Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  ‘We’re exactly as committed to our diversity goals as our international partners,’ Funder Radha had said, smile unwavering, and it took Joey years of experience and a couple of very disillusioning meetings with foreign Reality Controllers to realise Radha had actually told her the truth.

  She's in a small and aggressively air conditioned room, Jin-Young to her left, classic reality-show judge table in front of them, assistants hovering around a mounted camera pointed towards a rickety wooden chair, bodyguard exuding silent menace by the door. About to execute her proposal that had made Funder Radha burst into actual applause: to let Indi choose his girlfriend himself by using the Tavata update and seeing who among the shortlisted candidates he was most attracted to, all of this live, ideally in a situation where he didn't even know the audience could see how much he liked each new girl. Every match-fixing reality show season condensed into a two-hour interactive Flow.

  'Tell the team what we're looking for, Jin-Young,' she says.

  'Our standard unicorn. Someone completely original but also trend-friendly, completely fresh but market-tested.'

  'I'm so proud of you. We're also looking for someone with an actual voice. Maybe a few fixed values. Not a trending algorithm covered in skin, even if it's nice skin. Got it?'

  The team nods.

  'Bring them in,' Joey says.

  She says it again, that evening, at Cheezburger, the noughties-nostalgia bar where Indi hosts his in-group social Flows. The scene is set: Indi and his friend-Flowstars sit around a wide circular table on the lower level, covered with early Xbox game posters, trading banter fresh from their writing teams’ rumbling collaborative cloud docs. Extras sit around the other tables, pretend-conversing, drinking or actually working on laptops. On the balcony above, the stars' long-shot camerapeople jostle for space; others are concealed in shadowy corners. Each of the Flowstars has their personal POV cam, of course, mostly discreet monocle-cams designed to maximise user face exposure. Indi doesn't use one: he's wearing his smartglasses. All the camera feeds go live to a cluster of OB vans parked outside Cheezburger, where editors sit and monitor the Flow, and writer teams relay conversation tips and joke ideas to their stars' earphones. And this is where Indi's a step ahead of his rivals, thanks to another piece of Joey Roy magic, the real reason why none of the other Flowstars who've studied him and copied every aspect of his Flow have succeeded, why none of the other Flowcos who've duplicated his product with hotter, Hinduer or more mainstream-famous actors have managed to eclipse him: there are no writers in Indi's van.

  The extras sitting at the other tables, working on their laptops, are actually Indi’s writing team, live inside the stadium while the others watch at home. They respond in the moment, catching moods that never travel to the OB vans, relaying text directly to Indi's smartglasses, where he just reads or discards them. Indi has no conversation lags while listening to voices shouting in his ears, no monocle cam to distract him. Joey's got him to focus on body language, on actually listening and responding instead of waiting for pauses to launch monologues like his friends. Everyone else competes for airtime, Flows muddled and scattered like noughties social timelines. Joey had actually thought they wouldn't be able to get away with it after a point, but Indi had reassured her saying the idea was flawless: no one would notice. What Flowstar would ever take note of recurring extras?

  Indi's closest rivals have been a part of his group sometimes, but they've never lasted long. They've never been able to handle Indi's effortless group-alpha performances day after day, never understood why their fans stayed with Indi's clique even after they left. The current friend-group are all people who gave up trying to compete with him for overall Flowstar status long ago, specific-interest Flowpros who enjoy the boost from Indi's top-tier audience. Today's panelists are Vijay, a history rewriter trying to restore authenticity to textbooks, Shalini, a themepark designer with an unfortunate tendency to attempt text-to-speech recitations about various grand cultural projects under construction in the heartland next to smart cities that will probably never be built, and Pia, a collectible-celeb AR game creator who always has a pixiu-themed hat and cutting-edge multi-field gossip. They've got a good equation going: asteroid belts of stans, shippers, fan-fiction Flowers, re-enactors and deep-fake pornographers have declared them a combination worth collective obsession. Joey's considered getting a whole team in to actively manage Indi's Flow spin-offs.

