Chapter I

The alarm began as an inconsequential buzzing-rising deep within the walls of sleep, and then growing in pitch as it ate away at the silence. As he stirred, his breathing increased, and the pitch and volume adjusted itself accordingly, not loud enough to jar him, yet sufficient to prevent him from dropping off to sleep again. It was time. He cursed and opened his eyes. The buzzing stopped.

Running his hand across the stubble on his chin, Prakash reflected on what the day ahead held for him. He got up and shuffled across the floor to the bathroom, switching on the vidscreen on the way. A moment later, a sultry voice began to read out the day’s news. He hardly paid attention to it, as he poked around his mouth with the toothbrush, watching the drops of foam trickle down his chin. He looked at the blotched mirror. A gaunt face stared back at him, a study in bumps and scars, like the walls of an open cast mine. His sleepy eyes still held a spark of the fire that had ignited them in his youth, and hinted of things to be accomplished someday. His closely trimmed hair barely hid the metallic silver lines of the neural implant radiating from the nape of his neck towards his ears.

A splash of cold water was not enough to rid him of sleep. Something stronger was called for. He turned to the vidscreen, said loudly, “Gimme a jolt”.

The next moment, he felt like a sudden surge of energy was moving through his veins, as his head snapped back, his eyes popped open, and he felt like a million bucks. The feeling subsided, but now he was fresh and raring to go. The Jolt program was illegal, of course. Ever since medullar implants had become cheap, requiring just a colloidal injection of nano electrodes on the back of the neck, all sorts of innovative uses had evolved. Originally intended to help cure epileptic patients by transmitting electrical signals which would stimulate certain parts of the brain where the nano electrodes had been placed, people had developed other illegal programs that super stimulated the pleasure centres, to give the kind of rush that coke addicts were accustomed to in the last century. Some of these traded for as much as their real world drug counterparts on the NetherWorld network.

Jolt was just another program he had acquired and modified. In its original form, it would have caused slow but irreparable brain damage paralyzing him over a period, but he had spent months tweaking it, to remove the inconsistencies.

He walked out of the house, and after telling it to lock itself, went down the stairs to the street below. A long line of grey apartment buildings stretched out on either side, the walls of most of them had graffiti and torn propaganda posters flapping in the wind. He paused briefly, to regard this vista of grey sky, grey concrete and a road completely covered by slush mixed with snow, which was still falling in large lazy columns of flakes, buffeted randomly by the occasional violent gust.

A giant poster greeted him on the wall opposite. “Jai Shri Ram! Long Live Hindu Rashtra!” it proclaimed in lurid saffron letters, in both English and Hindi, against a larger than life picture of what was supposedly Lord Ram, with the muscles of a prize wrestler, and a raised bow and arrow.

Pretending not to look at it, Prakash trudged through the snow to the small teashop that served him breakfast. The teashop was not very modern by any standards, with its scarred wooden benches and a large brass pot of milk kept perpetually bubbling on an electric stove. An old vidscreen, one of the discontinued models that did not feature voice recognition, hung on the wall, grimy with years of soot and dust, tuned to the official newsfeed. Which was surprising….

“Jai Shri Ram, Prakash bhaiya”, the short, stocky man behind the counter grinned obsequiously, as he polished off milk stains from it with a rag. The look in his eye made Prakash slow his stride, and then he noticed the saffron clad hulk at one of the benches.

“JSR to you too, Bahadur,” he said a little too loudly, and sat down as the shop owner brought him his tea and samosas. The apparition in saffron apparently heard, for he rose ponderously and sat down right in front of Prakash. “Jai Shri Ram, Parkaash bhai”, he leered. “How are things at SuryaTech? Everything going on well?” He rubbed the three day old stubble on his cheek with a fat hand adorned with gold rings and tossed back his dreadlocks as he looked at Prakash unblinkingly across the table.

Prakash nodded in the affirmative. “They tell me that there have been cases of system break-ins. You wouldn’t know anything about it would you now?” The gold false tooth gleamed dangerously.

“I don’t have anything to hide, Jagdish”, said Prakash quietly, looking him straight in the eye. “I think you’re a better judge of that than I am.”

Jagdish’s grin remained in place, but it was frozen now, and a sinister look had crept into his eyes. “Look after yourself, Parkaash bhai. Terrorism is on the rise, and one can never be too careful…” was his parting shot as he swaggered out of the shop, completely ignoring the bill that had been brought to the table. Ramsevaks never paid their bills anyway.

