The Inhuman Peace Read online

  But the dreams remained.

  At first it had been just the panic of knowing that something had gone wrong, that bots meant to stay in Colombo had escaped, and they were coming here, heading to Kandy. Then the dream had changed. First to sitting in front of her parents’ old television, watching the news – three dead, twelve injured. The memory of monks ranting about robotics and karma.

  But as of late it had changed again. The dream now began with the last act of that tragic drama; the memory of cutting into that little girl’s body, slashing away the steel and the wires and the clever cabling underneath the fake skin. In real life, she had performed the autopsy with flawless precision, falsified the report just enough to let everyone keep their jobs, and moved on. In the dream, however, instead of the precise cuts with the 1-2 scalpel, she slashed into the body with a knife, an ugly and rusted thing, and the body screamed and twitched and bled, and the head, separated from the corpse, whispered can speak, can speak, can speak, and opened its mouth in a rictus of terror.

  Kushlani de Almeida was not a superstitious person, a fact that her family often deplored. But as of late she had taken her father’s advise and wore a panchayudhaya. The little golden disc, worn around her neck, held tiny avatars of the traditional bow and arrow, sword, trident, conch and disc. And because she was practical, it also had the decidedly nontraditional radio ID chip that signed her in and out of the office. And here she was, unable to sleep, turning that little golden disc over and over in her hand.

  She heard the gutter whine of the bike before the lights washed over her windows. There was that initial moment of panic – it was, after all, quite late – but she recognized the voice at the gate, so she made her way downstairs and opened the door.

  Sure enough, it was Jagath.

  ‘Miss,’ he said, holding out a little voice recorder. She played it.

  ‘We’ve got trouble on the project,’ said Hewage’s voice in the hot night. ‘Come. Immediately.’

  Thirty minutes later the sun crept over the grey hills, cutting into the sweltering heat with lances of red and gold. It had done so long before humans came and claimed these hills as theirs and set up temples, and by now had gotten into the habit of things. The sacred city of Kandy, having sat still in its own shadow for almost a thousand years, had also gotten used to the sight.

  The Ministry of Reconciliation, arguably the worst-named government body to ever exist, hummed with activity. Beyond the initial warren of buildings, the Watchtower, the ever vigilant seat of the entire bot operation, stretched giant solar cells, unfolding them lotus-like to catch the sun.

  Jagath’s bike crawled up to the gate and whined in. Kushlani de Almeida, having gotten off a little before, followed a few minutes behind; her parents would have a had heart attack if she was seen on the back of a bike. The guards waved her onto the path that led to the Watchtower.

  Two more gates followed; then, in front of the surprisingly normal-looking entrance to the Watchtower, was a game attempt at plastic grass, one of Hewage’s endless attempts at sprucing the place up. She kicked them aside and strode in. They had meant to have the entrance tarmacked, but with one thing and another, and government budget being spent on frivolities, it had never happened.

  The production lab was running. An endless stream of body parts, shaped like children’s limbs, clattered past her on the conveyor belt. Bay 17 – where the editors and sound mixers lived – was lit up. A few dozen interns – gangly, overexcited graduates lured from the nearby University of Peradeniya by the promise of a government pension – floated between offices, flocking around researchers like the glorified carrier pigeons that they were. It was all rather …

  Normal.

  That surprised her.

  The carpet led her to the glass elevator and upwards to the very top, to Hewage’s dominion: the dome-like command and control centre from which every inch of the Watchtower’s workings could be operated. Within, the stench of smoke and ash hanging like a stale toxin, and at the centre of it, Hewage – a thin, grey-haired man in the black and white of a government servant. Next to him, on the one empty tabletop, a mug full of coffee dust and cigarette butts.