  The contestants enter — Pia has agreed to pretend she knows them — and assume their seats. Three women, carefully shortlisted, all amazing, all combat ready. Joey gestures up viewership stats, and notes the sharp uptick with grim satisfaction. Indi activates his smartatt upgrade on cue — he's had the new tattoo implanted during his afternoon spa session — and everyone can now see just how much he likes them.

  It's not much of a contest. Hot off the starting block, ahead of the rest by parsecs, is curly-haired, dark-eyed, impossibly gorgeous Uma, who maxes out the smartatt's attraction/compatibility settings the moment Indi lays eyes on her, and transforms his audience into a slobbering mass of reaction videos. Joey has been expecting this: Uma has haunted her own dreams since morning. She has some kind of interesting wellness-y job, and many relevant things to say, but Joey doesn't hear a word of it: all she can think of is invading Troy to rescue Uma, dragging her off to their private island and devouring her logic-defying body until the sun explodes. Why Uma is here drinking fake Just-a-Faiz whiskey cocktails and not on the other side of the world fending off amorous Hollywood he-men, Joey does not know. At the table, conversation has more or less stopped: everyone's just dumbstruck. The viewers clearly couldn't care less: Uma is already a national phenomenon.

  'I am having improper thoughts,' Jin-Young whispers solemnly.

  'You and me both, brother,' Joey says. She looks at him: he has bad news. 'What is it?'

  'There's a mole on her cheek, and two more on her left hand.'

  'I see them.'

  'The live-reactors are saying this girl might be Desibryde.'

  Narad warns Joey she might be having a panic attack. Joey silences her.

  Is it possible? Desibryde is the world's most notorious South Asian sexFlower, whose Flows are so powerful that no amount of culture-police net-censorship can prevent them from reaching every corner of the country. Desibryde is a counter-culture Icon. Joey had assumed that Desibryde shot her Flows far away from India, in some country with breathable air and everyday freedoms: her whole performance concept, sex with mostly black men while wearing AI facemasks of goddesses or male religious leaders, is dangerous anywhere in the world, but to do it while living in India? If she's outed, she'll be on a hundred actual death lists. But — and Joey's heart skips a beat — what if she's tired of the guerrilla life and wants to find a Flow where she can just be herself? What if she wants to stay ahead of inevitable discovery and danger, and avoid all the trouble that previous mainstreaming ex-pornstars had faced? Where would she go?

  'Jin-Young, sign that woman up at once. Right now. And hire ten new bodyguards,' says Joey. 'Now. Go go go.'

  Jin-Young grimaces. 'The sponsors won't allow it,' he says.

  The funders will,' says Joey. 'Fuck it, we'll crowdfund. Look at her.'

  They both do, and breathe heavily.

  'She doesn't have a Reality Controller of her own,' says Jin-Young. 'I'm guessing I would get that job?'

  'Over my bloodied corpse.'

  'Indi still has to choose her.'

  'Forget Indi. Jin-Young, if we let that woman out of our lives, we'll never forgive ourselves. Every day will be a grey wasteland. You see this, right?'

  'Yes. Also, the mainstreamers are picking this up. Her agent's calling.'

  'It's a done deal. Alert Indi, call a break, I'm heading downstairs.'

  Indi heads up from the table and stalks towards the restroom as Joey races downstairs.

  'Girl's gone national,' says Joey, breathless. 'This is a gamechanger. Should we close it before she gets new man
agement?'

  Indi's face is unreadable. 'Get her number,' he says. 'And get her off my Flow.'

  'What? Why?'

  'It's my Flow,' says Indi, and heads back to the table.

  Joey still hasn't managed to move when Jin-Young races up to her. 'Trouble,' he says. 'Some godman's outed her and said she's here. Mob coming. We should head out.'

  Joey shakes her head. 'Call the newsboys, call the police, call for extra security,' she says. 'The Flow stays live.'

  But Uma's figured something's wrong, and is on her own phone now, and a second later she's up, and racing towards the exit. Joey chases her out of the building, but obviously Uma's faster: a car's waiting for her, door opens, and she dives into it.

  'You're hired!' Joey calls.

  'I'm sorry,' Uma says. 'I really wanted this.'

  She slams the door shut, and her car roars off through the ICB Market central lane before the already approaching media horde can catch it.

