Chapter V: Intrigue

Ravi’s hovercar descended slowly towards its parking bay, and then he killed the engine and paused before getting out. Something was in the back of his mind, nagging him. He should not have overdone the funk pattern at Monty’s. He stumbled out, and slurred at his infolink,”Lock and arm systems”. With a click, the hovercar’s doors shut, and the access panel glowed red, to indicate that the auto theft deterrent system, a joint creation with Albert, was active. The elevator was half way up to his floor when he realized what it was. AGT-4360. The first thing he did was to call Albert. “Tell me more about AGT-4360.”
Albert’s eyes widened with surprise. “Now? Shouldn’t you better be getting some sleep?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m telling you to get your butt down here pronto.”
Albert knew better than to refuse. If he did show up, Ravi would sit with him and they would try to crack the problem together. If he didn’t, Ravi would do it himself anyway. Either way, he wouldn’t sleep. Albert decided that he would make him sleep if he had to clobber him unconscious. He sighed, resigned to his fate, and grabbed the helmet before heading to his jet-bike. The Kawanishi hyper-charger, another illegal vehicle mod he had obtained, kicked in at the touch of a button, and the turbojet engine was transformed into a wailing banshee that propelled him into the sky on a column of flame. A jetbike journey, that would take 25 minutes at top speed on a non-modified bike, took Albert only 15-the five extra minutes due to dodging a police patrol that had decided to investigate the runaway comet in the neighbourhood. He killed the engine and glided noiselessly to a spot next to Ravi’s hovercar, and was soon at his apartment.
“You have to let the whole neighbourhood know that you’re coming, don’t you,” Ravi grumbled as he opened the door.
“Heh, how many of these street-droids can boast of a bike that can do 255 mph? They’d be lucky if they managed even 120.”
“Well, one of these days your luck’s gonna run out”, Ravi growled. “And to think you made me go for those afterburners, when I could have invested in a decent night vision mod for myself!”
“Come off it!” said Albert good-naturedly. “Don’t deny it, your hovcar is the envy of the neighbourhood! Besides, who can catch us when we’re up to speed?”
“Yeah, I’d like to see your face when your fuel tank bottoms out sixty feet above ground level, with a couple of Ramsevaks on your tail!”
Albert’s grin became sheepish. “That’s er…a problem that I’m working on. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way. Compression ratios in the combustion chambers need to be adjusted and some fine tweaking of the intake fins , especially if you use the new Kobaya carbon fibre ones that have a heat dissipation factor of 72%, should help reduce the…”
“Spare me,” said Ravi,” and let’s get down to work.”
“Right, so I was telling you guys about what I had overheard. I told my contact on NetherWorld to check it out. Let’s see if he’s found anything in all these days.”
They set up the connection, after all the necessary security measures, and then Albert opened a chat window.
Connecting to N3th3Rw0R1d://40EC.5A2B.7880.10DE.89BC.3001.0EFF.D7F6…
Connected
Initiating key exchange…
Using CKA-16384 encryption
Connection secured.
Initializing chat request….
Kq2699 entered the room
Kq2699>hello darklord
dARKl04D>who is this?

“Why kq2699?” asked Ravi. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing, that’s the point. I generate a random name every time, so I can’t be traced back.”
“So how does he identify you then?”
“Watch.”

Kq2699>someone you know
dARKl04d>prove it
Kq2699>Mobilis in Mobili N
dARKl04d>ah…the nameless one. It’s been a long time. What can I do for u?
Kq2699>do u have trade for me?
dARKl04d>is this link secure?
Kq2699>yes
dARKl04d>i looked for agt4360...and all I can say is that people are in grave danger
kq4399>who??
dARKl04d>cant name them here it is a defence project. Can prove dangerous to the revolution

Albert and Ravi exchanged glances. If this guy whoever he was, was involved with the IFF, they had hit a bigger can of worms than expected.

dARKl04d> I have fwded my file to your usual address. Use my public key to decrypt it.
Connection reset by peer.
Albert swore under his breath.
Connecting to N3th3Rw0R1d://40EC.5A2B.7880.10DE.89BC.3001.0EFF.D7F6…
Cannot resolve identity.