  She had never really probed into how Hewage got his position there. To run the entire Watchtower, to sit there with his cigarette and his crumpled shirt and bark out orders and have a hundred men and women jump to do his bidding in their crisp shirts and white sarees. It was the kind of position you got only if your family was, as everyone said, ‘connected’. But Don Hewage had no friends, and the only family he had was dirt poor and in crippling debt. He had an engineering degree and a stint at the University, and then red lines on his record – that would be the Peradeniya insurrection. Nobody knew him outside the Ministry of Reconciliation. He even had that scar of a name: Don Hewage. No ancestral names, no lineage to declare his place in society – just the accusation of having bent over to the Portuguese, most likely because he was from a poor family that had taken money in exchange for their dignity. But somehow he had wrangled himself in here – a roboticist in this highest of offices, to head the single largest source of pure profit for the government.

  One of life’s mysteries.

  The lab doors opened. The familiar dome beyond, banks of outdated computers lit up, an image across their screens: a child, or something that looked like a child, bathed in oil and dust, standing on a field of bloodless corpses. The king of a dead hill. The killcam broadcast swerved into its face, marking the tribes, the flayed skin, the metal beneath and its mouth open in a triumphant scream. Viewership counts: Ceylon, India, Australia, Malaya, Maldives. All the colonies south of the white noise broadcast by the Vatican’s stupid Babel Machine. The ultimate daytime show.

  ‘Everything’s normal,’ she said by way of complaint.

  Hewage blinked owlishly at her. ‘No need to start a panic, neh?’ he said. ‘Tea?’

  It was odd not having One here. The guy was an inbred idiot, but he made good tea with just the right amount of milk and sugar and a dash of ginger, something he’d picked up on a work rotation at the Hambantota harbour. So instead, she sat down and watched Hewage potter about with his stooped shoulders.

  Eventually, he handed her a piece of paper. Old school, that was Hewage. Wasting trees.

  Hewage, it began.

  I’ll get to the point. I’m not happy with the new developments on your side of the pond. I’ve been seeing scattered reports in the Ceylonese media about some robots from the Crofton–Kandy entertainment complex being used in a private show of some sort by some Bandaranaike toff. Then I have Sir Nigel Penhaligon claiming that your bots are glitching and heading up to Kandy to slaughter innocent people in the streets.

  Where do I start? This is a clusterfuck, as the Americans say, and you, my good man, are up front and centre. Bots being used for private entertainment – which idiot authorized that? Those bots are the property of the Crofton Institute, and Lady Crofton is a very influential member of Parliament – NOT to be trifled with.

  But far more worrying is this business of a technical glitch. There should be NO technical glitches anywhere. Not on the bots, not on the broadcast, not on the reporting and certainly not on containment. That was our arrangement with you.

  I don’t want excuses. We are dispatching two people to sort this out once and for all. One will evaluate all the software and hardware running on those things. The other will exterminate any aberrations.

  Assign your best and brightest to assist the evaluator. The exterminator will sort out his arrangement with Sir Penhaligon and the Inquisition.

  No tricks. If you try what you did in Singapore, I’ll have you transferred to the bottom of the ocean with concrete shoes. I expect this to be completely sorted out and forgotten in six months.

  Regards,

  Edgar Drake III

  Permanent Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs

  ‘Fuck,’ she said.

  There were several things that deserved the curse.
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  Hewage dumped a mug in front of her and started pacing about. ‘The Bandaranaikes are going to suffer,’ he said. ‘Drake’s ordered all of Aritha Bandaranaike’s land to be turned over to the Crown. He’s the heir immediate, so House Bandaranaike loses half of everything they have. That House is being decimated. Rambukpotha and Madugalle are over the moon.”