The atmosphere seemed to lighten after his departure. Bahadur came out from behind the counter, after switching the vidscreen back to a lurid illegal interactive infotainment channel. “Do you like living dangerously, Prakash bhaiya? One doesn’t talk like that to a Ramsevak, especially Jaggu! After last week’s magnetopulse grenade attack on the power grid, these guys have tightened their vigil. You had better watch out now,” Bahadur chided his favourite customer, cursing under his breath as he tore up the unpaid bill left by Jagdish.

“Don’t worry Bahadur, I’ll be careful”, said Prakash. He got up, paid for his breakfast, and went outside. A blizzard was starting up, so he turned up the thermostat on his jacket.

The chilly wind tore at his exposed face, but he was used to it, and resolutely trudged on.

Thick snow had piled up on the street. As far as he could remember, winters always brought snowfall here in Delhi. People said it had started only after the Mahayudh, the last war of 2012 -a series of nuclear strikes had decimated the population, besides reducing several cities, like his own, into vast fields of radioactive rubble. It paid to carry a radcounter when you were going to places like the one he frequented. The main road was deserted at this time of day, even hovercar traffic being sparse because of the storm. Those who could afford thermal sensing and radar-autopilot kits were the only ones to venture out on a drive. For all he knew, he was the only idiot to be risking frostbite walking to the metro station on a morning like this.

The Badarpur metro station began as a hole in the ground. The snow had piled up in large frozen blocks here, and walking was a risky business. The local Safai Sevaks had gone on strike again, ensuring that there was no one to clean the pavement. The open cover of a wall mounted COM link repeater unit creaked in the wind. It was surprisingly working, the indicator lights flickering defiantly at the icy weather outside. Looking at it reminded Prakash about something he had to do. He ducked into the narrow alley beside it, and withdrew a small keypad from his pocket. It took a couple of seconds to coax the repeater to accept a connection from his infolink; cracking rarely changed government codes hardly posed him a challenge. He punched a few keys, to encrypt the channel with his own algorithm-a biometric one that used a complex combination of his fingerprints and the proportion of gases in the air he happened to be breathing at that moment. A few seconds later, he was entering the number that would set the nanospeakers tingling within Javed’s ear.

“Is the stuff ready?” A curt voice sounded inside his head. “Yes. The usual place? Good.”

He disconnected, and walked down into the subway. It was warmer down here, amongst the crowds of people, mostly office-goers like himself. He walked over to the counter and paid for his ticket, ignoring the ticket clerk’s stare when he said he wanted to go to CP. Like most other metro stations, this one too was decrepit. Vidscreens on top that displayed train schedules and adverts, were cracked and scarred, the artificial voices that announced arrivals and departures varied their pitch or stuttered unintelligibly. A teenager in a grimy windcheater rushed up to him.

“Please saab, a NeuralAug? Only seven hundred? Good, imported stuff! Please?” he wheedled, showing a glimpse of a sealed bottle in his pocket. Prakash smiled and pointed to the metallic lines on his neck. “Sorry kid, I already got one.”

With a look of sullen disappointment, the boy walked away, to try again with an old lady struggling with a large bag. A beggar who had had both legs replaced by cheap prosthetics, walked around, the servomotors in his joints whining with every move. He did not ask anyone for alms. People swiped his battered card-reader of their own accord. He looked very old, and the self-powered legs still did not seem adequate, for he seemed to be making a great effort to move forward. His eyes could have been glass marbles, they glowered from sunken eye sockets, a look of utter rage locked permanently in them. It was like a speeding moment that had been arrested, a sweeping, destructive fury frozen as though in stone. Some hint of a reaction started in Prakash, and then was stillborn.

The train rumbled in at the platform and there was a mad scramble for the doors as usual.

The coach he was travelling in seemed much older and ricketier than the rest. Faded and peeling advertisements plastered the walls of the coach, peddling everything from shady clinics offering all kinds of services, NeuralAug programs to download and money making schemes to the more mundane, like cram courses for competitive exams. Seats were scrawled with graffiti; some had been slashed and had bits of foam insulation sticking out. The overhead lights were dim and grimy, mostly flickering, adding a movie scope effect to the lights flashing past in the tunnel at regular intervals. For a moment, Prakash idly surveyed his fellow passengers. There was the old man who claimed to have ’laid the foundations of Hindu Rashtra’ in 1992, the plump trader on his weekly trip to the wholesale markets, the overly pious looking government employee, who could only be a government employee, the way he hugged his bag nervously. A couple of friendly neighbourhood Ramsevaks, whose facial expressions seemed to indicate that their one pleasure in life would be to eviscerate people with the tridents they carried.

