemy. Good day.”

He turns and walks away through the shafts of dusty white light. His heels resound on the fine Islamic marble. Behind him he hears the soft woof of fists on flexible transparent plastic, Anreddy’s voice, distant and muffled.

“Hey, the blinds man! Don’t leave me, don’t leave the blinds! Man! The blinds! They can see me! Fuck you, they can see me! The blinds!”