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Such great shifts meant periods of intense and ugly change. They would see the changes soon: ministry boards being reshuffled, public-private enterprises suddenly restructured, mass firings, anyone even remotely related to the Bandaranaikes being swapped out for whoever from the other Houses could sneak a foot through the door. She reached for the mug, troubled. The tea was surprisingly generous, heavy and sweet, almost like her mother’s.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Nobody’s happy about it. Bandaranaikes in courts. Bandaranaikes sending petitions to the Queen. And bloody Aritha seems to have slept with the daughter of the Minister of Defense. Anything about him brings us up. Right now the biggest problem is that every time they call me up to explain, I have to tell them we can’t really predict the bots, and that’s what makes for good TV. Then they talk about putting up fences and getting the army to contain them, and then someone shows them a budget. There’s a motion circulating in the governor’s office saying we’re a danger to the whole country. Report from a Lieutenant Kanishka, same bastard who’s been handling coordination down there. Whole laundry list of manure: iterations get more dangerous, complex battle formations, all that bullshit. And a counter-motion saying if they shut us down, the government loses so much bloody international tax money that they’ll be running back to the Crown, hat in hand—’

  ‘Hewage?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What do we do? And why the hell is Edgar Drake involved?’

  Hewage stopped pacing. ‘We do as Drake says,’ he said. ‘You’re the liaison to the evaluator. Give them access. Let them do their crap’, he waved a hand, ‘And roll back changes when they’re done.’

  ‘Hewage.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We just finished putting them back together.’

  He gave her a look and lit his cigarette. Blue smoke puffed out, filling the air. ‘So?’

  These last six months, whenever the autopsy of that girl-bot came up, she would try explaining things to Hewage.

  ‘She felt alive,’ Kushlani had said, over and over again. ‘Imagine being born in an urban warzone, having to fight every day of your life. Imagine what you would grow up to be. You would be violent. You would be savage. But you would still be human, wouldn’t you? You would still be brave and afraid and sometimes cruel and sometimes kind and sometimes just tired. And he had said, “Wipe her.”’

  He read her. That was Hewage, all over again. ‘You repaired the girl,’ he said. ‘Wiped her memories, reset her to factory defaults?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Same difference, at the end of the day.’

  ‘Hewage?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why is Edgar Drake involved in this? What did you do in Singapore? And why did you call me up? What do I do?’

  He didn’t smile; not quite. But there was a twitch; not the kind that was amused, but the kind that suddenly made him seem older, crueller and a lot less like the absent-minded manager she knew.

  ‘We’re out of milk powder,’ he said. ‘Run down to the shop and get us some, will you?’

  TWO

  How does one describe British India? A vast explosion of people, and colour, and the smell and texture of a billion bodies and minds toiling. A subcontinent reduced to being a province, thanks to the guns that spat remorseless pieces of metal, time and time again, into brown and white bodies alike. Picture empires and billions soldered into a slave-nation that rules half the world in trade and arms.

  And in this madness was Goa, a city-state once created by the Hindu sage Parashruma, then remade by the Portugeuse captain Alfonso de Alberquerque, and then ground down and recast again when the Portuguese handed it over to the British as a gesture of desperate friendship during the Napoleanic Wars. And over the military constraints of its design, Goa layered its many addictions: its bazaars, its beaches. In Goa the sheer chaos of India met the pomp and infinite rulesets of British governance, and, over decades, bowled it over, knifed it in a dark alley and tossed its dead body into the sea. This was the only place in the world where the tourists were more local than the locals. And in this dry heat stood the Goa Mathematical and Military University.

  ‘What is it that separates mankind from the animals?’ said the man at the pulpit.

  It was cold in those dark halls. Despite the heat outside, the students huddled, wrapped in their warmest, surrounded by the old stone of the lecture room. The wooden door that lay between them and freedom bore a sign that said Psychohistory.

  The man the door belonged to looked like the word itself. He was young and old at the same time, like a philosopher hitting middle age. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and crow’s feet around the eyes; but the eyes themselves were bright, and alert, and sharp, and somehow hungry. It was he who decreed both the temperature and the syllabus in these halls.

  ‘Anyone?’ he tried. This was a question he always asked in his class; it was useful to gauge how good a particular batch was, and how open they were to having their beliefs broken down and substituted with knowledge.