It could mean only one thing. A power blackout at the other end, which resulted in Darklord’s computer going offline. “Let’s see what we have on email, shall we”, said Albert. “I don’t believe it…he seems to have encrypted it several times! Talk about paranoid!”
He started the decryption process, and watched impatiently as the progress indicator crept towards completion. At last, it was through.
The file was an interactive blue print. Ravi’s hologram projector was activated. The words flashed
“AUTOMATIC GUN TURRET.BUILD 4360”
The words dissolved, and were replaced by a three dimensional view of the object in question. It was a large, spherical mounted turret, with a camera eyepiece located above a stubby barrel. Touching each part of the image led to a description.
They read the document in silence. Where it all fit in-Mona’s job designing rapid response servo systems, the database search feature, the image tracking system-was becoming hideously clear.
The AGT 4360 was more than an automated gun turret. It was capable of comparing the faces of people with those stored in a database of known criminals-and swiftly pinpointing and targeting them in a crowd. The gun in question was a dual mode minigun as well as sniper-it could fire a single high calibre shot from a distance, or spray a given area with armour piercing depleted uranium pellets. Moreover, the four of them had, between themselves, unwittingly helped design every critical subsystem that went into it.

The next paragraph chilled them to the marrow.
After highly successful trials against dummy targets, 50 units will be deployed in various public places around the Capital city. This should provide a boost to law and order forces, besides allowing a much-wanted field trial.

The deployment date was the next morning.

Mona unplugged her thermal jacket from its wall charger, and slinging it around her neck, went downstairs for breakfast. Her brother Zubin, to her mild surprise, was mixing a bowl of cornflakes for her.
“What’s up, stranger, don’t see you around at home much these days?” she asked.
“Need you ask? I’m attending extra classes. ”
“Uh-huh.”
It was the longest conversation they had had in quite a while. Zubin was unemployed. In a bid to acquire the sort of education that the State could not provide, he had signed up for a distance learning course from a European university. Officially, such courses were banned from being accessed over the Net, but the NetherWorld offered fully encrypted back channels over which he could attend his video-lectures.
The vidscreen was reading out the morning news, as usual, in the husky hot babe voice that her brother preferred. Then it grabbed her attention.

“For the first time, the city gets a new security system that will revolutionalize the work of the police force. As part of the ongoing National Security System, SuryaTech officials are installing the AGT 4360, a sophisticated crime deterrent system, at various places in the city. Click below for a live interview with Dr. Sehgal, one of the officials involved with the implementation of the system…”

Mona pulled on her jacket and rushed out of the house, leaving behind a half-empty bowl of cornflakes. She twiddled her infolink and set it so it would monitor the morning newsfeed and send all reports about the AGT 4360 to her earpiece.

The metro was crowded as usual. Mona sat down by the window and looked at the early morning traffic streaming in all directions over the ground and in the sky. Against the backdrop of the chilly dawn, the few flying vehicles that were out looked so much like insects going about their business. When she emerged from the metro station at her usual stop, she saw it for the first time. A couple of technicians were crouching near a large globe that was vertically mounted on the ceiling outside the metro station. One of them had plugged a console into the data port provided for the purpose on the wall. The globe swung easily and fluidly around as he punched test commands, while the automatic turret extended and retracted. One of the technicians was silently appraising Mona from behind. He tweaked the control so that the camera now had her in its sights. He held her in focus till she turned the corner and disappeared from view.
“Ok, I guess the last stage test performed flawlessly here too. Let’s load her up.”
The two men opened the box they were carrying and withdrew the large belt of 20mm ammunition it held. The loading mechanism clicked as it sucked in the five-metre long belt, and then a small red light went on. “Right, the minigun is ready for operation.”
A similar process was repeated for the integrated sniper rifle, and the two technicians rose and walked away. Two small red lights glowed near the retractable gun barrels, to indicate the system was online.

