Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  He doesn't remember sleeping, but when Tara wakes him it’s almost noon, he's missed his alarm again and his arm is asleep. Indi and his squad left for some assignment early in the morning. They left her behind too, and she's not happy about it. If the whole point of her existence is to help Indi sell some sort of fancy sex measurer, how is she supposed to do it sitting in his flat?

  'None of them have even bothered to hear my pitches for my plotline,' she says. 'Do you think that's right?'

  He thinks it's terrible, but hastily lets her know he has absolutely no say in Indi's programming. 'I know, but who does?' she says, but grins, and allows him to escape towards the coffee he needs to restart his brain.

  He feels bad for her: They've made her do her guest segments, clean-ups, all the potentially sponsored bits Indi has no interest in: explaining freeze-dried biopharms, hawking self-repairing Yak-Yakshi t-shirts, being amazed anew every time she sees their luminescent fish... all very well, but how is this to transform her career, let alone her life? Rudra has no answers: all he has is residual guilt about the previous night — none of his previous porn-watching had prepared him for a situation where it was all part of a sitcom where he was a character, and had to have a conversation with the cheated-on girlfriend — and a yearning for the morning sounds of his old flat, where the walls were thin and he could tell the time by which neighbours were having family crises.

  It's only after downloading two cups of coffee that he realises she wasn't telling the truth: he distinctly remembers her pitching her futurist character to Joey and Indi on his first day, and Joey at least had heard her out. They'd been eating lunch, delivered from a new Russian place: cold borsht, salmon kulebyaka and an angry-looking golubtsy that everyone had looked at nervously before putting in the fridge, where it died. He'd not being paying much attention to the conversation, he'd been focussing on not developing an irrational and inconvenient crush on Joey: it had seemed unfair to expect her to sleep with him and meet his emotional needs, however minimal, after she'd already given him a job and a home and possibly saved his life. Tara had been talking for a while, something about how people were essentially good but also so pessimistic, and she wanted to spread positivity and joy, he'd only paid attention when Indi had stopped her with a raised hand. They'd all watched him chew in silence for a few seconds.

  'The show already has enough positivity,' he'd said finally. 'People come and watch me because I say things that are real and meaningful, but within limits — they don't want to hear the stars who go on all the time about how we're fucking up the earth, killing all the animals, and all the people too. Like if this ray of sunshine' — he'd gestured towards Joey with a fork — 'were a Flowstar, we'd all be in depression. But we're already at the limit of — what was that, Joey?'

  'The positivity-credibility intersection.'

  'That's the one. It’s science. Any more, and they'd think we don't care, or we're idiots. Filling space in between promos. It becomes Bollywood, or some guru shit.'

  'I want to reassure the audience that we haven't failed as a species, that humanity is doing a wonderful job. We need to make the world less horrible,’ Tara had insisted, and Joey and Rudra had looked up from their plates and made eye contact.

  'Excuse me?' Indi had been looking at Joey, not Tara.

  'It's just a relationship segment, Tara,' Joey had said. 'Not failing as a species is a good goal, I suppose?'

  'The links are there, personal to global. We are transforming the world into a single organism, a hivemind, with one culture, one thought, one goal,' Tara had said, not reading her lunch companions at all.

  'Are you quoting something? Is this religion?' Indi had been watching Tara with a look Rudra recognised: he'd seen the same look of cold interest in his father's eyes when he watched stock market animations in the evenings.

  'Tara, in your auditions you'd said you didn't have any strong political or religious beliefs,' Joey had said. 'If you're here on some kind of mission, you need to let us know. I don't like propaganda of any sort on my Flows. Brand placement is bad enough.’

  ‘Joey turns down political parties all the time,’ Indi mumbles through a mouthful of borscht. ‘She thinks it keeps us clean. Of course, the things we don’t talk about.’

  'I'm just trying to tell you my vision of the future, if you'll let me,' Tara had said, tears springing to her eyes.

  'Oh, okay. You're a futurist. Go on.'

