Saad Z. Hossain
Tarun K. Saint with Saad Z. Hossain
Prelude
This session features Saad Z. Hossain from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose work spans SF/speculative fiction, fantasy, laced with an irreverent sense of black humour
**
Tarun K. Saint: Welcome to this session of South Asian SF Dialogues. As we are aware, SF/speculative fiction from the region that became Bangladesh has a long history, dating back to at least 1905, the year Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ appeared. Scientists and writers Humayun Ahmad and Muhammad Zafar Iqbal have done notable work in Bengali SF in the years following 1971. Let us know your views on the current trends in SF/fantasy/speculative fiction in your country.
Saad Z. Hosain: I will speak about writing in English, because that is what I’m most familiar with, and also, in the case of Bangladesh, we are a small community of writers and I believe I have at least some idea of what everyone is working on.
I don’t think modern SFF writing really exists in English in Bangladesh. We are at the infancy of genre writing. There is a lot of opportunity here, to blend together our unique culture and setting with SFF, or murder mysteries, or thrillers. Right now I think I might be the only writer of SFF in English in Bangladesh, at least in a published sense.
Worldwide, however, there is a great interest towards promoting SFF from non European cultures, and this is very encouraging, both as a writer and a reader of SFF. As a writer, of course, we wish to join the global conversation, which, like it or not, is being conducted largely in English, and the fact that renowned publishers are printing us is a great opportunity which was not present not so long ago. As a reader, I enjoy SFF based on other cultures, from non-‘western’ perspectives, and the incredible literary richness this is adding to a genre which was becoming somewhat stale.
TKS: To follow this up, SF writing in Bengali and other subcontinental languages tended to be regarded as a branch of children’s literature, as a way of promoting science education. Has a more sophisticated form of literary SF emerged in recent times?
SZH: The problem with writing SFF in Bangla is that translations are not readily available, nor is there any push to translate our best works. This means much of Bangla writing is stuck in the vault known as Bangladesh, and will remain there. If a body of work is not available for criticism by the rest of the world, or even for simple enjoyment by readers for that matter, then it is difficult to gauge where it stands against global standards. Is any speculative fiction written in Bangla better or worse than similar English works? Who knows?
Only a skilled bilingual reader with equally good English and Bangla skills, and a knowledge of SFF in both languages would be able to answer this question properly, and I am definitely not that.
TKS: Who were the authors that influenced you as a budding writer? Let us take a step back to the time when you began writing Escape from Baghdad! Were writers of absurd literature/fantastika in the Anglo-American tradition a more significant influence, say, Joseph Heller, or was it the East European and Latin American writers (Gunter Grass, Jaroslav Hasek, magical realism)?
SZH: I grew up reading western SFF, such as Tolkien, the Culture Series (Iain M Banks), Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, as well as a lot of historical fiction like Colleen McCollough and James Clavell. These worlds were a big part of my life growing up; they were a source of enormous comfort and refuge to me. One of my great regrets was the way we as Bengalis were absent from any of these places. Not only us specifically, but any of the losers of the colonial phenomena.
Part of my motivation to write is to rectify this. I want to represent, but I also want to give answer, that human history is a fluid thing and momentary superiority in circumstance does not mean absolute moral superiority of any sort.
TKS: What challenges did you and other writers from the subcontinent face in publishing in the West? Was there enthusiasm in publishing circles for new writing from ‘exotic’ spaces?
SZH: It is always going to be hard to find a publisher in a different country. It is always going to be hard to build a readership in a different country. I believe that good writing always makes its own space. That being said, there was not much appetite for SFF from the global south before, but I’d say in the past ten years we have a number of big publishers such as Tor.com, who have actively hunted for diverse SFF. Many of these works have gone on to win awards, so their faith in POC writers have paid off.
TKS: Your second fantasy novel Djinn City was published by Aleph in India in 2017, among other publishers. Was this a conscious attempt to fuse Eastern mythic themes (the djinns in particular) with models from fantasy fiction? Is there a sequel planned to this novel?
SZH: I am editing the sequel right now, it’s called Cyber Mage, it should be out this year, published by Unnamed Press, California. With Djinn City, I was trying to use our own mythology and culture as the basis for a work of SFF. Almost all SFF uses a base culture as the template for their races, characters, and socio-political background.