  A few hands went up. ‘Intelligence,’ said one of the furry creatures.

  ‘Dreams.’

  ‘Religion.’

  ‘Genocide?’ tried a fourth.

  ‘Good, but not quite there,’ said the professor. ‘Intelligence, not really. We know we’re probably the most intelligent on Earth, but the margins are actually pretty small. Apes are intelligent. We’ve seen how they can easily learn languages and complex symbols. Whales have their own language … dolphins … cats … and octopuses, if we understand them properly, are intelligent tool-users.

  ‘What of dreams? Animals dream. Genocide … yes, we’ve observed plenty of instances among our close genetic neighbors, such as chimpanzees, where one tribe will wipe out another, so the only difference is that we have larger tribes to do this with. Religion … interesting hypothesis, Miss Watson, but I submit to you that religion is a by-product of the real reason.

  ‘And the real reason, ladies and gentlemen, is … extelligence.’ He wrote that word with a flourish on the wallscreen behind him. It had a neon glow in the amber light. ‘Extelligence. We have the ability to record, preserve and share our thoughts, our dreams, our religious convictions, our plans for what to do to that nasty sabretooth cat that keeps prowling around the cave … extelligence. A body of knowledge that often outlives us. We experiment with the world around us and transmit what we know through books, videos, culture, religion, so that the next generation can stand on the shoulders of that knowledge and do even greater things. Our holy books, written thousands of years ago, laid out tried and tested standards of behaviour so that we won’t have to start from scratch. Our engineering manuals describe engines, electricity, mechanics, so that anyone around the world can learn engineering without having to rediscover the wheel. We are basically the sum of our intelligence plus our ancestors’ knowledge.

  ‘In this way, we evolve faster than our genetics would otherwise indicate. The real difference between us and the monkeys, people, is that if a monkey discovers gravity, it has no way of making sure that knowledge outlives it. Every octopus, born alone on the seabed, must learn from scratch what its predators are and how to make those little shell-like structures they live in. We, on the other hand, have Newton’s books and colleges and old wives’ tales to tell us about the world. So when studying the world around us, when trying to predict how countries and cultures will behave, we have to remember that our individual intelligence does not matter. What we have to study is the several thousand years of extelligence that a culture has built up. Right ther
e is the key to our future.’

  This earned the customary impressed nods from the audience. He always enjoyed this part. A bit of theater to get them in the mood before the coursework piled up.

  ‘So we’re going to start by looking at and predicting some limited and fictional cultures before we head into the complexities of the real thing,’ he said, warming up. ‘Download the excerpts from and—’

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, irritated.

  There was a creak from the wooden door and the Dean poked his head in. ‘Am I interrupting?’

  Well, obviously, you idiot, but I can’t tell you that because you’re the Dean. ‘Not at all. What can we do for you, sir?’

  ‘There’s someone waiting for you,’ said the Dean enigmatically.

  ‘Alright, carry on with the Foundation excerpts,’ he said to the students, and followed the Dean out. ‘What’s this about, Henry?’

  There was a strange white man there. He was bald and built like a tank, and in one hand he carried a silver-tipped cane. ‘Edgar Drake the Third, Foreign and Commonwealth Office,’ he said, sticking out a hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Professor Bengali. That’s an odd surname, isn’t it? Bengali?’

  ‘Not at all, I assure you,’ said Jacob Bengali, feeling a slight chill. The proffered hand was clammy and uncomfortable to the touch. ‘My family’s from Calcutta. You’re not the real Drake, are you? You’d be much older.’

  Drake smiled. ‘As I said, the Third. I’m afraid my original is, indeed, much older. And possibly in better shape.’

  ‘What can I do for the Foreign Office?’

  ‘There’s a small situation we need some advice on, Professor,’ said Edgar Drake, holding out a document. Jacob took it. At his touch, the paper transformed itself from a blank sheet into an ornate invitation. ‘We’d like to invite you for tea at my office on Thursday.’