Drained, Guy stared at the television. It was talking about ‘widespread chaos in the City of London’, about ‘brownouts’ and ‘disruption’. There was an interview with the manager of a logistics company who didn’t know where his trucks were, and with a scruffy computer journalist who said he had always thought something like this would happen. They showed a picture of the little dancing girl, who apparently was known as ‘India’s sweetheart’. The journalist theorized that it might be some kind of promotional stunt.
Guy switched off the TV. The office was quiet. Leeched of all energy and emotion, he set the alarm, bolted the door and went home. When the driver tried to start a conversation, he shut the partition. Even the sight of In Vitro’s glass panels glowing in the city sunset failed to lift his spirits. On the kitchen worktop there was a note from Gaby. Something has come up. Work want me to go to Scotland. She did not know how long she would be away.
‘A virus? My God! What are you telling me, yaar?’
Up on Pali Hill, Zee TV was hurriedly muted. The click-clack of nails on cellphone carapace, by which the maid judged the progress of her mistress’s many conversations, ceased abruptly. Spotting warning signal number two (the chaat-filled palm stalled ominously between dish and mouth), the maid hitched up her sari and made a discreet exit, The explosion followed seconds later.
‘Behan-chod! What kind of dirtiness are you talking? My daughter has infected who…’
It took some hours before Mrs Zahir could be made to understand all this business of computer diseases. Such nastiness! Such complication! Once she understood, it took several more to recover from the shock. After an interval in a darkened room, she emerged, fortified herself with paan and sweet tea, and started to take charge of the situation. Her first call was to a very dear friend, who happened to have a column on Stardust magazine. The second was to her astrologer. By the time she had ticked off a list of advisers (spiritual and temporal), national media outlets (print and broadcast) and was stuck into the first of the international newswires, a clear line was emerging.
‘To be stolen like this,’ sobbed the artiste’s stricken mother, ‘is too too terrible. Our feelings are shaken. My daughter is sincerely protective over her creativity. For someone to come and use it for criminal purposes is shocking, really.’
Maa Zahir then appealed to the Chief Inspector of Police, ‘an old family friend’, to catch the violators forthwith. We say, look out, goondas! Whether inland or phoren, Leela’s mad-as-heck mummy will hunt you down! Lovely Leela herself, currently locating in romantic Scotland on the next Rocky Prasad smash, is said to have gone into seclusion…
Mrs Zahir had always had her daughter’s financial interests uppermost in her mind. From their first audition, and her inspired idea to change the girl’s Persian name to something Hindu-friendly, Leila-Leela’s marvellous career had taken her on an upward path of almost unprecedented rapidity. It had also been satisfyingly free of the blemishes that attached to other Bombay starlets. True, in the early days certain people remarked on a seventeen-year-old girl being seen so often in the company of elderly film mogul K. P. Gupta. Some may even have made a connection between that and the starring role Gupta gave his unknown protégée in N2L2. People were dirty-minded. There was nothing you could do against that. But this! For a thing like this to mark her daughter’s twenty-first birthday! It was a public-relations disaster.
Stolen. Piracy. The same five-second loop, repeated again and again. Five seconds from the fully copyrighted holi dance in Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely. Five seconds, one hundred per cent royalty free. Mrs Zahir could almost feel her jewellery getting lighter, each unlicensed frame shaving a little heft from the bangles on her wrists, loosening a stone from the rings on her fingers. It had to stop. It had to cease forthwith.
Hunched in his cubicle, the violator carried on counting. Pens in his Cisco Systems promotional mug. 18. Post-it notes left on the pad. 37. Keys on his keyboard. 105. Bead of sweat on the delete key. 1. He wiped it away with a fingertip. It was an effort to focus on his screen.
Hour by hour, the list of Leela-related disasters was growing longer. Clients from all over the world were contacting Virugenix, wanting to know how to remove her from their systems. The helpline staff posted updates to a page on the corporate intranet, and Arjun returned to it obsessively, to look at what he had done, the trouble he had caused for knitting-machine manufacturers and management consultants, adult magazines and university departments, for an auto-parts supplier in Austin which couldn’t track its inventory, a public-relations company in São Paolo which had lost its contacts database. Late in the afternoon a router went down, shutting off most of Boston’s internet traffic for almost an hour. Entry by entry, it all went up on the page. Nature of incident. Severity. Advice given. Mostly the advice given was to shut down the email system and wait for a fix.
A fix the AV team had yet to come up with.
Waves of nausea kept rising up into his throat. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, an amplified rattle suggesting illness, crisis. Letters in paragraph one of the text on his screen. 342. Number of ceiling tiles visible between the partition wall and the row of recessed lights running through the centre of the office. 75. The hot zone was full of arguing engineers, Darryl perching on a desk in a corner, swinging his legs and watching the action as Clay and the Vietnamese analyst Tran conducted a hand-waving debate, scrawling on the whiteboard and angrily crossing out each other’s glyphs. Occasionally other people butted in and the argument would diffuse through the room. It did not look to Arjun as if they were making much headway.
It was time. He knew if he waited, he would lose his moment. Still, something kept him fixed to his chair. He wanted to speak to his sister. He wanted to hear the voice of someone who knew him, who cared. Chris came into his mind and he put her out of it again. He waited until most of the people had left the hot zone, then knocked on the door. Only Clay and Darryl were inside, drinking bottled smoothies from the office fridge and flicking despondently through a printout of decompiled code. Seeing Arjun outside the door, Clay pulled on his face mask and Darryl started oscillating his hands in a frenetic shooing motion.
‘What are you doing?’ he stuttered, as Arjun poked his head into the room. There are rules, Mehta. You’re not authorized.’
‘I need to talk to you, Darryl.’
‘I–I don’t care, OK? This is not good. This is not good at all. You have to leave.’
Arjun almost acquiesced, half turning to go, but he steeled himself.
‘It’s important.’
‘This is a bad time, OK? This is like a crisis period? We are dealing with something major, so if you could just close the door and depart, Mehta, things would be a lot better. Clay, tell him. Make him go.’
‘It’s about the Leela virus.’
‘Good name, huh?’ said Clay to no one in particular. ‘I think they should give all viruses chicks’ names. Like ships. Or hurricanes.’
‘Hurricanes often have masculine names,’ snapped Darryl. ‘Andrew, for example.’
‘I believe that until 1979, women’s names only were used,’ said Arjun. ‘Since then there has been an alternating list.’