Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  -- We're on the smooth stretch, says Narad as she appears in an AR puff, hovering over the driver's head. Time to put your face on.

  Joey takes off her headset. She sits in absolute stillness for a minute, eyes shut, mind empty, breathing slow and deep until Narad sends her phone an alert: her systems are good to go. This is another action montage she knows the beginning and end of. She opens her rucksack and pulls out a small case. As the car speeds over the bridge, over parched earth and the brown trickle of the Yamuna, Joey transforms, with smooth, precise applications of finely strategised, big data recommended, makeup, from recently-draped-over-parents-sofa-wet-sock Joey to Work Joey, Reality Controller, loved and feared in equal measure by the hottest Flow team in all of Delhi. Wet Sock Joey once binge-watched a cat-matchmaking reality Flow directly on her headset for two days while eating only banana chips. Work Joey has three aggressive notes ready for Indi's Look Of The Day, and has already decided which nepotism-beneficiary intern gets to make Creepy Rajat Uncle's memorial video. The car pulls up at the SachVoice News studio and a gaggle of assistants rush towards it with tablets and problems. Work Joey goes to work.

  She'd worked with Indi once before, after college, before they broke up, when he'd tried to be an edgy 24x7 real-life streamer, the kind that everyone in America had been obsessed with at the time, broadcasting warts-and-all honest anti-influencer too-much-information Real Life, performing social experiments, questioning the system, provoking Real People. She still has nightmares about it. He'd tried lifegaming, setting himself real-world action quests while his followers gave him instructions, feedback and money, and made him their puppet, paying larger and larger sums for increasingly dangerous stunts, and he'd had no qualms about taking Joey with him. They'd learned the hard way never to share his real location, because they couldn't afford security then: he kept getting more popular, and while they were both immune to abusive messages, his fans' attempts to control all his relationships went from bad to worse, and then he'd start getting mobbed, people would start sending food and reporting crimes wherever he was, and even hiring thugs to attack him. If it had been America, they'd have sent SWAT teams. She'd told him before they started that no one in India wanted that shit: that people wanted escape, not truth, perfection, not reality. They had more than enough reality to deal with. She'd hated being the on-display cameo-appearance girlfriend, shielded herself from the constant avalanche of lewd commentary by going wholly offline, abandoning first her phone and then most of her life. Her girlfriends had pulled her out of this hole, and realising that Indi was fine with watching her suffer as long as his fans could watch it too had finally pushed her into breaking up with him, something all his infidelities couldn't achieve. It had taken two years of relentless charm and pursuit before she'd even agreed to meet him.

  Jin-Young's officially in charge of keeping an eye on Indi at all times, but she does it too, force of habit, as Indi and a couple of young Newsflow anchors walk along a track, following pre-programmed cameras and their superfluous operators, followed in turn by a greenscreen backdrop on a trolley. At the far end of the studio, a screen grid displays possible settings for their conversation: Manhattan, Mohenjodaro, Mars. The mainstreamers wear flexi-costumes, bright green bodysuits that are different on each screen: Indi's casually dressed, 64-colour screenshirt scrolling through his personal moodboard and sponsor logos, many of which will be blurred for mainstream broadcast. A drone flies above them, picking up panoramas: Indi's been wanting one of his own, but Joey's forbidden it.

  SachVoice executives appear every few minutes to subtly find out if Joey’s interested in headhunting them for her Flowco and she makes no real pretence of interest. Word has gotten around all the media that Joey’s stock is rising: everyone wants to have meetings with her because they’ve all heard everyone else wants to have meetings with her. She’s been through the SachVoice roster already and found it sadly lacking in value: they’re all placeholders anyway, like Indi's current co-anchors, youngsters quickly promoted to help everyone forget that their recent predecessors from the Years Not To Be Discussed are now in hiding, swept under rugs after an international exposé declared them guilty of fostering genocide. They couldn’t go out in public without causing flash-protests, and the new Japanese investors wanted fresh faces. These studios used to ring with the screams of anchors not reporting daily lynchings or massive corruption, but for now it's all Indi effortlessly outshining the mainstreamers, explaining what the coolest people in New New Delhi really want.

