River of Gods (5 page)

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.

New Varanasi runs into old Kashi in a series of discontinuities and
juxtapositions. Streets begin in one millennium and end in another.
Vertiginous corporate spires lean over shambles of alleys and wooden
houses unchanged in four centuries. Metro viaducts and elevated
expressways squeeze past the sandstone
linga
of decaying
temples. The cloy of rotting petals permeates even the permanent jizz
of alcohol-engine fumes, dissolving into an urban perfume that cities
dab behind their cloacal bits. Bharat Rail employs sweepers with
besoms to keep flower petals off the track. Kashi generates them by
the billion and the steel wheels can't cope. The phatphat turns down
a dark laneway of clothing shops; pale plastic dummies, armless and
legless but smiling nevertheless, swing from racks overhead.

"Am I allowed to ask where you're taking me?" Satnam says.

"You'll find out soon enough." Truth is, Najia Askarzadah
has never been, but ever since she heard the Australians crowing
about how bold they were in going to it and they weren't grossed out,
not at all, she's looked for an excuse to find this
back-of-backstreet club. She has no idea where she is, but she
reckons the driver is taking her in the right direction when dangling
shop dummies give way to hookers in open storefronts. Most have
adopted the Western standard uniform of lycra and overemphatic
footwear, a few cling to tradition, in the steel cages.

"Here," says the phatphat driver. The little wasp-coloured
plastic bubble rocks on its suspension.

Fight! Fight!
exclaim the alternating neons above the tiny
door between the Hindu icon shop and the hookers drinking Limka at
the chai stall. A cashier sits in a tin cubby by the door. He looks
thirteen, fourteen, and already he's seen everything from under his
Nike beanie. Beyond him, stairs lead up into stark fluorescent light.

"One thousand rupee," he says, hand out. "Or five
dollar."

Najia pays local.

"This isn't exactly what I imagined for a first date,"
Satnam says.

"Date?" Najia says as she leads him up the stairs that
climb, turn, dip, turn again, and finally empty on the balcony over
the pit.

The large room had once been a warehouse. Sick green paint,
industrial lamps and conduiting, louvred skylights all tell its
history. Now it's an arena. Ranged around a five-metre hexagon of
sand are ranks of wooden pews, tiered as steeply as a lecture hail.
Everything's new built from construction timber stolen from the
cash-starved Varanasi Area Rapid Transit. The stalls are faced with
packing case panels. When Najia lifts her hand from the railing it
comes away sticky with resin.

The warehouse is heaving, from betting booths and fighters' stalls
down at the ringside to the back row of the balcony where men in
check workshirts and dhotis stand on their benches for a better look.
The audience is almost entirely male. The few women are dressed to
please.

"I don't know about this," Satnam says but Najia has the
scent of close packed bodies, sweat, primal fluids. She pushes to the
front and peers down into the pit. Money changes owners over the
betting table in a blur of soft, worn notes. Fists wave fans of
rupees and dollars and euros; the sattamen keep track of every paisa.
All eyes are on the money, except for one man, diagonally opposite
her on the ground floor, who looks up as if he has felt the weight of
her regard. Young, flashy. Obvious Hood, thinks Najia. Their eyes
meet.

The barker, a five-year-old boy in a cowboy suit, stalks the pit
hyping up the audience as two old men with rakes turn the bloody sand
into a Zen garden. He has a bindi mike on his throat; his weird
little voice, at once old and young, rattles from the sound system
through a wash of tabla-and-mix anokha. From his tone of innocence
and experience, Najia wonders if he might be a Brahmin. No: that's
the Brahmin in the front row booth, a seeming ten-year-old dressed
twentysomething flanked by tivi-wannabe girlis. The barker is just
another street boy. Najia finds she's breathing fast and shallow. She
no longer knows where Satnam is.

The din, already staggering, ratchets up a level as the teams go out
on the sand to parade their fighters. They hold them high over their
heads, stalking around the ring, making sure everyone can see where
their money is going.

The microsabres are appalling creatures. A small California gentech
company owned the original patent. Cut standard
Felis domesticus
with reconstructed fossil DNA from
Smilodon fatalis
. Result:
bonsai sabretooth, something the size of a large Maine Coon with
Upper Palaeolithic dentistry and manners to match. They enjoyed a
brief star-pet celebrity until their owners found them taking out
their and their neighbours' cats, dogs, Guatemalan domestics, babies.
The engineering company filed for bankruptcy before the writs took to
the air, but the patent had already been massively infringed in the
battle clubs of Manila and Shanghai and Bangkok.

Najia watches an athletic girl in cropped muscle top and parachute
baggies parade her champion head-high around the ring. The cat is a
big silver tabby, built like a strike aircraft.

Killing genes, gorgeous monster. Its fangs are sheathed in leather
scabbards. Najia sees the girl's pride and love, the crowd's roaring
admiration redirected on to her. The barker retires to his commentary
podium. The bookies issue a rush of slips. The competitors slide back
into their boxes.