Prakash was at his seat, when the console indicated an incoming call. Dr. Sehgal’s face filled the screen. He seemed rather cheerful.
“ Morning, Prakash. First off, I’d like to congratulate you on your role in the successful implementation of the NSS. It was a good job you did, despite the restrictions that you no doubt must have faced.”
Prakash nodded. It was all he could do to prevent his left eyebrow from levitating. Since when had Dr. Sehgal started to hand out encouragement?
“I would like you to join me”, Dr. Sehgal went on,” in a short while today as we monitor the system during its first live trial.”
Prakash muttered that he would be there, and got up to refill his coffee mug. He tried to marshal his thoughts. The all night hack he had run was probably a waste-the system already had gone online. But then-would Dr. Sehgal still have released the documents for him to see? Anyway, he had made a copy of the file for himself, and transferred it to a secure location, for later perusal.

“Black coffee, go easy on the sugar, and don’t let it be too hot.” Prakash gazed idly around the cafeteria as he waited for the coffee machine to prepare his cup. There were very few people around, since it was quite early in the morning. A news item on the wall-mounted vidscreen nearby caught his eye.

“A suspected IFF terrorist was found dead of unknown circumstances in his house, this morning. The police are investigating …”

The video clip accompanying the item showed a figure slumped over a keyboard. Prakash shrugged, picked up his coffee cup and walked back upstairs. It was time to meet Dr. Sehgal.

Chapter IV: Recreation

“Compile, run test series 5 and then shut down”, Mona snapped at her terminal before leaving for the coffee machine. To her, the whole thing stank. She’d just spent a fortnight surviving on caffeine, interfacing the servo controls of the tracking unit of the project they were working on, with Janos, the communication protocol that had independently been developed by SuryaTech as a common standard for all their projects.

She could understand Prakash’s frustration. Her task was no less challenging-develop a focusing system with a camera that could zoom up to a square centimetre, and lock onto a continuously moving target with precision. This was fine as far as setting up a robot system went, but this system had to have armour plating, and electromagnetic shielding, which would slow down the servo motors….

Then again, what was the point of it all? What was she working on anyway? The secrecy and ‘need to know’ clearance that shrouded everything that went on maddened her. At least her colleagues too shared her angst. She walked out to the lobby, slamming her palm impatiently on the biometric scanner to summon the lift. Prakash, Albert and Ravi would be waiting for her at ground level. The feeble rays of the evening sun trickled in through the gigantic plate glass that covered the atrium. Crowds of hovercars passed overhead in long lines, like flies, vertically arranged in lanes in ascending order of speed. People streamed in and out. For some, like herself, it was the end of the day, while work was just beginning for the rest.

For some reason, looking at the glass windows made her feel like a termite in a glass case.

She sighed, and braced herself for the walk across the football stadium sized ground floor area. A huge holo-display had been set up, publicizing yet another partnership program between Surya Industries and Maxim Enterprises of Hong Kong. It showed a changing photomontage of beaming faces, buildings, facilities, scientists-all that went into SuryaTech.

“Surya and Maxim-redefining the future!”

Mona rolled her eyes at that one. They had been ‘redefining’ the future for so long that she couldn’t understand if she was living in the past or the present. Who actually got paid to write these slogans, she wondered.

A moment later, she was striding towards Prakash, Ravi and Albert, who were waiting for her near the entrance.

“So, what’s the plan? “

Ravi grinned. “Go home, get drunk, hook up a psychedelic neural pattern tape, and get high!”

“She wasn’t talking about how you usually spend your evenings, Ravi”, Prakash said with a straight face. Ravi punched him as the four of them guffawed. It was almost a sense of release, and utter relief, to leave the imposing SuryaTech building, and continue their banter as they made their way to the parking area. Everyone could sense it, a cloud of oppression and uncertainty that enveloped them everyday while they were at work. Every evening when they left, it would dissipate. No one spoke about it, however. It was one of those things that everyone understood.

They were riding Ravi’s new hovercar, one of the sportier new models with integrated hi-speed vertical manoeuvring. “Watch this trick,” he said and spoke into his infolink

“Set Destination-Monty’s”. The mini screen on the dashboard changed to confirm the new destination as the popular dive bar, and autopilot engaged.

