‘You’re supposed to love me.’
‘I’m sorry but I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not supposed to be any way. Things are how they are. This is just how it is.’
Just how it is? Nothing is just how it is. Behind things are explanations. Behind things are the ideas of things and they are what count. He stared at her. Just how it is? Broken automaton.
‘I know what you are,’ he told her. Then he got out of the car and headed in the direction of the main road. In the distance vehicles whizzed along the highway. Chris was shouting something after him, calling his name.
His feet crunched over gravel. It felt like the floor of a game-world dungeon, shifting, full of traps. Everything was wrong. His life was malfunctioning. He needed a place to stand.
What is more certain than number?
Fifteen sails visible on the water.
Twelve cars parked in the lot by the marina.
Eight windows along the first floor. Eight more above them.
Numbers were the truth of the world, numbers cloaked in materials. Find certainty by counting the things. In decimal. In binary, hexadecimal. How many sixteens of trees in his field of vision? How many around the lake? Streams of numbers came to him, too fast to handle. But he had to try. It all boiled down to your ability to handle complexity.
He trudged home along the side of the road. When he was safe inside his apartment, he locked the door and sat down on his bed, his hands in his lap. Moving was not important. Eating was not important, though somewhere deep down he knew he must be hungry. The important thing was to think. The evening light was soft and yellow. He stared at the tree branches framed in his window. How many needles? ed ee ef f0 f1 f2…
For some hours he sat and counted. Around him the light faded. He could not go home, which meant he had to find a way to stay, to make Virugenix keep him on. Parse the problem. Think of a number.
Then it came to him. He scrabbled around in the trash on his floor, squashing a little plastic container of milk with his foot. A squirt of white shot out over the carpet. Always conserve your semen. It is your strength. Underneath a pile of papers he found a plate with something growing on it. Wedged behind the desk was the left chappal he had lost. There were letters from his sister, and an Asha Bhosle disc. All useful, but not what he was looking for. Finally he laid his hands on it, a torn copy of last month’s Filmfare magazine. Yes, there it was. He was right.
Think of a number.
06 13
13th June. The date of Leela Zahir’s birthday. Only two days away.
Arjun first saw a computer when he was ten years old. It was a 286PC and it belonged to Cousin Hitesh, whose father, concerned for his son’s education, had brought it back from a business trip to America. Hitesh improved himself by playing solitaire and trying to beat his high score on a side-scrolling game which involved bombing villages from a helicopter. Mostly the machine sat grey and untended in Hitesh’s bedroom, humming portentously. Arjun’s family was staying in Bombay for a week, and, while Hitesh was in the next room watching action movies on the laserdisc, he could spend hours undisturbed, exploring the guts of the extraordinary object. He was thwarted at every turn. Path not found. Sector not found. He was asked questions which made no sense.
Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
When he pressed a key and the cryptic pulse of the DOS prompt exploded into graphics, the suspicion was planted in his mind that something inside the machine must be alive.
File creation error.
By the age of thirteen Arjun had long discounted the theory that there were actual living things inside computers. But something mystical persisted, a hint, the presence of a vital spark. A computer booting up is creating itself ex nihilo, each stage of activity generating the grounds for the next. A tiny trickle of electricity to a dormant chip allows it to take a roll-call of components, which then participate in a simple exchange of instructions, a setting-out of terms and conditions that generates a more complex exchange, and then another, tier after tier of language coming into being until the display of a holiday photograph or the sweep of a pointer across a spreadsheet become thinkable, their meanings reaching all the way back down into binary simplicity.
Arjun glimpsed a secret in this yes-no logic. Hungry for more computer time, he would beg or steal it where he could: libraries, college labs, the houses of richer or luckier schoolfriends. He particularly loved to run simulations. Anything would do: commercial god-games; cities and armies; a simple world of different-coloured daisies; clusters of digital cells switching each other from red to blue. Watching populations of computer creatures grow and die, he found himself meditating on scale, wondering in a teenage way if his own world was nothing but a stupendous piece of programming, a goldfish-bowl system running for the amusement of other cosmically bored teens.
True or false?
Either way this particular system was a problem. He soon found himself in full retreat from it, buffeted by puberty, by the awkwardness of interacting with other people. People were a chasm, an abyss. Their violence, their vagueness, their unknowable motivations and inexplicable changes of mood had been woven into a nightmarish social world. Why would nobody understand? They were, making no sense. At last laying his hands on his own machine, he became a computing hermit, fleeing into a place where communication was governed by clearly laid-out rules. Logic gates. Truth tables. The world of people could go and rot. He closed his bedroom door on it.
His life might have progressed in any number of directions had he not, one evening, left a floppy disk in the A-drive of his PC. When he started up the following morning, his screen suddenly went blank. He pressed keys. No response. He rebooted. The machine ran slow. He rebooted again. And again. Finally, after an interminable crunch and stutter from inside the case, a message appeared in front of him.
u r a prlz0n7r ov th3 10rd$ ov mlzr00L
He kept shutting down and restarting, but the problem only got worse. His beloved computer had been reduced to a pile of scrap metal. To get it running again, he had to reformat his hard drive, which meant that he lost all his data. Everything. Months of work erased by this catastrophic visitation. He started to research what it was that had happened, and found that he had been hit by a thing with a name, the Carnival Virus, a string of code that had hidden itself in an innocuous floppy disk and had used his computer to make copies of itself. Every restart had given birth to another generation. Life.
Information on computer viruses was hard to come by. Even a sketchy impression of where they originated was difficult to form without his own internet connection, and in India at that time, that was an impossibility. By writing off for disks and magazines and making occasional cripplingly expensive calls to foreign bulletin boards, he managed to get hold of a few code samples, which he studied like religious texts. In the privacy of his bedroom he created several simple viruses, careful to keep backups of his data in case (as happened once or twice) he accidentally infected his own machine. He taught himself assembly language, and by his late teens had begun to excel in all sorts of more conventional programming tasks. His parents, who were worried by his reclusiveness, his bad posture, his unwillingness to play sports or bring friends round for tea, began to see an upside to his obsession. Computers were the coming thing, Mr Mehta would remind his colleagues at the firm. My son will be an engineer.