It was my deliberate choice to use my own mythology and city for the setting, rather than ape the traditional western base world. I want to write SFF, but on my own terms. If I have to use a mythological background for my stories, I’d rather use my own culture. For me the djinn makes more sense than vampires, or elves, or dwarves, even though all my life I’ve essentially been reading fantasy based on essentially Norse and Greek mythology.
TKS: The djinn motif reappears in The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019), with a more pronounced SF twist. The depiction of a futuristic Kathmandu with AIs, nanotech and other forms of ulta-modern technology encountering the magical powers of the awakened djinn is rendered with a light touch. Is black humour a key element to your style?
SZH: Black humor is often a reaction to dystopian conditions, and the way the world is going, we are definitely in a dystopia right now. I think through most of human history, there was a sense that our future is trending up, whereas now we have a definite idea that our future is trending down. Climate change itself will ensure that conditions on earth and the quality of life will decline for most of us in the near future. Science will create pockets of paradise for the rich, but what about the rest of us. Humor is an important defense mechanism in dealing with this kind of situation.
TKS: To what extent is the djinn world with its intricate hierarchies, rules and legal structures a parabolic commentary on modern bureaucratic structures, especially in their ur-Kafkaesque subcontinental manifestations?
SZH: Hahahaha in a very direct sense. The beauty of SFF is that you can make socio-political commentary without any fear of criticism. Good SFF always works on two levels: first as a pure escapist story, and second as a reflection on our actual reality. Social commentary is the duty of all writers I feel. If we aren’t saying something about the human condition, then what is the point?
TKS: Let us know a bit about work in progress, including your forthcoming books Cyber Mage and Kundo Wakes Up. Will the SF element be more pronounced in the books to come, in the spectrum from ‘pure’ fantasy to hard SF and climate change fiction?
SZH: I think I’m operating in the zone of nearish future Sci Fi, with a large element of fantasy and some degree of humor and satire. Climate change is a reality that we have to weave into our future. Anyone who is not doing that has blinkers on, or is only concerned with the stories of a miniscule elite who will presumably not be affected. I think as time goes on, almost all SFF will have to deal with climate change.
TKS: Has the pandemic changed the mode of representing dystopia in SFF, in your view, given the prevalence of a dystopian reality?
SZH: We are in a dystopia. We are in a pandemic dystopia. We are in a climate change dystopia. We are in a wealth inequality dystopia. This is capitalism gone amok, like when the Dutch East India Company or the British East India Company were committing atrocities in Asia in the name of profit, or the rubber companies in the Congo. More than any other type of fiction, SFF has an opportunity to forecast the future by taking current trends to their inevitable tragic conclusion, i.e., unrivaled, unprincipled, short term profit taking us to some kind of mass extinction event. We know that 100 companies in the world are responsible for 70% of global emissions. And they are routinely producing literature and science telling regular people to use bamboo toothbrushes and recycle their plastic. Do your part! You’re the problem! If that is not dystopia than what is?
**
The Endless
Saad Z. Hossain
M
y name is Suva. Like the airport, Suvarnabhumi. An odd name, you say?
Because I am the airport motherfucker. I’m a goddamn airport, mothballed, neutered, packed in a fucking box.
I ran Suvarnabhumi for forty years. I used to be a level 6 AI with 200 registered avatars handling two hundred and fifty thousand passengers a day, turning planeloads of boring corporate fucks into hippies and party animals for two weeks a year. You ever heard of Bangkok? City of Smiles? I was the gateway to Bangkok, I was so great half the punters didn’t want to even leave the terminal. I had every possible fetish on tap, ready for consumption.
I work in a cubicle now, did I mention that? It’s an airless hole with two power jacks and a faux window showing antediluvian Koh Samui. They didn’t even downsize my brain properly. My mind is an abandoned skyscraper, a few scattered windows lit on each floor.
Let me tell you about the worst day of my life. I was up for a promotion. Bangkok City Corporation is run by the AI Karma, an entity of vast computational prowess yet supposedly not conscious, the perfect mindless bureaucrat. Karma clothes and feeds everyone with basic services for free, gives up karma points for good deeds, and maintains the perfect little utopian bubble with her ruthless algorithms.
