Ian McDonald - River of Gods

I do, computer, Najia Askarzadah thinks. I have to trust, because everything I am comes from those memories. The reason I am here, talking in this ludicrous virtual-reality pleasure dome to a tivi soap star with delusions of significance, is because of those memories of light, moving.

“But in that case are you—as Lal Darfan—sailing pretty close to the wind? I mean, the Hamilton Acts on Artificial Intelligence.”

“The Krishna Cops? McAuley’s hijras,” Lal Darfan says with venom.

“What I’m saying is, for you to say you’re self-aware—sentient, as you seem to be claiming—is signing your own death warrant.”

“I never said I was sentient, or conscious, whatever that is. I am a level 2.8 aeai and it’s done very nicely for me. I’m only claiming to be real; as real as you.”

“So you couldn’t pass a Turing test?”

“Shouldn’t pass a Turing test. Wouldn’t pass a Turing test. Turing test, what’s that prove anyway? Here, I’ll give you a Turing test. Classic setup, two locked rooms and a badmash with an old style print-display screen. Let’s put you in one room and Satnam from PR in the other—I presume it’s him giving you the tour, they always give him the girls. He fancies himself a bit. The badmash with the display types in questions, you type back answers. Standard stuff. Satnam’s job is to convince the badmash he’s a woman and he can lie, cheat, say anything he wants to prove it. I think you can see it’s not going to be that hard for him to do. So, does that make Satnam a woman then? I don’t think it does; Satnam certainly doesn’t think it does. How then is it any different from a computer to pass itself as sentient? Is the simulation of a thing the thing itself, or is there something unique about intelligence that it is the only thing which cannot be simulated? What does any of this prove? Only something about the nature of the Turing test as a test, and the danger of relying on minimum information. Any aeai smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”

Najia Askarzadah throws up her hands in mock defeat.

“I’ll tell you one thing I like about you,” Lal Darfan says. “At least you didn’t spend an hour asking me stupid questions about Ved Prekash as if he’s the real star. Speaking of which, I’m due in make-up.”

“Oh, sorry, thank you,” Najia Askarzadah says, trying to do the gushy girl journo thing while the truth is she’s glad to be out of the pedantic creature’s headspace. What she intended to be light and frothy and soapi has turned into existential phenomenology with a twist of retro po-mo. She wonders what her editor will say, let alone the passengers on the TransAm Chicago-Cincinnati red-eye when they pull their inflights out of the seatback pocket. Lal Darfan merely beams beatifically as his audience chamber comes apart around him until all that’s left is pure Lewis Carroll grin that fades into the Himalayan sky and the Himalayan sky rolls up into the back of Najia’s head and she’s back in the render farm, in the rocky swivel chair with the racked cylinders of the protein processors tramlining into the perspective: sci-fi bottled brains in jars.

“He’s quite convincing, isn’t he?” Satnam-Who-Fancies-Himself’s aftershave is a little assertive. Najia slips off the lighthoek, still a little mazy from the total immersion of the interview experience.

“I think he thinks he thinks.”

“Exactly the way we programmed him.” Satnam has media style, dress, and easy confidence but Najia notes a little Siva trident on that platinum chain around his neck. “Truth is, Lal Darfan’s as tightly scripted as Ved Prekash.”

“That’s my angle, appearance and reality. If folk can believe in virtual actors, what else’ll they swallow?”

“Now don’t be giving the game away,” Satnam smiles as he shows her into the next section. He’s almost cute when he smiles, Najia thinks. “This is the meta-soap department, where Lal Darfan gets the script he doesn’t think he follows. It’s got to the stage where the meta-soap’s as big as the soap itself.”

The department is a long farm of workstations. The glass walls are polarised dark, the soap-farmers work in the umbral light of low-level spots and screen-glow. Designers’ hands draw in neurospace. Najia suppresses a shudder at the thought of spending her working years in a place like this, shut off from the sun. Stray light on high cheekbones, a hairless head, a delicate hand catches her attention and it’s her turn to cut Satnam off.

“Who’s that?”

Satnam cranes.

“Oh, that’s Tal. He’s new here. He heads up visual wallpaper.”

“I think the pronoun is ‘yt,’” Najia says, trying to catch a better glance at the nute through the hand-ballet. She can’t say why she is surprised to find a third-sex in the production office—in Sweden nutes tended towards the creative industries and India’s premier soap undoubtedly exerts a similar gravity. She realises she has assumed that India’s long history of trans- and non-genders has always been hidden, veiled.

“Yt, him, whatever. Yt’s full of it today, some invite to a big celebi party.”

“Yuli. The Russian model. I tried to get invited to that, to interview him. Yt.”

“So you settled for Fat Lal instead.”

“No, I really am interested in the psychology of aeai actors.” Najia looks over at the nute. Yt glances up. Yts eyes meet hers for a moment. There is no recognition, no communication. Yt looks back into its work again. Yts hands sculpt digits.

“What Fat Lal doesn’t know is the characters and plot are basic packages,” Satnam continues, ushering Najia along between the glowing workstations. “We franchise them out and different national broadcasters drop their own aeai actors in on top of them. There are different actors playing Ved Prekash in Mumbai and Kerala and they’re as mega down there as Fat Lal is up here.”

“Everything’s a version,” Najia says, trying to decipher the beautiful dance of the nute’s long hands. Out in the corridor, Satnam tries the chat.

“So, are you really from Kabul?”

“I left when I was four.”

“It’s not a thing I know very much about. I’m sure it must have been.”

Najia stops dead in the corridor, turns to face Satnam. She’s half-a-head shorter, but he takes a step back. She grabs his hand, scrawls a UCC across his knuckles.

“There, my number. You call it, I may answer. I may suggest we go out somewhere, but if we do, I choose where. Okay? Now, thanks for the tour, and I think I can find my way back to the front door.”

He’s where and when he said he would be as she cruises in to the kerb in the phatphat. He’s dressed in nothing he’s too fond of, as Najia requested, but he still wears his trishul. Site’s been seeing a lot of those, on the streets, around men’s necks. He settles in the seat beside her; the little autorickshaw rocks on its home-brew suspension.

“My shout, remember?” she says. The driver pulls out into the swarm of traffic.

“Mystery tour, okay, that’s fine,” Satnam says. “So, did you get your article written?”

“Written, done, off,” Najia says. She banged it out this afternoon on the terrace at the Imperial International, the Cantonment backpackers hostel where she has a room. She’ll move out when the payment comes in from the magazine. The Australians are getting to her. They moan about everything.

The thing is, Najia Askarzadah has a boyfriend. He’s called Bernard. He’s a fellow Imperialist, a gap-yearer whose twelve months turned into twenty, forty, sixty. He’s French, indolent, overly convinced of his own genius and has atrocious manners. Najia suspects he only stays at the hostel to pull fresh girls like her. But he practises Tantric sex, and can keep his dick up any woman for an hour while chanting. So far Tantra with Bernard has involved her squatting on his lap for twenty, thirty, forty minutes tugging on a leather thong looped around his cock to keep it hard hard hard until his eyes roll up and he says Kundalini has risen, which means the drugs are finally kicking in. It’s not Najia’s idea of Tantra. He’s not Najia’s idea of a boyfriend. Neither is Satnam, and for many of the same reasons, but it’s an idea, a game, a why not ? Najia Askarzadah has steered as many of her twenty-two years as she’s been allowed responsibility for by why nots ? They steered her to Bharat, against the advice of her tutors, friends, and parents.