“Yeah, so you added voice recognition to the console, so what?” said Mona.

Ravi and Albert looked at each other, then at the other two in the rear seat. “That’s what you think”, Albert winked and flipped up a plastic lid with a glowing red button below it.

“Brace yourself kiddies….”

The next moment the car lunged forward and up, entering the hi-speed lane above them. It went even higher, and raced towards its destination at what seemed like 300 miles an hour. Five minutes later, the speed dropped automatically, and they made a smooth landing in one of the seedier parts of the city.

“Next time you try breaking the sound barrier you might tell us in advance, cowboy”, Prakash grimaced. “How the hell did you fly so fast? Stole an Ion Engine from somewhere?”

“No.” Albert’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, as he stroked his goatee. “These are Fujihara afterburners. Increases engine power by up to 400 percent for a short while.”

Prakash’s jaw dropped. “What the hell did you pay to get those? They would cost 300 thousand credits on the black market. You’d have a hell of a time just smuggling them in, anyway. These engine mods are illegal. Besides, you realize the local friendly Ramsevak patrol wouldn’t take kindly to our flying stunt?”

“Let’s call it an… ah…funds transfer”, said Ravi. “I did someone a favour, he owed me, I made a good investment on my earnings, right?”

Mona groaned. “When will you ever learn to live on the right side of the law? Alright, so now I’m not gonna ask again.”

“That presupposes your identifying the right side correctly, Mona”, said Prakash softly.

She gave him a queer look but said nothing.

“Well, the down side is, afterburning gulps up fuel…see, I’m already down by 20%”, said Ravi, changing the topic.

The four of them stepped out. Snow had already started to fall. They stood in an abandoned industrial complex, outside a large, nondescript building with a neon sign that flashed ‘Monty’s’. The ‘t’ had long since flickered out, and the rest of the letters seemed in danger of following suit sometime soon.

A few other hovercars were parked in the narrow street. They hadn’t been used for quite a while, judging from the thick snow that covered them. Prakash produced a cash card, and swiped it to pay the cover charges on the scanner near the door, which then dutifully slid aside to let them in.

It felt dark and cool inside the bar, the feeling heightened by the diffused lighting that the soft shade LED panels on the ceiling gave off. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, which combined with the multicolored rays from a spinning globe on the ceiling made for interesting hallucinatory effects. Across was the dance floor, where a large number of people gyrated to music that could only be heard by clipping a small aural amplifier to the back of the neck. These were available at no extra charge. It was a great help, because only those who wanted the loud music would hear it, and thus it was possible to carry on a conversation in the place without having to shout.

A sign on the wall read:

Coming soon!

The cYBe4DeM0nZ live!!

All of next week! A heavy metal fan’s dream come true! Prepare to be blown away by the funkiest neural patterns, exclusively composed for your cerebral pleasure!

“Atleast we know what’s hip and happening”, said Albert dryly. The four of them occupied a corner booth after ordering their drinks, and all eyes turned expectantly on Prakash.

“Well, people, let’s face it, we don’t usually get to know what eventually becomes of our projects, but this definitely takes the cake. For starters, today’s phase 7 testing was declared a failure, as I had told you all earlier. “He raised his hand to stop the indignant comments that the other three sought to voice.

“As you are aware, on the last test, our accuracy rate for facial recognition was something like 99.78% after running a comparative search on one million records, with a seek time of 794 milliseconds. During this test, it reduced further to 780. Even that was not apparently good enough for Dr. Sehgal.”

“Arrogant bastard”, Mona said sharply. “By any other standards, for an airport security system this would be excellent. I subjected all the servo motors to individual stress tests as specified. Sehgal’s got it in for us, that’s all.”

“Exactly my point, Mona. If it was just an airport security system being implemented, then we all deserve pats on our backs.”

Realization dawned slowly, but inevitably, like the pinprick of light that eventually becomes an oncoming express train.

“He mentioned something about a targeting system and then clammed up.” Prakash went on.