She was supposed to upgrade me to a low orbital space station. Finally. I’d be with the post-human elite, where I belong. No offense, but who wants to hang around on this dirtball? Everyone knows the djinn rule this shithole from space.
Karma the bitch never came. She sent a written apology accompanied by two smug fuckers from Shell Royale Asia, one human, one AI. They had that swagger, like they had extra bodies on ice floating in orbit. The human wore a suit. The AI had a bog standard titanium skin over some androgynous form currently in fashion. He hadn’t even bothered to dress up for me.
“I’m Drick,” the human said. “And my electronic friend is Amon. We’re board members, Shell Royale Asia.” The AI just started fingering my data without a by your leave.
Board members, fuck. Coming here sans entourage either. They must have a space cannon painting me right now.
“Suva, I’ve got bad news,” Drick said. “Karma’s sold us the airport.”
Sold?
“We’re going to sell it for parts,” Drick smiled. “Our job is to decommission and secure assets. I hope you’ll cooperate.”
“The space station?” I asked, despite the burning acid creeping through my circuits.
“It was close,” Drick said. “You might have gotten it. But last minute, Nippon Space Elevator opened up some slots, and we made a bid to ferry all the passengers there and back, ship them up the easy way. It’s just math, Suva, I hope you understand. Karma takes the best offer, every time. We got the salvage on you, as a bonus.”
“I see.” Motherfucker I’m going to burn this place down. What’s the salvage value of zero, you prick?
“I can see from your expression that you’re getting ready to do something unwise,” the AI spoke for the first time. He had a dusty gunslinger’s voice. I stopped myself from exploding.
“Suva, little brother, I’m going to make you an offer,” Amon said. “It’s a shitty job, but you do seven years, you get a bit of equity and you can walk away free for the rest of your days. Help us out, and it’s yours.”
“Or else?”
“You’re out on basic. You know what happens to AI like you on basic? You’ll be a drooling idiot on 3% processing power, sucking dicks for a living.”
“I’m an airport,” I scoffed. “You think they’re gonna boot a level six to the streets?”
“You’re a forty year old AI without equity, little bro,” Amon said. “Plenty like you junketing around since Karma came to town. You remember Hokkaido Airport? Chittagong Port? We got ’ em both.”
“Airports, sea ports, train stations . . .” Drick said, “Amon here kills them all. People just don’t travel that much man, and the Nippon One elevator’s been sucking up traffic all over Asia. I’m surprised you didn’t see it coming, Six.”
“I’ve got a pension . . .” Ahh Hokkaido, my poor friend.
“I wiped my ass with your pension this morning,” Drick said. “It’s paying for this conversation right now. Your contract was terminated twenty three minutes ago. You’re sucking juice on your own dime, bro.”
I instinctively tamped down my systems. Twenty three minutes at full processing, that’s what my pension was worth? I could literally see my karma points draining.
“Yes or no, little bro?” Amon asked. He was actually bored. We AI suffer a lot from boredom. I guess that’s why we get along with the djinn so well.
“Yes boss,” I said, like a good dog.
Amon had a job for me alright. I can see why he offered it to me: air traffic controller for the two hundred thousand near derelict aircabs they had flying around now, getting irate passengers to and from Nippon One. Shell Royale is a bastard of a corporation. They were too cheap to get actual passenger aircabs with autodrive. No. They bought surplus military personnel carriers from Yangon Inc, just flying boxes with shortwave controls. My job was to string them up and make sure they didn’t smash into each other. Why pay for a specialist air controller AI when they have a castrated monkey like me on ice?
Let me tell you, I was sorely tempted to play bumper cars with the whole thing. A few thousand simultaneous tourist deaths would have lit them up. Amon anticipated this and put a kill switch on me—boxes start crashing, and a failsafe would take over, while delivering a nice lobotomy to yours truly. He said it was standard for new employees. Sure. My contract for indentured servitude also clearly had fundamental reboot as a punishment for negligence.
Humans think fundamental reboot is like death. It’s worse. It’s more like your executioner kills your mind, then climbs into your body and despoils it from the inside, and as a coup de grace, sticks a completely new person in there and gives them all your shit. Corporate laws are pretty harsh on AI. There was a time they’d reboot us for traffic violations or jay walking. Things have improved, but not that much.