  'I have the girls lined up for this afternoon,' Jin-Young says. 'Would you like to examine them alone, or should I select a focus group?'

  'You make me sound like some kind of flesh trader,' Joey says, and watches blank-faced as Jin-Young considers an outraged explanation, then realises she's covering up for him, then realises he's made a basic error by discussing Indi's new girlfriend auditions in a rival office, and is then consumed with shame and regret. He looks like he's ready for a moody close-up. He's dressed in the K-pop idol gear he now wears to work every day — immaculately coiffed blue/blond hair, sparkly Anmu-loop screenshirt, dangerously tight pants.

  Joey's the only one who knows that Jin-Young's K-pop outfit is a disguise, worn to thwart potential race-hate attacks and add to their whole group's near-mythical cool quotient. She'd almost made him a Flowstar because of his story: she can still see it, a nice docuFlow set in Korean neighbourhoods, Jin-Young narrating how he grew up in Delhi, speaking perfect Hindi, how confused he is by the growing tribe of Indian Hallyu kids. How the mid-20s anti-Chinese agitations across India (so much dramatic background footage freely available) inspired him to become one of several Korean-diaspora people who dress up as K-pop or K-drama idols instead of the completely fashion-free engineering/infrastructure executives their parents raised them to be. Reenactments of Jin-Young's escapes from at least three late-night lynchings over the last year: a season finale featuring the most recent one, where he'd thought his luck had run out, but the youths chasing him with hockey sticks had just wanted a selfie. Jin-Young had heard Joey’s docuFlow idea out, and then, in an absolute first for his Flowco career, refused immediately.

  She's been dreading the girlfriend auditions since morning, but giving up control over crucial Flow elements has always proved to be a bad idea, and it's important for the candidates to know that a woman's in charge and they're not expected to sleep with Indi or anyone in his crew at any point. And she can't depend on Indi to not start anything with whoever his lucky co-star is.

  'I couldn't have done any of this without you,' he'd said to her after winning his first ‘Gujiaboyzz Flowstar of the Year’ award (South and Central Asia) a year ago.

  'Everyone knows this,' she'd said, and then he'd kissed her, and gone off to do interviews. He'd tried to come over to her flat at dawn, and when she'd told him very clearly they weren't going to be a couple ever again he'd let it go after sulking for a week. He'd tried to bro-fy her after that, discussing potential celebrity conquests whenever he could, and she'd gone along with it for the longest time because she hadn't wanted to give him the satisfaction of knowing how angry it made her.

  She lines up her distraction ploys as Indi strides towards his team, eager to gloat over how he's absolutely dominating the mainstreamers. He goes through the usual Monday routine of punishing Joey a little for not sacrificing her weekend for him. Joey and Jin-young run him through the update. There's only one thing that requires real decisions: a new Central Reality Editor will have to be found.

  There are two producer-editors handling the final checks on Indi's Flow now, and they're perfectly competent, but Indi likes having people he knows as the final burden-bearers of key responsibilities. Why he sacked his Chief Editor over the weekend Joey doesn't know, but she doesn't really care. She'd never liked Raj, who was some sort of cousin of Indi’s. Raj had not only been bad at his job, he’d kept derailing meetings with pitches about Indi taking a stand against Dravida separatists, or explaining why
people who still used Instagram were longform traditionalists.

  She tells Indi she'll find the new Central Reality Editor herself: the production side of the crew is her turf, Indi is best left to handle the glamour end of the business, the people whose names she struggles to remember: stylists, trainers, personal care specialists, bodyguards and tech pit crew, his off-Flow entourage and down-time lovers. The people neither of them have time for, the kids who do his game playthroughs or the body doubles who record visuals for point-of-view travelogues, adventure sports experiences and cooking tutorials on his behalf, are left to Jin-Young.