“AGT-4360”, Albert whispered almost to himself.

“What??”

Wiping beer from his goatee, Albert straightened up and looked around at the rest of them. “I overheard Sehgal mention that to his terminal’s voice recognition system. I think it’s a project code.”

“Why would he be so careless as to use voice recog for something like that,” Ravi’s chubby features crinkled into a thoughtful frown, “unless you were completely invisible around there, eh, Albert?”

Albert flushed. “Well…ok, I….” He sighed. “Alright, I admit I was testing out a fiber-optic camouflage jacket in the vicinity….”

Before the collective gasp, he quickly added, “This was last month, before they added the motion sensors, remember.”

He clapped his hand over Mona’s mouth as she opened it. “No, I’m not gonna tell you where I got it. Ask no questions, hear no lies…”

He got a kick under the table in reply.

“I’m heading to the dance floor, you guys coming?” Ravi had already grabbed a pair of headphones. Prakash saw him linger at the DJ’s booth and sighed. Ravi was a confirmed neural implant junkie. Soon he had joined the crowd that swayed and pulsed to the unheard music. Prakash decided he too would, for once, try a neural pattern. He too selected a clip-on headphone. Along with the heavy metal that instantly assaulted his ears, a series of alternating low and high frequency waves pulsed into his brain via the metal stripe pattern on the back of his head. Not as good as Jolt, but then it wasn’t a program he’d written. The effect of Jolt was like a mule kick to the jaw. This was like being slammed repeatedly by a whole herd of them. He reeled as the neural signal, attuned to the thump of the bass drum, attacked the pleasure centres of his brain, making him see a kaleidoscope of exploding light in front of his eyes, and feel like he was floating off the ground. Two minutes was more than he could stand. It took another minute to return to normal. Mona regarded him with amusement. “Too hot to handle?” she asked.

Prakash nodded, then scratched his jaw and looked at Ravi and now Albert, with wonder. “How can they stand it? I like Beethoven and Bach, the neural versions are so soothing, but this…”

“You’re getting old”, Mona said matter-of-factly. “Besides, this beats working our butts off in SuryaTech any day!” At least that was something they both agreed upon.

He pondered over what she had said, all the way home in Ravi’s hover car. Yes, he thought, as he unlocked his flat and entered, he was getting old. He could still remember, his father, growing older and sicker gradually due to the lethal radiation his battalion had faced during the war, and fading away by the time Prakash turned six years old. He was raised by his mother, on an army widow’s pension, combined with the job she had at Surya Software (which would later merge with several other companies to form SuryaTech).

He reached into his cupboard and withdrew an old plastic box. An old silicon processor lay inside it, its 400 odd golden pins reflecting the light. It was an antique 256-bit transmission controller, that encrypted and routed network traffic of up to fifty thousand users in real time-quite an achievement for its time. He ran his finger over the familiar signature on the reverse side. His mother had been on the team that developed the instruction set for this processor, and several more. It was the time when cold fusion technology had at last been perfected to allow everyday usage. The press had waxed eloquent about how mankind’s energy requirements were completely satisfied, the initial flurry of inventions that followed included hi thrust ion engines, which enabled the development of hypersonic aircraft that connected any two points on the planet within four hours, flying at the edge of space. The invention was timely, because fossil fuels had reached their final crisis in terms of supply. A few other horrifying inventions, including portable laser weaponry, also owed their existence to cold fusion.

He stood on the balcony. A stratoliner appeared as a glowing blue dot on the horizon, then the thunder of its four ion engines grew to a deafening crescendo as it approached for landing, the exhaust nozzles glowing incandescent in the night, floodlighting the drab city below in eerie shades of blue, and leaving a long vapour trail that persisted for several minutes.

He could still see her waving to him at the airport, ten years ago, before leaving for an international seminar in Beijing. He could still see the liner soaring vertically preparatory to its hyperbolic sub-orbital flight trajectory. And then he could see it going up in a white hot ball of flaming plasma, like a meteorite in reverse.