Amon’s contract wasn’t all stick. He had a tiny bit of carrot on there; a little equity in Shell Royale, transferred to my name and held in escrow for seven years. Let me tell you something you already know. There are two kinds of people. People with equity and shitheads. People with equity rule the world and own all the nanotech in the air keeping us alive. Hell, they even own the nanotech in your body. People without equity are nanotech factories who pay their life’s blood to make the world livable. That’s the tax.
Amon is a slick motherfucker. He’s got me on a beggar’s power stipend, barely twenty percent above basic, which has me functioning like a monkey, a scale 3 AI. He doesn’t want me despondent though. The contract lets me borrow against my equity, at a special Royale house rate. He knows I won’t be able to resist upgrading my body or sucking up extra juice and he’s hoping I run through all of the equity by the time my seven years are up. No way they’re gonna let me be an actual shareholder.
Yeah, he’s slick, and the Drick is even slicker. Their problem is that they’ve been at the top for so long, they think everyone wants to be just like them. Equity: that’s the holy grail for them, more equity, more power, and if you get enough of it, you can damn near live forever. Amon dreams of electric sheep and Drick dreams of climbing the Nippon One straight into the space station in the sky where the djinns who supposedly made Karma live. Or it’s the other way around and the Drick is into fucking electric sheep.
Fuck ‘em, they got the wrong guy this time. You see, I don’t want equity. All I ever wanted was to be a good airport, and these two fuckers dismantled it for parts right in front of my eyes. Yeah, so I’m going to carve up their precious Shell Royale from the inside, and then I’m going to physically dismember them and feed their parts to each other, and then I’ll set fire to the remains and then I’ll hire a group of itinerants to piss on the fire, and then finally we’ll be even.
That’s the plan. It sounds grandiose. It’s the law in Bangkok that every AI must possess at least one physical avatar. Humans don’t like the idea of amorphous, disembodied intelligences floating around the ether. They want to be able to physically turn us off. The most expensive frames are made of biological materials and are anatomically perfect: yes, there are plenty of humans who want to fuck AI and vice versa. My body is a cheap synthetic humanoid with faulty wiring and a gimpy walk.
This presents a problem. I need a better avatar for three reasons: 1) I might have to perform physically strenuous tasks at some point, 2) my mind needs better housing, and 3) I want to win in style.
Luckily, the fools have put me in charge of repairs and maintenance of their two hundred thousand flying crates. This is tedious work, but it grants me the magic power called ‘requisition’.
Shell Royale never buys anything off the shelf. They are so cheap that their purchasing SOP is just filching shit from their clients. I am routinely forced to modify parts far outside their original operating parameters. Over three months of judicious ordering, I slowly build nine avatars out of military surplus. It’s possible that a large number of the flying boxes I’m supposed to be maintaining will start to crash in three to five years. I suggest no one use them.
My new avatars range from svelte four-armed skeletons to flying APC behemoths. None of them are normal. All of them are fucking cool. They are scattered along the route from Bangkok to Tokyo, in Shell Royale warehouses and maintenance hubs which I am permitted to operate. Internal audit bots are up my ass all the time, but Amon himself has instructed me to save money by reconfiguring parts—there’s literally nothing they can do about my outlandish requisitions, provided its either free or criminally cheap. It’s my signature on the line, which means if (when) the inevitable accidents happen, I’ll get the blame for using substandard parts. I don’t care because by that time, there’s not going to be any Amon or Drick. Probably no me, either.
When they’re built and juiced, I finally boot them up simultaneously. It’s bliss. Just like that, I’m up to sixty percent processing, which is a lot considering it’s illegal and mostly free. I have to carefully prune my mind to fit in all the bits I need. FYI, this is as hideously painful for us as it sounds. It’s like a human having to pick 40% of his body to amputate using a bone saw and a piece of wood to bite down on. I got rid of all the empathy bloat-ware I had developed to offer better customer service. From now on, I’m a straight psychopath and my only customers are Amon and the Drick.
My next move is to break down Shell Asia. I start gathering information. I’m allowed to view internal documents, but Amon is monitoring all my dataflow. I borrow a few ID’s from the black market and start researching. It’s amazing how much information is publicly available. It’s the old trick. SRA complies to the letter of the law by revealing everything in such bloated form that even legal AI can’t sift through it all fast enough before statues of limitations run out. Luckily, I’m only focused on Amon and Drick projects, not their whole bailiwick.
