Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

And then the goddess changed.

The world turned dark, the sky purpling to voluptuous black, her arteries pulsing full with electric information. The goddess drew her weapons, a ringing of metal singing across her lands. They had angered her. The devi’s thousands of arms became a whirling corona of limbs and flashing blades. Durga raised her gloved hands and felt a whisper of fear at the AI’s awesome fury, the stars of the devi’s three eyes somehow blinding amid the all-encompassing night of her flesh. She was the domain, and her darkening skin shaded the mountains and rivers and forests, the sky sleeting cold static.

Durga saw thousands of trolls cut down, rivers of their blood flowing across the land. But of course, cut down one troll, and ten more shall appear. Durga thought of Raktabija—Bloodseed—a demon her namesake had battled, who grew clones of himself from the blood of each wound that Ma Durga inflicted on him. Ultimately, Ma Durga had to turn into Kali to defeat him. History repeats. So does myth.

The goddess stormed on, smiting her enemies, the hateful demons, human and bot alike. Just like the trolls had appeared with malware fangs bared, the goddess too smiled and revealed fangs that scythed the clouds around her. Her laughter was thunder that rolled across the land and blasted great cresting waves across the rivers and lakes. There was a mass exodus of devotees happening, hundreds of avatars running away from the mountain, skipping and hitching across the landscape as bandwidth struggled to compensate. Others were deporting, streaks of light shooting up to the sky like rising stars.

Durga couldn’t believe what was happening. She drifted to the grassy ground by a crimson river and watched the battle in a crouch, the trees along the shore rustling and creaking in winds that howled across the land. Flickering flakes of static fell on her avatar’s arms, sticking to the skin before melting in little flashes. This was better than any veeyar narrative she’d ever seen—because it wasn’t procedurally generated, or scripted, or algorithmic. It was an actual AI entity reacting unpredictably to human beings, and it was angry. It felt elemental in a way nothing in veeyar ever had. There was no way Shiva Industries had ordered her to react to trolls with such a display—many of those trolls were their most faithful users. They clearly hadn’t anticipated the overwhelming numbers in which the trolls would attack the goddess, though, creating this feedback loop. Nor had they anticipated, Durga assumed, that she would go through a transformation so faithful to the Vedic and Hindu myths she’d been fed.

Durga didn’t quite know what being avatar-killed by the goddess entailed in this domain, because the devi wasn’t supposed to have attacked her devotees. Even as Durga huddled in fear that she’d be randomly smote by the goddess and locked out of veeyar domains forever, she empathized with this AI devi more than she had with any veeyar narrative character, or indeed with most human beings. She couldn’t take her eyes off the destruction of these roaring fools, the kind of glitch-masked bastards who would harass her every time she dropped into veeyar, so much that she’d often just use a masc avatar to get by without being attacked or flirted with by strangers. Durga liked how easily fluid gender was in veeyar, and hated the fear trolls injected into her exploration of it. Often, despite railing against other dark-skinned Indians who did so, she’d also shamefully turn her avatar’s skin pale to avoid being called ugly or attacked. And now here was this goddess—dark as night, dark as a black hole, slaughtering those very assholes so it rained blood. Looking at the devi, Durga felt a surge of pride that on this day, she’d stayed true to her own complexion, on a femme avatar.

Durga saw two trolls teleport to the shore and approach across the river she was crouched by. She realized they had cast a grounding radius so she couldn’t fly away. Their demon-masks and weapons vibrated with malevolent code. “Saali, what are you smiling at?” roared one, pd_0697. “That thing is going crazy, polluting Indian veeyar-estate and you’re sitting and watching? While our brothers and sisters get censored by that monster for speaking their mind?”

“This was an anti-national trap,” said the other, nitesh4922. “But we have numbers. We’ll turn that AI up there to our side. Are you a feminist, hanh?” he said, spotting Durga’s runic tattoos for queer solidarity. “Probably think that’s how goddesses should act?” he spat, voice roiling and distorted behind the mask as he pointed his sword at the battle on the mountain.

“Look at her avatar,” said pd_0697. “She’s ajna-andha. Shouldn’t even be here, crowding up our domains with their impure stink. Go back to realspace gutters where you belong, cleaning our shit!” The trolls advanced, viruses cascading off their bodies like oil in the bloody water of the river. Twinkling flakes of static danced down and clung to their armor, which was intricate and advanced. They could damage her avatar badly, hack her and steal her cryptocoin, or infect her with worms to make her a beacon for stalkers. Worst of all, they could have a bodysnatch script, steal her avatar and rape it even if Durga deported, or steal her real ID and face and put it on bots to do as they pleased. Durga got ready to deport the domain if they came too close, even though she wanted to stay and witness the devi.

“Yes,” said Durga, nearly spitting in their direction before realizing it would just dribble onto her chin inside the helmet. “Yes, I am a feminist. Come get me, you inceloid gandus. I’m a dirty bahujan anti-national feminist l—”

Durga gasped as a multipronged arc of lightning hurtled out of the sky and struck the two trolls. Having no third eye, she couldn’t feel the heat or smell their virtual flesh burning, but she had to squint against the bright blast, and instinctively raised her arms to shield herself from the spray of sparks and water. The corpses of the avatars splashed into the river smoking and sizzling, the masks burned away to reveal the painfully dull-looking man and woman behind them, their expressions comically placid as they collapsed. Their real faces, or someone’s real faces, taken from profile pics somewhere and rendered onto the avatars to shame them as they were booted from the domain. Durga was recording everything, so she sloshed into the river and took a long look at their faces for later receipts. Relieved that she was in a pod with gloves that allowed interaction, Durga dipped her hands into the river of blood, picking up their blades. Good weapons, with solid malware. They’d been careless—no lockout or self-destruct scripts coded into them. Durga sheathed the swords, which vanished into her cloudpocket. She ran her hands through the river again, bringing them up glistening red. She painted her torso, smeared her face, goosebumps prickling across her real body even though she couldn’t feel the wetness. Troll blood drying across her avatar’s body, she looked up at the goddess as the AI’s rage dimmed the domain further, the forests and grasses turning to shadows.

“Are you… Kali?” Durga whispered to the distant storm.

Like a tsunami the goddess responded, sweeping across the world to shake her myriad limbs in the dance of destruction. As the black goddess danced, her domain quaked and cracked, the mountains cascading into landslides, rivers overflowing. Fissures ran through the world, and the peaks of the hills and crags exploded in volcanic eruptions, matter reverting to molten code. Her tongue a crimson tornado snaking down from the sky, the goddess drank up the rivers of blood to quench her thirst for human information. The mounds of slain troll and bot avatars were smeared to a glowing pulp of corrupted data, their decapitated heads threaded across the jet-black trunk of the goddess’s neck in gory necklaces. Many of the trolls’ masks fell away to reveal their true faces, hacked from the depths of their defenses, ripped away from national databases—their doxxed heads swung across the night sky like pearls for all to see. Durga bowed low, humbled. This was the goddess she had always wanted.