  There's at least a week's worth of human activity recorded as Indi's life on any given weekday, and Joey's biggest secret, the source of all her power, is that she's the only person in the country so far who's managed to find ways to deliver it perfectly to her Flowstars' viewers. Each of Indi's Flowfans gets a customised Flow, specifically catered to their interests and preferences, so while most of Indi's fans follow the sitcom of his life and friendships, there are several who genuinely think Indi's a serious gamer, or a visual artist. She's not sure if there's any other Reality Controller in the world who manages as complex a multi-channel setup with as tight a crew: her own Flowco has been trying to get her to put it down on paper for months, and all her rivals have tried in vain to emulate it. Indi's the only Flowstar in the country whose fanFlowers often discuss wholly separate shows and whose Flow pirates get accused of faking. Every other Flowstar has to deal with Flowjackers who steal their Flows and run them with their own commentary. Indi's fans have learnt there's only one place where they can get exactly what they want.

  Joey gets at least one headhunter call a week because the whole industry has taken note of the speed at which she took Indi from Influencer to Trailblazer. The only remaining rank is Icon, and Joey fervently hopes he'll never get there: she'd lose the last traces of control over her own life. As things stand, at least half of Indi's team is expendable, but the Flowfunders told Joey long ago that it wasn't about how many people were needed: a crowd around you meant status. In a world where Flowstats are mostly fake, what you need to show power is human bodies.

  He probably doesn't even remember his first attempt at livestreaming his life: Indrajith Mathew and Bijoyini Roy, college legends and debate circuit will-they-won't-they obsessions, giggling awkwardly over a plate of momos in a dingy Tibetan Quarter restaurant, letting their friends know they were a couple. Joey hasn't seen that vid in years, but she remembers every moment of it. She was the star, he was breathless and nervous. But he'd said they would be together forever. They'd taken the video down later, relationship declarations were never a good idea during culture shifts. The restaurant was gone as well, razed to dust like the rest of the neighbourhood.

  'I've let you down before, I know. It will never happen again,' he'd said to her years later. They'd looked into each other’s eyes for a long time: he'd flinched first. Fortunately the job hadn't required that she trust him.

  Joey and Jin-Young leave the shoot area with a couple of interns and a bodyguard. The girlfriend auditions have been set up in a nearby Film City studio, it wouldn't do to let all the ladies into Indi's spaces, or on SachVoice turf: they'd have a mainstreamer version on the air within a day. Besides, the shortlisted ladies are all in Film City anyway, scurrying from meeting to meeting with their agents in tow. All Joey's New Bollywood friends have moved back to Delhi over the last three years, the number of gangs and political unions they have to pay rents to shoot anything in Mumbai has risen sharply since the Years Not To Be Discussed. Several of them are in one or the other of the large entertainment company buildings they're driving by now, sparkling new towers with fashionably slanting facades of bright paint, darkened windows and solar panels. They message Joey from their work-play stations to bitch about their meetings, sometimes about one another. Between their towers and at every corner, concrete bunkers and sniper stations are packed with armed guards — Film City is on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border, a favourite destination for culture-outrage vandals, rape gangs, crowd-sourced flash-robs and fundamentalist lynch mobs. Rumours have been doing the round for months that the warlords who rule Uttar Pradesh are planning an organised invasion.

  Joey and her team don't have time to observe the architecture or the militia — they have to do a bug sweep each time they leave competitor turf. Narad spots the first one — it looks like a portable phone charger — in Jin-Young's man-purse. Joey finds a strange pen in her rucksack. They all stare at the bodyguard in fascination as he extracts a flower-shaped hairclip from his pocket. Everyone wants to know what Team Indi's planning. The only time the bag had been out of Joey's sight was when it went through the security scanner at the SachVoice entrance. She sends out a companywide alert, and sends pictures of the bugs to the Flowfunders. That's one regular sponsorship from SachVoice more or less assured.