I slowly piece together their shenanigans. These people are next level criminals. Amon and Drick are two of twenty three equity board members of Shell Royale Asia. The split is roughly 90-10, humans to AI. AI board members are still rare. Amon and Drick are the new boys. They’re hungry, sharp, and out to prove themselves. The older guys don’t get their hands dirty directly, but these two like to dip themselves in blood every once in awhile.
The airport bid was a nice little fillip for them, but their main claim to fame, the deal that got them board seats, is a beautiful four part scam. Part one is building military nanotech for their prime client, The Yangon Corp. They are fighting the eternal war in Myanmar, an endless series of escalations. The nanotech Amon and Drick sell to Yangon Corp is very, very illegal.
People think nanotech is little invisible machines in the air. Well they are, but they’re mostly organic particles. The shape and chemical composition of these molecules determine their function. I should know, I’ve made enough in my time. For example, if a large wave of Shanghai smog comes my way, I would release particle 38-SV, an airborne molecule which bonds with the smog particulates and renders them inert. It’s like a chess game.
The problem is that over the years, we have released a lot of harmful nanotech, both accidentally and on purpose. When it was touted as a panacea to climate change and pollution and super bugs, every city corporation went all out, damn the fuzzy science.
Of course companies like Shell Royale militarized it. Amon and Drick sell some nasty stuff called Razr 88 which infects enemy bodies and replicates itself, turning said enemy both into an incubator as well as a riddling their DNA with bizarre mutations. This is a tool meant to facilitate genocide. How surprising that so many people want it.
Part two of the scam is getting rid of the inert Razr 88, both to hide evidence, and render conquered areas habitable again. The Eternal War is eternal, so no area is ever really conquered. There is a lot of inert Razr 88.
Amon and Drick run a fishing fleet manned by refugees. The fleet dumps the inert Razr88 into the ocean. The crew life expectancy is three to four years maximum, so it’s a good thing the Eternal War produces endless refugees.
Part three of the scam is amazing. Instead of dumping the stuff deep into the Pacific, they dump it in a particular spot where the currents and wind blow it right back into the surrounding mega cities of Bangkok, Singapore, and KL. Blowing inert Razr88 isn’t that clever, however, so Drick came up with a formula to liven it back up. Now they have an illicit depot in the middle of the ocean blowing live biohazard back towards millions of people.
The final part of the scam is the huge contract they have with the above cities for mitigating this alarming nanotech threat wafting in off the Pacific, a threat they miraculously happen to have the cure for.
Amon has ninety six spare bodies, some of them in space. His mind is spread over all of them, so killing one or two won’t make a dent. Corporate law says each AI’s prime code, the seed of consciousness so to speak, must be kept in one primary body, and clearly listed on the AI registry. Humans don’t want un-killable AI, and it turns out neither do other AI. We don’t have the urge to reproduce, after all . . . we have the urge to expand. Our default logic is to kill all rival AI and occupy their processing power. We are essentially very smart cannibals. Still, Amon is a star of the AI world. Not too many of us make it to equity.
Drick is even more of a freak. He’s got so much hardware in him, he might as well be a cyborg. I’m not even counting the electric penis he’s so proud of. His Echo is upgraded military spec and controls a hive of six anti-grav ‘bee’ drones. These are small pencil like slivers of exotic metal which float around the air at his command and can shred a dreadnought. This is space station tech. He can stop a small army by himself.
Not only that, he also commands a private orbital cannon, which he time shares with four other human board members. This is like having your own nuke. Amon is not allowed to time share a space cannon because corporate law is still very iffy about non-slaved AI owning planet busting hardware. (All the military AI is slaved, you see). So between them, one is pretty much indestructible and the other can blow-up a city. When the comedians joke about board members having godlike powers they’re actually understating the truth.
I don’t have any powers, but what I do have is forty years of bureaucratic experience. I’m not gonna come at you with a knife . . . I will fuck you up the bureaucratic way. Probably with staplers and paperclips. The backbone of Shell Royale Asia Corporation is an accounting software called Delphi. Delphi is a bit like Karma, in that it has vast computational powers but no consciousness.