  As Joey approaches the Cheezburger exit, one of the other girlfriend nominees — a beautiful super-liberal intellectual activist type whose name Joey has now blanked — comes storming out. She'd impressed Joey during the audition with her well-crafted feminist takedowns of everything in Indi's flow, but lost her completely over the last hour by sulking and glowering into her fake cocktail as she watched Uma own the table.

  'Whatever it is, you should head back in,' says Joey. 'You're the favourite now.'

  Option Two shrugs. 'Fuck you. Fuck all you people, you're monsters,' she says, and walks away.

  'How are we doing?' Joey asks Jin-Young as she slumps back into her observation chair on the balcony. 'Police? Thugs? Hate mob?'

  'All good,' says Jin-Young. 'Maybe it's all for the best.'

  'I suppose it is.'

  'Are you all right?' Jin-Young asks after a while. 'How... sorry, but how old are you, Joey?'

  'I'm twenty-five,' she says. 'It's the new forty. And the new twenty.'

  They turn back to Indi's table: in the rubble of their plan sits the sole survivor. The audience doesn't really know what to think of her, it's still busy speculating about Uma. All they really know about her is that she just came third in a field of three in Indi-attraction scores, not really a ringing endorsement for a match-fixing tattoo, and they don't like it, or her. Her name is Tara, she's a trained singer-dancer-futurist, which doesn't impress anyone; most of the discussion online is about futurists being the new wanderlusting sapiosexuals. But not picking a winner is not an option, either for Joey or the audience.

  Joey had only selected Tara as a filler because the other girls were generic and Tara wasn't a clear Type. But she can work with this woman: definitely pretty, potentially interesting. Clever, earnest, unthreatening. A good enough girl for a two-month monogamy schedule.

  Tara looks up at the balcony, and meets Joey's eyes. She smirks, drains her glass and lays long, slender fingers gently on Indi's arm.

  ‘I’m hungry,' she says.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN THE GUARDS stationed outside his family's new farmhouse refuse to let Rudra in on the day of his father's funeral, he feels many emotions but surprise is not one of them.

  It isn't really their fault: they've never seen him before, and they're new boys, fresh from some dying town, now gatekeepers eager to prove their worth by shielding their masters' people from every possible interaction with people of their own kind. And it's not like anything about Rudra screams rich-boy in any way, not his demeanour, not his features, and in any case he's wearing the wrong sort of gas-mask. He'd had to borrow it from his neighbour Chuki: Rudra has built a life fundamentally based on not needing masks, on not needing anything outside his room at all. His clothes and shoes are clean, and sufficiently brand-appropriate, but not on trend: they must think they're second-hand. But worst of all, he hasn't arrived at these forbidding gates in a car, and what could be more low-class than that?

  He knows a journey to the Culture Colony is not the epic journey it seems like to him, that it's just another part of the city and thousands of people make the commute every day, but the lack of control over sensory inputs has overloaded his brain. He'd had to pay the autoguy an outrageous amount of money to come all this way, roasting and rattling down dusty roads in his clattering death-mobile. The autoguy had flatly refused to go to the Culture Colony at first — they beat up people like me there, he'd said — but Rudra had cash, enough cash to forget the risk. He'd paid the autoguy to hang around and take him back, but the moment he'd stepped out, dirt-streaked, flash-burned, the fucker had taken off, solar roof twinkling happily over yellow-green-brown roach-bot, dust cloud in his wake.

  The guards refuse to call his brother: Sir is busy, show entry QR or give phone. Rudra has no intention of opening up his accounts for their inspection: it's not just the indignity of it, it's not safe, every guard has a data-theft side-business. They grope him for good measure, enthusiastically grabbing his balls, letting him know what's what. They demand his fingerprints, to see if he's on an approved guest list: he knows he's not. So he pulls the most Delhi line of all: ‘Do you know who my father is?’ It's not a good line today of all days: his father is dead. And he's pretty sure his brother or mother was the one responsible for shutting down his taxi accounts. They didn't want him here. Not in their home, not in their lives. They hadn't even told him about the heart attack. He'd found out later, when the automated condolences started pouring in from people he hadn't met in over a decade. It was too late to even turn up for the cremation by then. They hadn't taken his calls. But he couldn't blame them, he had avoided theirs whenever possible for at least five years: the only way they stayed in touch was by moving large amounts of money through his bank account. He's tempted to open his account up for the guards: when the hackers show up later, he'll ask them to send his family their regards.

