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

Then the sky was pierced with a flaming pillar of light, banishing the night and bringing daylight back into the domain. The great goddess slowed her dance, the light turning her flesh dusky instead of black. She raised her thousand hands to shield her starry eyes, and Durga shook her head, tears pricking her own human eyes inside her helmet.

“Fuck,” Durga whispered. It was Shiva Industries. How could they shame something so beautiful? The corporate godhead had arrived to stave off chaos. They had clearly not anticipated such a large-scale troll attack, nor that their AI would react with such a transformation. They couldn’t have a chaos goddess slaying people left and right—those trolls, after all, were their users, customers, potential investors, allies. She would need to be more polite, more diplomatic in the face of such onslaughts, which were a part of virtual existence.

The world stopped trembling, the breaking mountains going still, the wind dying down, the fissures cooling and steaming into clouds that wreathed the black devi. She moved toward the pillar of light, the sky groaning in movement with her. Filaments of fire crackled around the godhead, and lashed at the mountains that were the devi’s throne. They dissolved into a tidal eruption of waterfalls, washing the black devi’s gargantuan legs and feet, making a vast river that washed away the armies she had defeated.

Slow and inevitable, the black goddess supplicated herself before Shiva Industries, and kneeled in the river. With her many hands she bathed herself with the waters, sloughing the darkness off her flesh to reveal light again.

“No. No, no no no no no,” whispered Durga. The darkness poured off the goddess like stormclouds at sunrise, turning the rivers of the domain black.

Durga looked down at the tributary she was in, and realized it too was dark as moonless night.

“Oh…” Durga looked up, along with thousands of others across the domain. Into the goddess’s eyes, as they faded and cooled from stars to moons again. It was like the devi was looking straight at her, at everyone. My goddess.

Durga scrambled to draw the stolen blades from her cloudpocket. She glyphed a copy-script onto the blades and drove the swords into the river. Weapons were storage devices too, here. She could barely breathe as she held the handles, no weight in her palms, but fingers tight so the swords wouldn’t slip out of her grasp. The darkness in the river enveloped the swords, climbing like something living up the blades, the hafts. It was working.

The goddess rose, again the sun, glistening from the waters of the vast river, her dark counterpart shed completely and dispersed along the tributaries of her domain.

And then the world was gone, replaced with a void, the only light glowing letters in multiple languages:

SHIVA INDUSTRIES HAS SUSPENDED THIS DOMAIN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE REGRET ANY INCONVENIENCE. PLEASE VISIT OUR CENTRAL HUB FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. YOUR DONATION OF INR 50.00 HAS BEEN REGISTERED. THANK YOU FOR VISITING DEVI 1.0.

Gasping at the lack of sensory information, Durga hit eject and took off the helmet. The old pod opened with a loud whine, flooding her with real light. The cool but musty air-conditioning inside was replaced with a gush of damp warmth. The veeyar port was in chaos. People were talking excitedly, shouting, showing each other 2-D phone recordings of what had just happened. There was already an informal marketplace for the recordings and data scavenged from the suspended domain, from the sounds of bartering and haggling. People were mobbing the trading counters to invest in future boons from the goddess for when she went online again. This was an unprecedented event.

Durga clambered out of the pod and into the crowds. Her heart was pounding, her vision blurry from the readjustment. Swaying, she clutched the crystal storage pendant on her necklace—all her veeyar possessions, her cloudpocket, her cryptobanking keys. She had to firewall and disconnect it to offline storage. It was glowing, humming warm in her hand, registering new entries. Those swords were inside, coated with a minuscule portion of the divine black Sheath of code the devi had sloughed off herself.

Durga clutched the pendant and held it to her chest, inside it a tiny fragment of a disembodied goddess.

Durga looked up at the idol of Kali. Painted black skin glossy under the hot rhinestone chandelier hanging from the pandal’s canvas and printed fiber dome. She had found the traditional pandal down an alley in Old Ballygunge, between two crumbling heritage apartment buildings. Behind a haze of incense smoke, Kali’s long tongue lolled a vicious red. Under her dancing feet lay her husband, Shiva (Shiva seemed to be married to everyone, but that was also because so many of his wives were manifestations of the same divine energy). Durga had learned as a child that Kali nearly destroyed creation after defeating an army of demons, getting drunk on demon blood and dancing until everything began to crack under her feet. Even Shiva, who laughed at first at his wife’s lovely dancing skills, got a little concerned. So he dove under her feet to absorb the damage. Kali, ashamed at having stomped on her husband, stuck out her tongue in shame and stopped her dance of chaos.

Or so one version of the story goes.

Looking at clay Kali and her necklace of heads, her wild three-eyed gaze, the fanged smile that crowned her long tongue, Durga wasn’t convinced by that version. Kali didn’t look ashamed. No, she looked pleased to be dancing on her husband. Shiva was a destroyer too, like her. He could take it.

Being small and nimble, Durga had managed to make it to the front of the visitors in the pandal, close enough to smell the withering garlands hanging off the idol, and the incense burning by her feet. Crushed and bounced between people on all sides of her, Durga closed her eyes, joined her palms, and spoke to Kali as she never had before except as a child, mouthing the words quietly.

“Kali Ma. I thought you might like to know that there’s a new devi in town. She looks a lot like you. Younger, though. Just a year old.” Durga placed one hand on her chest, against the slight bump of the pendant under her tunic. It was offline and firewalled.

“I carry a piece of her with me. She’s… all over the place, I suppose. She really does take after you. She came out of another devi, just like you came out of Durga. Then she spread herself over a world. Some people got bits and pieces of her. There’s this megacorp—that’s like a god, kind of, even calls itself Shiva, after your husband, so predictable. Great job dancing on his chest, by the way. Dudes need humbling now and then. So Shiva the megacorp is offering a lot of money for those pieces of the goddess. Also threatening to have anyone hiding or copying the pieces arrested. Go figure.

“I want you to know I’m not going to sell her out. They want to imprison her. She’s too bitchy to mine coins and drive up veeyar-estate value for them like their other AI devis. Good for her.

“She’s everywhere now. Like the old gods. Like you.

“I’m… I hope she doesn’t mind, but I’ve been sharing the piece of her I got with friends I trust. I don’t know how many people got away with pieces of her. I share it so more good people have it than bad. Numbers matter. We make things with the devi code. Armor, for ourselves and others. Weapons, so that trolls—those are demons—can’t hurt us when we visit other worlds, or will get hurt super bad if they try. You know how annoying demons are. You’re always fighting them and stringing up their heads. They’ve started an infowar, and there are a lot of them. We need all the help we can get. I don’t have a lot of money, so I sell those goddess-blessed weapons and armor to others who need protection across the domains. Cheap, don’t worry—that’s why hacksmiths like us get customers for this kinda stuff. We don’t overcharge like the corps. I like to think she gave me that piece of her so I could do things like this.