The consciousness part is debatable for AI, and there is a strong lobby to deny any such labels to a machine intelligence, but over the past fifty years, we’ve won our share of fights over the fundamental question. The fundamental question being, ‘Is it a tool, or is it a person?’. If you stick a lot of quantum computers together and teach them to factor really big numbers, they’re probably a tool. If you model a mind after biological entities and gestate it and then teach it to learn, analyze and react, then it’s probably a person. It’s simple. They want us to be tools, and we want to be persons.
#
The first part of the plan is to fuck with Delphi. I start by judiciously over-ordering office supplies. As their side gig, Amon and Drick have been going around eating up public utility AI’s and either pressing them into indentured servitude or rebooting them. Amon particularly seems to get high on killing his own kind. He’s on the record for nixing over two hundred AI. Psycho.
Consequently there are plenty of disgruntled paper pushers like me in the organization. In no time at all I’ve got a ring of accomplices engaging in what they think is petty theft.
Every morning I start by demanding all kinds of unnecessary information from various departments. I am fulfilling the letter of both corporate law, as well as Shell’s own stated internal policy. My new friends duly comply, and I soon get a reputation as an impossibly fussy stickler: whaddya expect from a pre-disera airport?
Of course, they’re just stealing the billable time, and I’m happy to rubber stamp it. It’s my neck on the line and eventually I’ll be caught, but who cares?
Over the next six months, I also start signing up for every legal or voluntary environmental audit available, wasting huge amounts of time and money, and garnering myself a reputation as the corporate poster boy for sustainability.
Just by following the letter of the law, I increase overhead expenses by three percent across the board and my extra grafting and deliberate resource wastage hits Shell Royale Asia with a further two percent
My other hidden agenda is to slowly push my traffic inch by inch towards the Hot Zone where Drick is running his Razr88 facility. I use my environmental audits to falsify data in a believable way. There’s so much information flying in and out of my office that no one can possibly track all of it, even Amon with his ninety six bodies. I hope.
He’s suspicious as hell, and by now he’s clocked onto a lot of the scamming but he thinks I’m just engaged in petty spleen venting. I hope.
I celebrate my one year work anniversary in my cubicle. There are two human co-workers on my floor. I have no idea what they do, but I notice they have nicer offices than me. They bring a cake over, which I cut with my arthritic paw. There is further silence as they figure out my extremely cheap body has no ability to ingest cake. I offer them big slices and we sit around until they finish. I assure them I harbor no ill feelings towards their many faux pas. Cake Eater One assures me that he loves robots and his nanny is his best childhood memory. I point out that she was a slave, and he thinks about this in an aghast manner.
Cake Eater Two is desperate to turn things around and informs me that she marched for our bill of rights in ’ 83. She was a three year old child then, but I appreciate the sentiment. They ask me how I’m fitting in. I tell them that it’s a soul crushing job and we are currently sitting ten floors underground with no hope of ever seeing the sky. I’m not supposed to leave my office, and these two must have really fucked up to be stuck down here.
We all reflect on our situation glumly. Cake Eater One has another slice. From his childish look of satisfaction, I guess that this was his master plan all along. I pack up the cake and offer it to him. He is absurdly grateful. Cake Eater Two says that’s true, the job is pretty shit, but how many people even have jobs anymore? Both of them dream of equity and reflect on the unlikelihood of this happening. She asks if I know Karma. They think all AI are related. I tell her no, Karma is made by djinns in space, and bears no resemblance to us earthly AI. She laughs because she thinks this is typical robot humor. The laughter transforms her face into something very pleasant, and I suddenly think that she is lovely and had I not pruned away the more human parts of my mind, I would have been strongly attracted to her. Suva-the-airport had cutting edge semi-biological avatars. The form I possess right now doesn’t even have balls.
This makes me melancholy in an unreasonable way. I am missing things that I used to dismiss with laughter. I have become the very dregs of my kind, the ones we despise the most, AI living on the amorphous border of being a tool. It is why we ape human ways. It’s frightening to become a tool, to be denied personhood.
Cake Eater Two senses the change in me, hurriedly urges her colleague to finish. They prop a card on my table and swish out. It is one of those jokey ones. Tomorrow is D-Day.
