Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The game is bad cop and bad cop. You’re in an interrogation room. It could be a jail cell, a confession box, or a torture chamber, what matters is that you can’t hear or see what’s happening outside. All you know is what the cops tell you. You have a partner in crime in an identical room. For you are accused.

So they have you in this green interview room that smells of thick paint and antiseptic. See that partner/fellow hoodlum/lover of yours? Soon as the tape went on, they spilled everything, including you . This is what you have to decide. They could be telling the truth. They could be playing headgames to get you to grass up your partner. You don’t know and bad cops won’t tell you. They’re bad . Then they let you stew without even a cop coffee.

The way you see the deal is this. You deny everything and your partner/fellow hoodlum/lover denies everything and you might both walk. Insufficient evidence. You both confess and the cops turn out to be not so bad after all because there’s nothing a cop likes less than paperwork and you’ve just saved them deskloads of that so they’ll push for a noncustodial. Or you deny everything and in the other cell, you get fessed up. Fellow hoodlum walks and the full weight falls on you. What’s best for you? You’ve got the answer before their footsteps even reach the far end of the corridor. You bang on the door. Hey hey hey, come back here, I want to tell you every little thing .

The game is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s not as much fun as blackjack or Dungeons and Dragons but it’s a tool A-life researchers use to investigate complex systems. Play it enough and all manner of human truths emerge. Long-term good, short-term bad. Do as you would be done by and if not, then do unto them as they do unto you. Thomas Lull has played Prisoner’s Dilemma and a slate of other limited-information games millions of times. It’s very different playing for real.

The room is green and smells of disinfectant. It also smells of mould, old urine, hot ghee, and damp from the shirts of the rain-soaked cops. They are not good cops, they are not bad cops, they are just cops who would rather get back to their wives and children. One keeps rocking back on his chair and looking at Thomas Lull, with his eyebrows raised, as if expecting an epiphany. The other one is constantly checking his nails and has an uncomfortable thing he does with his mouth that reminds Thomas Lull of old Tom Hanks movies.

Do what you need to, Lull. Don’t be clever, don’t be fly. Get yourself out of here. He feels a growing closeness in his chest.

“Look, I told the soldiers, I’m travelling with her, she has relatives in Varanasi.”

Chair-rocker swings forwards and scrawls Hindi on a spiral-bound notepad. The voice recorder isn’t working. They say. Tom Hanks does the thing with the mouth again. It’s really starting to needle Thomas Lull. That, too, could be part of it.

“That might be enough for provincial jawans, but this is Varanasi, sir.”

“I don’t understand what the hell is happening.”

“It is quite simple, sit. Your colleague made an inquiry at the National DNA database. A routine security scan revealed certain. anomalous structures in her skull. She was apprehended by security and passed into our custody.”

“You keep saying this, anomalous structures, what does that mean, what are these anomalous structures?”

Tom Hanks looks at his nails again. His mouth is unhappy.

“This is now a matter of national security, sir.”

“This is fucking Franz Kafka, is what it is.”

Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.

“He’s a Czech writer,” Thomas Lull says. “He’s been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony.”

“Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue.”

Chair-rocker deliberately crosses the name out and takes a swing back to study Thomas Lull with added perspective. The heat in the windowless room is incredible. The smell of damp policeman is overpowering.

“What do you know of this female?”

“I met her at a beach party at Thekkady down in Kerala. I helped her over an asthma attack. I liked her, she was travelling north, I went with her.”

Tom Hanks flips up a corner of the folder on the desk, pretends to consult a scrap of text. “Sir, she stopped a section of Awadhi counterinsurgency robots with a wave of her hand.”

“That’s a crime?”

Chair-rocker snaps forward. His chair feet crack on the shoe-polished concrete floor.

“Awadhi airborne divisions have just taken the Kunda Khadar dam. The entire garrison has surrendered. It may not be a crime, but you must admit, the coincidence is. extreme.”

“This is a fucking joke. What, you think she is something to do with that?”

“I do not make jokes where my country’s security is concerned,” Tom Hanks says. “All I know is this report and that your travelling companion set off the alarms trying to access the National DNA database.”

“I need to know these anomalies.” Tom Hanks swivels his eyes at chair-rocker. “Do you know who I am?”

“You are Professor Thomas Lull.”

“Do you not think I might be better positioned to offer a hypothesis about this than you? If I knew what you were taking about?”

Chair-rocker confers in short, stabbing Hindi with Tom Hanks. Thomas Lull can’t decide which of them is the superior.

“Very well, sir. As you know, we are in a state of heightened alert because of the situation with our neighbour, Awadh. It is only logical that we protect ourselves against cyberwar, so we have installed a number of scanners at sensitive locations to pick up slow missiles, infiltrators, agents, that sort of thing. Identity theft is a recognised tool of undercover operatives so the archive was routinely equipped with surveillance devices. The scanners at the DNA archive picked up structures inside this woman’s skull similar to protein circuitry.”

By now Thomas Lull cannot tell what is game and what is real and what is beyond either. He thinks of the shock he gave Aj on the train when he exposed the lies that were her life. She has returned that shock tenfold.

Tom Hanks slides a palmer across the desk to Thomas Lull. He does not want to look, he does not want to see the alien inside Aj but he turns the device to him. It is a false-colour pseudo-X-ray assembled from infrasound scans. Her lovely skull is pale blue. The globes of her eyes, the tangled vine-root of the optic nerve, the ghostly canals of sinuses and blood vessels are grey on greyer. Aj is a ghost of herself; her brain most spectral of all, a haunting of sentience in a web of fibres. There is a ghost in the ghost; lines and ranks of nanocircuits arching across the inside of her skull. The tilak is a dark gateway in her forehead like a mosque darwaz. From it chains and webs of protein wiring thread back through the frontal lobes, across the central fissure into the parietal lobe, sending probes into the corpus callosum, twining tight around the limbic system, delving deep into the medulla while it wraps the occipital lobe in coils of protein processors. Aj’s brain is chained in circuitry.

“Kalki,” he whispers and the room goes black. Complete lightlessness. No lights, no emergency power, nothing. Thomas Lull fumbles his palmer out of his pocket. Hindi voices yell in the corridor, rising in intensity.

“Professor Lull Professor Lull, do not attempt to move!” Tom Hanks’ voice is querulous and panicky. “For your own safety, I order you to remain where you are while I ascertain what has happened.”

The voices in the corridor grow louder. A rasp, a flare; chair-rocker man lights a match. Three faces in a bubble of light, then darkness. Thomas Lull moves quickly. His fingers feel out the memory wafer slot on the side of the police palmer and slide it open. A rasp, he whips his hands back, then light. Tom Hanks is by the door. The babble of voices has become intermittent, calls, responses. As the match burns out Thomas Lull thinks he sees a fluctuating line of light under the door, a torch bobbing. He releases the memory chip. Another match flare. The door is open now, Tom Hanks conversing with an unseen officer in the corridor.