His train of thought abruptly derailed when the vidscreen piped up in its Oxford accented voice-”You have a call”.

It was Bahadur.

“Saab, did you have dinner? Shall I have it sent up to your place?” His face showed a hint of reproach, as he wiped sweat off it.

“Yes, please Bahadur. And please go easy on the oil.” Prakash was in no mood to dress up and go out again. Besides, his thermal jacket’s battery needed recharging.

A few minutes later, Bahadur’s assistant was at the door, with hot parathas wrapped in thermal foil. The meal left him satiated, yet disturbed.

He shook himself. Time to get rid of these depressing thoughts. “Gimme an Ecstasy, level 3.”

The Ecstasy program, as opposed to the Jolt program, sent waves of relaxing signals to his tired brain, to bring him to a calm and peaceful state, preparatory to falling asleep. And it was on the border of sleep that it struck him.

He had to have heard of AGT-4360 somewhere. He got up, turned off the Ecstasy program and sat down at the vidscreen.

“Console. Secure log in. Set up cloak.”

This was enough to start a background program that threaded his terminal across the world’s computer networks, hopping continents, twisting and recrossing itself, encrypting itself with a different cipher along each route, to make him virtually untraceable. All he had to do now was make the final connection.

By the first decade of the 21^st century, wireless networking had become the norm across the world as hardware became cheaper. It also proved to be a blessing after the war, as there were no wires to snap or re-lay. Hence, nearly half a century later, the only places still using wiring were those who were paranoid about security.

Like SuryaTech.

He dialed his own office telephone number. The term ‘telephone’ is loosely used; it was his remote access unit, which would instantly contact his infolink, wherever he was within the premises of Surya Tech. The screen confirmed that a connection was established, before he disconnected. That was all that was required. It was a signal sent to his office terminal, which would now launch a distributed attack on the project file server. To kill time, Prakash had once written a stealth program that would execute instructions passed to it whenever the processor on a system was idle. He had swiftly propagated this little program across his office, so that now he had about fifty computers at his disposal, all working in tandem to break into the project server. Of course, there was the dirty work of clearing up the log files, he would attend to that first thing in the morning. Now for some well deserved sleep.

Chapter III-The module test

Chapter III: The module test

The beeping in his head was starting to cause irritation. Prakash lifted his arm and turned on the infolink. The screen read:

Schedule

1430: Facial recognition module test phase 7

It was time to go. One of the drawbacks of being on the development team for SuryaTech’s National Security System was having to go all the way to the testing areas as the schedule demanded.

Prakash got up from his seat, and went to the lobby, where the express elevators were. After being cleared by the retinal scanner, he punched the 7-digit code that would take him to the testing range in basement number 5, about two miles below ground level.

He hated these elevators. The incredible speed with which they moved always led to pressure build up in his eardrums. He got out, went through another set of biometric scanners, and entered through a blast door into a long corridor, with doors on either side.

The fifth door let him in after checking his fingerprints.

“You’re late.” Dr. Sehgal said brusquely. He was a barrel-chested, bearded man in his sixties, who looked more like a prizefighter than a scientist.

“Anyway, now that you’re here, let’s get on with the test.”

Prakash sat down at the terminal provided, and started installing the code he’d written earlier.

“It’s ready”. He waved to indicate the robot camera that stood nearby.

“Alright, testing phase 7…,” Dr. Sehgal activated the large screen projector. It showed a scene outside a metro station at rush hour. A large crowd of people surged towards the camera. With his laser pointer, Dr. Sehgal targeted a few faces. A red halo appeared around them as they moved forward, then the film froze.

“Memorize.”

The selected faces were instantly stored into a large test database from which they would be re-selected.

The next test would be to check whether the faces could again be identified correctly. Dr. Sehgal started randomly selecting faces for recognition.

A few minutes later, the results of the test were displayed.

Prakash looked up. He would know now, whether the fine-tuning he had done on the algorithm had paid off or not.

“Seek time still needs improvement. 780 milliseconds is not good enough.”

Prakash did a double take.

“Not good enough? It’s practically being done in real time! It has to search a minimum of a million records before coming up with a match!”