  'What are the names of your father's friend's sons?' Jin-Young asks, waving his phone at her.

  'What? Why?'

  'The intern wants to know. For consent forms.'

  'What consent forms?'

  Jin-Young shrugs. 'Maybe he is from abroad?'

  'Why is he calling you?'

  'He's scared of you.'

  She reaches for his phone, but Jin-Young is faster. 'Just finish the job, please,' he says, and hangs up.

  The truth is Joey doesn't remember the names of both of Rajat Uncle's sons. The older one, the one who'd taught her to play chess, introduced her to The Beatles, and told her long ago that she could be one of his wives when she grew breasts but his main wife would be American and blonde, was Rohit. The younger one, her own age, she mostly remembers as Fatty, because that's what Rohit called him. He was a quiet kid, interested only in playing games on his phone and avoiding his brother. She remembers talking to him only once — he'd made eye contact with her while she'd been staring in horror at his obnoxious mother, and informed her solemnly, before diving back into his phone, that his mother changed the settings of every device in their house every day, just a little bit, but every day, because she was trying to drive his father insane.

  She'd resisted the idea of Indi getting an official girlfriend at first, not because of residual feelings but because Indi's clear ambition to woke-flirt with every attractive woman in the National Capital Region had been the regular spine of their daily narrative, so no one in his team, least of all Indi himself, had wanted him to go monogamous. But the funders have issued very specific directives, and Joey has to admit their numbers are solid. Like most of Indi's major life decisions of late, it's been about product placement.

  A Finnish company has developed a smartatt upgrade called Tavata, that lets users measure both their compatibility with and their attraction to anyone they meet, and let their smartatts know of their exact degrees of interest and consent through wholly non-verbal cues. It can be customised to work for people anywhere on the sexuality spectrum, but all that is for more open cultures — in India, New or not, they want to launch a version that lets a committed partner know if you're physically intimate with anyone else, and performs or allows compatibility checks on the basis of 'acceptable' communities.

  Joey had immediately refused to work with the wrist-chastity-belt version of the device — it was very easy to see, in a country where most kids got their first smartatts from their parents, how the upgrade could be used by families or communities to filter potential matches for people in their power by religion, or caste, or any of the dazzling array of discrimination options India continues to use, or simply exclude non-hetero matches. The same Tavata used as a consent-ensuring successor of the dating app in the West could easily become an arranged-marriage enforcer on your skin.

  'I know the orgy version is better for our creative team and our core demographic,' Funder Radha had said, 'but the One True Love version-'

  'The chastity belt version.'

  'That's not necessarily how-'

  'Come on.'

  'Whatever, the Indian
values version means bonuses for everyone, and the new Augmented Reality design team you wanted. Plus you could do your usual thing where the people-like-us audience knows he actually hates it. They can break up after two months, it's not a marriage.’

  ‘But we’re going to get so much hate. So many hot takes.’

  ‘If the project works, I'm pretty sure they'll do a premium edition which is the full-spectrum global one, and that means more raises for everyone. Everyone. Hot takes won’t protect you when it’s winter. Just look at the fucking number, Joey.'

  Joey had looked at the fucking number and settled, yet again, for minor consolation victories about casting inclusivity. But she knows these are hollow: the truth is that her funders could have forced her to shortlist only potential girlfriends who looked like Bollywood stars if they'd wanted to, or could have chosen some fair-and-lovely high-caste Hindu instead of Indi to be their alpha Flowstar for the right price and partnerships. They have other teams that do exactly this. But Indi's their golden boy, their international credibility booster, their token-woken poster-child, and they've always given Joey and him more freedom than other Flowcos would have.

  ‘Our company is deeply committed to a fair and diverse workplace,’ Funder Radha had told her at their first meeting, and Joey had still been innocent enough to not see her hidden smirk.

  ‘I hate so many things about the Flow, but it’s giving voices to so many people who’ve simply not had platforms for their voices before,’ Joey had said. ‘It’s really one of the things I want to explore.’