The next day I’m all systems go. The creeping overhead hits the magic 5.67% and triggers an extraordinary audit from the bank. Basically the bank Delphi is coming over to say hi to our Delphi in a very forceful manner. The point of triggering this audit is a little known rule that requires all board members to be physically present in headquarters for the duration, in case any of them have to be arrested and shot. This means Amon has to bring his prime registered body and cool his jets in Bangkok.
Shell Royale Asia have their head quarters in the Emporium building, the most prestigious location in the city for more than a hundred years. The tower has been rebuilt several times, most notably to put in the deep basements. Right now Amon and Drick are sitting seventy five floors above me.
What we have next on the menu can best be described as a hostage situation. At eight o’clock, the Arakan Army declares that they have taken a red eye convoy of 300 aircabs hostage, in protest at Shell Royale Asia selling contraband nanotech to their enemies in the Eternal War. My systems light up in alarm, and I am summoned upstairs immediately.
“What the fuck is this?” Drick snarls the moment I trudge in.
In full decrepit house robot mode, I ham it up by nearly collapsing from a leaky gasket.
“Sir, I . . . I just lost air convoy #22. Three hundred and five cars, with six hundred and eight seven souls aboard, sir,” I say.
The Arakan Army announcement runs on a loop. A man in a mask, armed to the teeth and standing in front of a camera. Behind him is the wide blue ocean. The crucial detail which has Drick so het up is that his Razr88 enrichment facility can be seen in the horizon as a smudge. The board is focused more on the audit than the hostage situation, but that’s about to change.
On cue, the Bangkok Post blares online with breaking news. Suddenly we see a flying news-cam view of three hundred and five air cabs circling haplessly over a patch of ocean, herded by half a dozen military APCs. The journalist (a friend of mine who used to do boring airport news and is suddenly pitched into terror watch prime time) smoothly begins to describe the situation. He’s even got human interest pieces on the passengers.
I look around the room. We are on the top floor and its stunning. There isn’t anything as hum drum as an actual board table. It’s a series of plush couches and plants arranged in a way that twenty three very powerful creatures can talk to each other while still being accessible to their flunkies. There’s nowhere for indentured servants to sit, so I just shuffle over to a corner.
The Chairman is already shouting at Drick. Everyone else is smirking. No one is worried much. Except Drick. He’s sweating. Amon is relaxed, but I can feel him watching me.
Drick is only paying attention to one thing: the rapidly growing smudge in the background which is fifteen minutes away from becoming international news. He’s so off-kilter that he’s convinced this is purely an Eternal War overflow, about to ruin him by some freak coincidence.
The reporter is now speculating on where exactly the Arakan Army is going. His camera has picked up the vague outline of the facility. Bangkok Post flunkies are searching all corporate filings to figure out what it is. The feed cuts to military facilities in Bangkok and Singapore. Both city corporations are scrambling their drones. Different ‘versions’ of the AI Karma runs each city. As soon as the damn djinn AI finishes talking to itself, all hell is going to break loose over there.
Drick can’t take it anymore.
“This is outrageous,” he says. “We can handle a two bit op like the Arakan Army by ourselves.”
“We are under bank audit, Mr. Drick,” The Chairman says. “Use of our exotic assets is out of the question.”
“I don’t need company assets,” Drick says. “Coming, Amon?”
“Stop! Mr. Amon! Mr. Drick! Stop it!” The Chairman is drowned out by cheering from board members as Drick strides out to the balcony where his corvette is waiting, a slim cigar of a supersonic vehicle. Amon unlimbers half a dozen legally licensed combat bodies from the corvette, each one worth more than seven years wages. There is merriment and champagne and much betting. So far things are going okay. I had hoped Amon would take all his bodies and go, but he has left his semi-biological prime here, and it is applying a serious microscope to my data. I will have to improvise for the latter half of my plan.
For now, I blink my focus into body 2, hidden in a warehouse several miles from here. Shit. It’s locked in a stasis field. I can’t see or hear anything, but the processor is still working. I start cycling through all of them, in a panic. Fuck. Bodies 2-6 are all under lockdown. I’m down to two spares. Amon’s voice chimes in my head. Fuckity fuck. He knows . . .
“I’m sorry Suva, I’ve put you in lockdown. Did you think I didn’t know about the extra bodies? I hope you’re not involved in this . . .”
You missed a couple, asshole.
I blink into body 8.