  She'd cleared her throat, very rattled but determined to power through. 'It boils down to this: we are evolving into a creature beyond anything we have imagined. A super-organism, linked by algorithms and AI. This is our purpose and our destiny as the most brilliant animal, the most beautiful, the most responsible.'

  'The most responsible?'

  'Why yes. We are building our own replacements, no? We cannot live in peace, we cannot learn from our pasts, we cannot agree on our futures. So we are building gods who can. We are teaching the machines how to be better than us. One day our children shall rule the stars, and they will be better than us. We did our duty, we should be proud. This is the message I want to share.'

  She'd looked around the table, expecting applause or at least argument, but Indi and Joey had both nodded and returned to their food.

  'What do you think?' Tara had said.

  'It's fine, I like it.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But it's not time yet. No one's ready for an Indian woman futurist,' Joey had said. 'They'll take your ideas and give them to some Oxbridge dude.'

  'India's not one of the future-type countries, Tara,' Indi had said. 'Nice idea, though. I like how your mind works.'

  Rudra had felt bad for her then, but feels bad for himself now, because Tara repeats her whole idea to him, almost word for word, and then sits across the table, arms crossed, eyes full of rage.

  'I don't know what you want me to say. I agree with you, I think,' he says.

  'I don't really care,' she says. 'Thank you for listening, at least.'

  She leans towards him, a rueful smile on her lips, and he's suddenly struck by how beautiful her collar-bones are, and yanks his eyes away before they wander further. They always know when you're looking.

  A lot of his week has been spent in taking basic Flow training classes with Tara. It’s been easier than he’d expected: he’d thought Tara at least would be put through some sort of ballerina school-level hardship. He’s seen former K-pop stars do tell-all documentaries about the rigours of their training: the chaperones, the insane diets and exercise regimens, the body morphing. But no one’s offered to add to Tara’s height, or cut her eyelids: it’s still India, and things are still loose.

  All through the week, despite his trainers finding what he already knew, that he was bad at interpersonal communication, (his results: he's good at avoiding using problematic words, but his references are too geeky for anyone else to understand) but he'd been quite sure that Tara was flirting with him: a first for Rudra, normally the only way he learns of anyone being attracted to him is when they tell him five years later they thought he was cute five years ago. But there's something about Tara that still makes him feel that she sees him, and that he, and he alone, has her complete attention, that there's a special corner they lurk in together unobserved. But he now suspects all that was because she thought that as the Reality Editor and power-lunch companion he was actually someone whose approval she needed. When she realised — and he's vaguely pleased it took a whole week — that Rudra was largely superfluous to the whole operation, that Joey, Jin-Young and the two Flow livestream-editors in Indi's OB van were in charge of how much screen-time she got, she didn't drop Rudra entirely, but there was a very clear shift in her behaviour.

  'You people are all confusing,' she'd told him after a group meeting. 'You all talk the same. Same words, same style. Same schools, same families, same friends. You see the same things, know the same jokes. It's hard to tell you all apart.'

  'I know what you mean,' he'd said. 'But you fi
t in perfectly well! I haven't seen you miss a single reference, or joke. And you wear better clothes than anyone else, as far as I can tell. I don't get these people either, frankly. I don't fit in here either.'

  'It's because you don't want to,' she'd said. ‘I wasn’t raised to be a part of this group: I had to learn.'

  Not being flirted with is a condition he's most comfortable with, but the urge to champion and protect a new human is unfamiliar for Rudra. Most of his Kalkaji friends have been through horrifying ordeals both while crossing the Arabian Sea and while struggling to make a living in Delhi. He knows at least five people who've been chased out of their flats by mobs, accused of being cannibals and demons and drug traffickers. But they'd spent some time getting to know him, playing his games and sharing his food, before opening up and telling him their worst stories, and he'd known that the guilt and rage he'd felt, and the desire to help them in any way he could, came from somewhere real. He'd brought a stack of CVs from his flat, handed them to Joey on his first day.

  'I can't do anything with these,' she'd said. But she'd kept them.