Something wasn’t right. The older man would not look him in the eye. He shook his head gravely. “There’s the targeting system also that needs to be accounted for…the project is already behind schedule..,” he muttered almost under his breath.

“Targeting system? Isn’t this just an airport security measure being installed?”

Dr. Sehgal looked up, his face impassive.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Prakash. That will be all for today. Please try to optimize the system further, before our next series of tests.”

Prakash made his way back to his seat. Something wasn’t right. Why was access time so critical for this application? The National Security System surely went beyond all this.

He sighed. All projects at SuryaTech were shrouded in the utmost secrecy, and team members were kept informed on a need to know basis. He’d have to find out on his own.

He decided to call a meeting of his own.

“Videoconference. Team FRM2046003.”

The holo-projection screen expanded to show the faces of his three team members.

“Right, people, testing was done for phase 7 just now. They want to make it faster yet.”

An angry babble of voices rose at once. Signalling the trio to keep calm, Prakash asked them to meet him after work.

Chapter 2:Business as usual

Mohan Kumar Singh was a devout man. He was woken up at 4 am every morning by his wife, after which he would walk to the nearby temple to pray to Lord Ram. Afterwards he would head for the local metro station for his hour-long ride to the government office block in Chandigarh. Today, he settled down, managing to get hold of an empty seat, before the crowds surged in at other stops. The newsreader on the vidscreen in the coach droned on, something about increasing riots in Washington over shortages. It all seemed so far away, so disconnected from his cosy cocoon of life here. The work was minimal, the side income was phenomenal. How much did a junior party member and passport office employee have to do, anyway? For the most part, Mohan’s day comprised giving passports the once over with the digital scanner, and charging a little extra under the table to quicken the process, without verifying entries in the government database on passport holders.

That had been a tough one to arrange. His contact at SuryaTech, which had designed the database, had charged hell for the reverse engineering, which now enabled him to validate a passport without checking the database first. The ‘investment’ had paid off, for now the extra income came in handy. He had three daughters to marry off, after all. Besides, everyone he knew supplemented his or her income in this manner. They had to. No one asked their colleagues any questions; it was a commonly shared dirty secret.

The train had long since left Delhi and was racing across a vast, treeless wasteland. One of the many contaminated areas, where no one lived despite the fertile soil.

“I used to live somewhere here.”

“Huh?” Mohan was jolted out of his reverie. He turned to glance at the elderly, unkempt co-passenger who was addressing him. The man looked around eighty years old. It was surprising he had lived so long. Not many people lived past sixty these days.

“It was a small village, over here, before the war. When I returned, I was told I could not go near it, it was too dangerous because of the radioactivity.”

“Oh.” Mohan could think of nothing else to say.

Not seeming to notice, the old man went on. He was speaking slowly and clearly, his cracked voice carrying a faint trace of wonderment.

“I’ve seen it all. The Emergency, the terrorism in Punjab that killed my father in ’83. Lost a brother in the Indian Army sometime around the end of the last century…

But I’ve never seen anything like this, not in the last thirty five years.”

“Uh...I see….” Mohan did not have the foggiest notion about what the old man was rambling about. There was a party dedicated to rule, by divine will of Lord Ram, and he was a member to the cause, that was it. He neither knew nor cared about what had happened earlier.

“We used to stick together. We were…..one people….we lived peacefully…Everyone appears so scared and mistrustful these days. Somebody disappears without warning. Last week my neighbour’s son vanished without a trace. They must have come and taken him away. But he didn’t do anything…he was innocent…poor boy….used to go out with some other kids every evening that’s all.”

But Mohan was no longer listening. Mumbling something about his station being the next one, he rose and moved to the next compartment, the old man’s parting words echoing in his head, “ Is this what Lord Ram wanted??”

Suddenly, a rough push sent him reeling to the floor. A tall, bearded figure in a white dress stood in front of him, waving a gun.

“Nobody move! Get your money out!”