The rest of the people stood listlessly in the aisle, literally hanging from the handle bar, and swaying with the movement of the train. In the alternating patches of light and dark, they looked like a grisly tableau of corpses hung on a scaffolding…

The train was approaching CP now, the ghetto area which had been ground zero for the nuclear strike on Delhi 35 years previously. For a long time, the area had been dangerously radioactive, and the trains even now had thick lead glass windows installed by a paranoid government around that time. However, years of perseverant clean-up efforts had reduced the levels sufficient to cause a mild skin cancer…

The railway system, being mostly deep underground, had not suffered too much damage, and the above ground sections were quickly rebuilt. He saw it now-piles of rubble stretching out endlessly. Why the place was called CP he did not know, it was just a name that had continued from the times before….

The train stopped at one of the designated stops, and Prakash got off. Apart from the dirty red brick station, there was no other building in sight. He walked across, ignoring the few beggars who sidled up to him, some showing their prosthetic arms in need of batteries, and empty bellies in need of food. A small red building had stood in one corner, it was of red brick, and had scale like markings on it, like a sundial. Another relic from long ago, God alone knew what purpose it served. He knew the way like the back of his hand-through the ruins of Park Hotel and Regal (whatever that was), to the long gash in the ground with the makeshift stairway. This had been some sort of underground shopping area before the war. The walls were now covered with graffiti, and some of them dripped slime. The air here was an acrid miasma of smoke, stale tobacco, spices and damp clothes. The few people that moved about had vacant expressions in their eyes, most seemed to be on neuro-aug induced stupor. One of them saw him approach and whimpered something about needing batteries…

Prakash ducked into an alcove, pulled out a rubber glove from his pocket and slipped it on. A well built, swarthy man with a burn scar on his cheek approached him, wearing a similar glove. They shook hands. That was all it took. Microfibres in each glove helped to complete a circuit that in an instant transferred Prakash’s custom bank account password cracker from his info link to the other man’s.

“So have you made the necessary changes?”

“Yes, it’s all there.”

“I hear the IFF have taken out the power generator in Civil Lines. Smooth operators, moved in with magneto pulse grenades by night and did the job.”

Prakash raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have…..”

Javed’s face creased into a grin. “Got some in exchange for a shipment of cranial aug. Never thought it would come in so handy. They pay well, the IFF. At least it would help in paying for my wife’s treatment now”. The grin was replaced by a bitter smile. There was little Prakash could say. Farida had had a run in with some Ramsevikas the previous year, and they had decided to ‘purify’ her. Three months of torture had nearly reduced her to a vegetable. The neural therapy sessions, which would possibly restore her memory and bring her back, cost a bomb apiece.

“Want one? It will cost you though…”

“I’ll tell you if I ever need one,” said Prakash, and retraced his steps back to the station. As he drew nearer, it happened. There was a bright blue flash of light -which made him instantly hit the ground - followed by a loud crackling. He got up and ran towards the metro station. He knew what it was much before he reached the platform-another magneto pulse attack. Sure enough, a handful of Ramsevaks had reached the spot, and were clustered around the station control room, looking at all the fried equipment. That was the beauty of it-a high-energy magnetic pulse that wiped out all unshielded computers and electronic equipment within a 20m radius without harming human beings. Unless you had cheap unshielded cranial augmentations. This is what had been in the charred head of the station master’s corpse on the floor. A note had been left behind, scrawled in red ink:

“Down with Hindu Rashtra. India will live forever!”

The Indian Freedom Fighters were a subversive group that had formed in the years after the war. It had been composed largely of educated youth, who were enraged with the Machiavellian machinations of the extreme rightwing government, and wanted to restore the Indian nation-state, as it had existed earlier-a peaceful democracy. Their emblem was the old tri-colour flag that had belonged to the Indian republic.

“I knew it. Had been telling the idiots to install the magnetic shielding for the control room”, the first Ramsevak muttered.

“Move it. The trains on this sector have been cancelled,” the nearest Ramsevak growled. Prakash cursed. He was going to be late again, paying through his nose for the hovercar taxi transport, which usually suffered business because of the trains. He walked out of the station-straight into the arms of a waiting hovercar driver, who immediately started pestering him about where he wanted to go.

After some haggling over the fare, during which the driver moaned about the high price of fuel cells and how he had 4 kids to feed, Prakash boarded the car and settled down for a slow albeit smooth ride, 15 feet above the rubble strewn wasteland. The car crossed the hazardous CP, and then reached the ruins of the Red Fort, a symbol of ‘medieval imperialism’ according to the guidebooks. Here were grubby housing tenements, crowded streets with a few other cars flying at ground level, a few open spaces where children played, and gleaming in the distance like a mirage, were the long, sleek buildings that housed SuryaTech Ltd., crested by the four huge central towers, whose tops vanished beyond the clouds.