  Tara keeps hitting him with stories of bad workplaces and exploitative situations she's been survived, and wishes he had the courage to tell her it’s all too much too soon: he wishes he had the courage to really listen, or to tell her to see a professional. But he's grateful to have someone to talk to, even though Tara does most of the actual talking. He already knows how much of an outsider she is, how she grew up in Jaipur the daughter of proud-Hindu middle-class parents and ran away from a forced marriage and a dreary future to be a movie star, how at every stage of her life she's been gaslit by every elite she's encountered, how she expects nothing from Joey and Indi, how she is and always will be alone in the world. He's seen her on the phone with her parents, though: they fight a lot, but they always call back. He's glad she has some strings holding her to the world, even if she cannot see them.

  He’s amazed at how much she still wants to belong, to fit in, after everything she’s been through. He’s spent so much of the last week feeling disappointed because life, yet again, had found a way to not give him his Chosen One moment: this new waypoint in his journey had not proven to be a gateway to some vast, shattering twist. None of the assorted costumed weirdos in the building have revealed themselves as a wizard or a kung fu mentor or a superhero recruiter waiting for him to arrive. His reality-editor monitor array would have been perfect for a secret message announcing that all of the reality he knew was a lie, all his memories were false, that he was actually a cyberpunk anarchist trapped in a pod outside a simulated world, or an astronaut watching brain-TV in his stasis chamber on the way to some other planet, or a robot. He’d have made a good robot.

  Tara's plan for their unsupervised day of fun is to explore their building: there are six whole storeys they haven't visited, each occupied by Flowco hubs in literally ascending order of importance. Indi is the only one who has a whole floor to himself, letting the others know exactly how high they can dream of climbing. The ground floor is full of constantly auditioning no-hopers, mostly gimmick acts: a walk from lift to lobby always involves avoiding performance artists, self-mutilators, streakers, jugglers, conspiracy theorists, animal/alien/celebrity impersonators, stunt people: Indi's Flowfunders are their landlords, but what they all want is active management, a team led by producers like Joey. Tara wants to find out everything about every Flower in the building, but Rudra has to decline: Joey's made it quite clear that the floors in the middle are off limits until the funders are sure Rudra and Tara are not spies for another Flowco.

  'As few selfies as possible, no replies on tags, no cameos, no being nice to strangers,' she'd said, very firmly.

  'I want to be part of the community,' Tara had said. 'People remember arrogance.'

  ‘And you want to be remembered,’ Joey had said. 'Rudra, same goes for you. Don't be seen too much with the downstairs people, okay? Make all the friends you want, but keep it off cam.'

  He wonders if she knows about Indi's on-cam friendships: he can't get last night's video out of his mind. Worse, he can think of so many ways he could have handled the whole thing better — not watching the video at all, for one. He's just grateful he's not run into either Indi or Neha yet, just spent his morning pacing his room delivering low-stakes Hamlet soliloquies. Should he tell Joey what he saw? How? He's already heard she and Indi were an item in college, that's how she got her job. He hasn’t spent enough time with his family to really learn how nepotism works. It's possible the team thinks he's one of Joey's exes as well. The whole point of his job is to be the one fired if anything goes wrong. Should he light that match himself? But his ghost-AR pangolin has not appeared to give him answers and hope. As the lift doors open and the low-level Flowers gape in awe at them, Rudra's dearest wish is to be as invisible as he's always felt.

  A few Flowers recognise Tara and come and take selfies, and she poses enthusiastically, making a new friend every second: Rudra poses for some as well, not knowing how to say no, wondering if any of the people whose cams he's gazing blearily into has any idea who he is. A few seconds later, he sees Tara staring at him from inside an excited huddle, and is surprised to find the crowd parting as he steps forward, and leads her out. Somewhere along the journey from the penthouse, he'd acquired tremendous authority. Did they watch the lift to know what floors it went to? Had they ever accidentally mobbed delivery boys? That last answer is easy: there's a service elevator down a corridor from the lobby.