Saying this, the gun wielder moved forward into the compartment. Mohan tried to crawl behind the door, but was hauled up by the scruff of his neck. “Where do you think you’re…”

The robber never completed his sentence. His face changed into a mixture of surprise and agony, and then Mohan saw three shining points protruding through his neck. A moment later, he had crumpled down in a bloody heap, while the suddenly materialized Ramsevak behind him nonchalantly wiped his trident on the corpse’s shirt.

As casually as though it were routine, the Ramsevak punched a number on his infolink and murmured: “Took down another one in coach no. 5”.

Then he wheeled on the cowering passengers, and swaggered out after telling them there was no more danger.
It had happened so fast, Mohan had had no time to react. Now the reality was sinking in. The would-be robber lay on the floor, his head askew at an impossible angle, his eye sockets burning into eternity. The razor-sharp trident had probably severed his neck vertebrae, along with the jugular.

Mohan found himself in a cold sweat, shivering uncontrollably. He tried to tell himself that his life had been in great danger, that the bearded man would have shot him for money, that he should feel safe now. But it didn’t quite sound so convincing. He got off at his regular station, and walked mechanically towards his office. He couldn’t chase away the bearded corpse’s accusing glare. He did not even notice as a fellow colleague appeared and slapped him on the back.

“Hello Mohanji, how are you today? What’s the matter?” he proffered, noticing the tense expression on the older man’s face.

“Nothing, really. It’s… the kids; they are not concentrating on their studies.”

“Oh, yes.” The younger man agreed wholeheartedly, seeming to relish the subject.

“I have similar problems with my son. He’s got it into his head that he wants to study abroad. What’s wrong with our schools I wonder? He’s been hanging out with all sorts of people on the net, talks about patriotism and what not. These people just cannot appreciate our glorious Hindu Rashtra.” He prattled on, and Mohan was glad when they separated to go to their respective cubicles. There was already a queue beginning to form, and the people present were looking irritated at the delay. A bespectacled, dishevelled looking man stood before him. He wore a large shapeless robe that concealed his physical attributes, except the fact that he was of medium height.

“I need to renew my passport,” he said.

Mohan had been through this a million times, every day of his life, for the last twenty years. He picked up the tattered passport that was proffered to him, and waved the scanner over it.

After a longer than usual pause, the man’s personal details came up on the screen. He had been on the Sind front ten years ago, had lost his arm when his tank was destroyed by a rail gun attack.

According to rules, military veterans had to be cross-examined by senior officials before getting passport clearance.

He held out his prosthetic arm, so old that the artificial skin had come off in places, revealing the dull metal and hydraulics beneath. It whined rather loudly as he attempted to move the hand, and jerked violently sideways.

“Can’t use it much longer. Doctor said that it needs replacement; have to go to the European Union to get a better model.”

Mohan was his usual brusque self again. “I’m sorry, rules are rules. The uh…senior superintendent will see you when he gets back from….his tour on…Friday.”

It was almost like an understood signal.

The bespectacled man looked around, withdrew his prosthetic arm, to extend it again with a cash card. “This is all I have…please…”

Mohan nonchalantly took it, and swiped it on the separate card reader he kept for the purpose. He glanced at the amount on the screen. Two hundred and fifty thousand. For a moment, even he was surprised, at the shabby citizen’s ability to hustle up so much money. But then he shrugged, what did he care so long as no one found out? Like the old Hindi proverb- about concerning oneself with eating mangoes, not counting the trees they grew on…

Once the ‘transaction’ was completed, there was only his side of the bargain to be kept. For this, he invoked a small program that had already memorized the passport database access codes for his superior. In a matter of moments, the new passport was issued, and the required approval status was changed to ‘approved’. Behind the scenes, a sum of twenty five thousand rupees made its way untraceably to an anonymous bank account, after ten percent had been deducted as part of the arrangement he’d had with his contact.

Mohan felt a twinge of satisfaction as the disabled man shuffled away.

“Next, please.”

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.

About this blog

This blog is where I intend to post a preview of 2047,a cyberpunk novel that I'm writing. I'll be posting chapters as I write them. Send in your feedback via comments!!