  He tells the guards he's here because of the shraddho, the one they might have noticed being organised inside, it's for his father. He tells them they should just send his photo to their boss, that he hasn't been around for years but he's very important, that they'll all get fired if they don't let him in.

  The guards are completely unmoved. 'Whenever big men die there are always long-lost sons,' their leader says, grinning. The sun feels like it's hovering an inch above his head: his humiliation isn't even happening with just the guards present, there are photographers hovering nearby, leering, hooting, taking pictures. The accredited media ones and the personal Flow assistants are all inside, of course, not that there could be many: there are only a couple of genuinely famous people that might be attending. The ones near the guard-hut are the lowest of the low, nicknamed paprasis, dead-eyed young men who roam the streets taking pictures of people, asking strangers for autographs, the rag-pickers of the data age. They're shouting encouragement to the guards, asking for a beating. One of the guards eyes him speculatively, stroking his baton. Rudra is shouting now, voice cracking, making empty threats, but they see right through it. You can't fake Culture Colony arrogance. He can feel himself drifting: already, a part of him is zooming out, looking at the gate, at the walls, from a great distance, wondering how he'd get into the compound in each of six different genres of game, drawing dotted lines, imagining heat-vision single-colour silhouettes patrolling the grounds. In each situation, he'd have been in command, barking out orders to his teammates, and if his meatspace avatar could only have had a tenth of that authority, he'd have been inside long ago. He'd have been on the high ground, taking out enemies with a sniper rifle, sending animated taunts, leading charges, capturing flags. The guards form a circle around him, slowly, savouring it. He wants to reload from last save. He wants to play at an easier setting. He wants to ragequit and try another game. He hasn't been beaten up in so many years. He wonders how it'll feel. He can already taste blood in his mouth.

  He doesn't even notice the car pulling up behind him, but the guards sigh in frustration and fall back. One springs to the window as it rolls down. An arm emerges,
presenting a QR code on a phone. The guard scans it and salutes smartly. Another guard starts pushing Rudra away as the gate beeps and swings open, but Rudra's seen the man at the wheel, and shouts 'Avik Uncle!'

  For a horrible second, as the window rolls up, he thinks he hasn't been heard, but then the car stops, the door opens, and Avik Roy emerges, eyes wide.

  'Rudra? Babu, is that you?'

  The car's air conditioning hits him hard as he slumps in the rear seat, displacing Rono — so big now, he wants to say, but his mouth is dry. Romola Aunty, the first human woman he'd ever had dirty thoughts about, hands him a bottle of water, and he drains it, chokes and splutters. He's reeling, blurry, but recovers in an instant as he sees Joey — that's Joey, it's disturbing how much she looks like Romola Aunty — turning and simply staring from the passenger seat, and the pity in her eyes makes him want, for the first time since he learnt of his father's death, to burst into tears.

  Rudra had always known his father made lots of money, it was obvious from the sums that flowed in and out of his bank account around every tax deadline, but this is the first time he gets a sense of exactly how much. The farmhouse is cutting-edge: sprawled over impeccably manicured land — there's a fountain! — and featuring a sprawling Star-Trek-looking glass/stone/wood/concrete two-storey house and 3-D printed smartmud huts. There are stations for every kind of alternate energy, greenhouses, water plants, giant unsmogger fans, questionable flamingo statues, even an orchard. In the distance, beyond the high stone walls, the Culture Colony Shiva holo-lith towers over it all, smiling down benignly. This place could survive a zombie apocalypse, possibly not even notice one. Rudra watches the Roys struggle not to comment: they've evidently not been here either, and Avik Uncle seems as if he has many things to say about possibly ill-gotten wealth. Rudra is grateful for this, and even more grateful that they've asked absolutely no questions about how he is or what he's doing or why they had to sneak him into his family home. He wants to let them know he'd be happy to be adopted, that the love he feels for them in this moment is the closest to family-love he's ever experienced as an adult.