  Tara had asked Joey for a bodyguard, and been very hurt by Joey's evident amusement. 'Rudra will protect you,' Joey had said, and so he's her appointed bruiser and companion on a discovery tour of ICB Market. This fits in with Rudra's schedule, which consists of exactly nothing except a compulsory journey outside the flat at some point because Joey thinks this will prevent him from going full hikikomori.

  An unexpected burst of morning rain has cleared the air, it's actually possible to wander out without a mask for a few hours, an opportunity not to be missed. Tara has her AR headset and a booster strapped to her arm: this way she won't get mobbed, she explains. She gesture-plots their walk plan through the market, around the shrinking lake, past the ruins now being converted into an open-air theatre. She holds Rudra's hand completely unselfconsciously as they walk, and exclaims with delight as they cross a couple of air-dance-artists and she sees, through her headset, the patterns they're weaving in mid-air with their smart styluses. Rudra's more interested in the shapes he sees moving swiftly from building to building, leaping across terraces and walking on wires. Monkeys, with shock collars attached to their necks, network-booster packs strapped to their backs. He flinches every time one lands on the street and scampers past, but Tara is completely unmoved — she grew up surrounded by monkeys on the streets, and is amazed he's such a fragile creature. Rudra had vivid memories of the time he'd tried to defend his school tiffin-box from a marauding monkey family, of the large circle of school kids that formed around them, laughing and encouraging them as they tore at his clothes and skin. Delhi monkeys used to be a huge menace until the government found a way to make them useful citizens: now they can't enter taxpayer houses without getting zapped. In less posh areas, homeless people make food money by acting as signal boosters, but homeless people aren't allowed in India China Brotherhood Market.

  They walk through the market's lanes, stepping over mud-spattered spamphlets, rogue-drone-scattered sheets explaining, in plane safety illustration style, how to take out facial recognition cameras with laser pointers, or pole-cutters. They avoid, with equal care, enthusiastic tourists with their lava-lamp spiritual t-shirts, their AR guides and tourist-company crowd-handlers. Most of the restaurants haven't opened yet: by night these lanes are straight out of some exotic Hollywood Asian-fetish-exotic-tech-future movie, giant glowing signs, sexy holograms, colourful street food, smoke, filth, rubble. But by day they're just charming, photo-friendly and vaguely romantic, especially since the ICB market area guards got s
tricter about letting locals in. His father would have approved. His father had once invested in a digital tourism company, where you lay down in comfy sofas in greenscreen rooms and travelled via Mixed Reality helmets, guided tours extra, while attendants of suitable ethnicities fed you Delhi versions of the appropriate country's food. Rudra had visited one of the parlours a few years ago, and hadn't been surprised to discover it was essentially a multicultural handjob centre.

  He doesn't mind that ICB Market is an overpriced tourist trap. He avoided it all through school and college, but living in it has showed him it's also a portal between worlds: the Russians call this market Temno Kalingrad. It's where white immigrants gather to fortify themselves with alcohol before venturing out into the Delhi night in their retro-cool Crocs-and-socks. Plenty of the restaurants and shops are no-Indians-allowed: they're reluctant to admit even celebrities like Indi, who wouldn't be seen dead in any racist place, of course. He's heard that the Peach Blossom Spring, a very posh pan-Asian lounge, is where the upper end of the continent's human trafficking network operates. ICB market is being recolonised by several countries at once, not that Rudra finds this disturbing: colour-coded colonisation is easier to identify and deal with than the other kind.

  His phone rings: it's his brother. He lets it ring out, as usual. His mother has been calling every day as well, even sending him videos demanding to know what his plans are, and reminding him that all his betrayals will have consequences. They even tried calling Joey once, but she told them to fuck off in that really nice way she has.

  He puts the phone back in his pocket, his hand shaking a little. Tara takes off her headset and gives him an enquiring look: he's tempted to pour out his whole life story to her, but resists. She draws him into her favourite coffee place, the trendy City Of Cats, full of college kids running AR workgames and eyeing one another at retro-pirate torrentbooths.