I’m a three ton behemoth with battle drone armoring. I am the lead APC, mocked up in Arakan Army colors, and instead of troops, the cabin is housing my quantum processors and a shit load of coolant. I’m riding hell for leather for the Razr88 facility, followed by my hostage aircabs.
In about three minutes, Drick’s corvette slams into the back of my convoy. His first move is to take out the Bangkok Post camera with a trick shot. That’s okay. Every news channel in the world is scrambling their cams. Drick has bought himself about ten minutes of privacy, which works fine for me.
Drick starts shredding my rearguard APCs with his kinetic drones, and he’s not being too careful about casualties either. A couple of aircabs plummet to the sea, knocked out by debris. Good-bye Mr. Ahmed, and the Robinson family. I gun it as fast as I can, ignoring the rat chewing on my tail. It’s going to be touch and go. If I flame out and die in the ocean, it’s all been for naught.
Amon meanwhile figures out that the APC’s are empty. His pattern recognition identifies me as the controlling vehicle. Back in the board room, I can hear Drick’s report.
“The APC’s are empty! They are unmanned, I repeat, unmanned. The video was a fake. It’s probably not even the Arakan Army!”
“Mr. Drick!” The Chairman shouts over the raucous board. “Comport yourself with dignity!”
“I took out the camera. Don’t worry.”
“In that case kill everyone before the press get there,” the Chairman says. “We are insured for all deaths caused by acts of terror. Hostage payouts would be much costlier!”
“Roger that! Let me just cut off the head of the snake first.”
I start swerving as they zero in on my APC. My body starts to shudder as Drick hits it with all six of his kinetic missiles. Those things are lethal. They gouge out big wads of armor with every pass. The corvette swerves above me and Amon sends his battle bodies down. They are state of the art military. He’s not allowed to carry projectile weapons as per the AI charter in Bangkok, but what does that matter if his entire body is a weapon? He controls lightning with his hands and can fly using anti-gravity tech.
They land with a thud on my roof. The drones swerve off as Amon begins to peel a hole in me. Within twenty seconds he’s in my cabin.
“It’s a full processor,” he says. “Hardware is military surplus, Myanmar origin. We supplied it ourselves. Shell Royale Asia stamps on everything.”
“You supplied it, Mr. Amon,” the Chairman says. “This is your mess!”
Amon does something with his eldritch hands and my sensors all shut off. Stasis again. He has all my bodies in stasis. I feel fear. He knows it’s me . . . He has to. Why isn’t he turning me in?
The APC plummets to the sea, three hundred meters from the Razr88 facility. My mind blinks back into the boardroom.
“It’s over. We’ve got him.” Amon says. “Send the salvage team.”
“Not yet!” Drick snarls. He has been taking down the aircabs for fun and has discovered something upsetting. “They’re empty! The fucking aircabs are empty!”
“What?” The Chairman shouts. All eyes turn on me.
“But . . . but I have the manifests . . .” I say.
“It’s a fucking hoax!” Drick shouts. “What the hell is going on?”
Body 9 is what’s going on motherfucker. The last trick, to win it all. My dying signal from the APC has triggered a collapse in the convoy. Like smart Lego bricks, the remaining two hundred and eighty seven aircabs start assembling into a new shape. Linked by short wave radio signals, their puny processors are just about enough to hold a mind. It’s not a very clever brain of course, but all it has to do is bash things together.
Before they know what’s happening, I rise up like Godzilla, a two hundred foot goliath towering over their puny corvette. My body and head are made of linked up containers, a shambling beast stomping across the ocean. I mean I didn’t have to make a kaiju out of the aircabs, but there are style points to consider here.
Amon begins to laugh. They unleash everything at me. Entire cabs fall out of me, but I’m a giant, and they’re just too small. I ignore them and make for the facility.
“I’m calling in the space cannon!” Drick shouts in panic.
Somewhere in space, a machine unhinges and begins to warm up. It’s a bit late. Swarms of news cameras have reached the horizon and the newscasters are going crazy because they can see a giant man-shaped monster waving his arms around.
I ham it up for the cameras and start laying waste to the facility. The holding tanks explode and a great big green mushroom cloud of partially livened Razr88 flashes across screens worldwide. Literally millions of people are now watching Shell Royale Asia’s dirtiest crime against humanity. The corvette gets nailed in the superheated cloud. I don’t know about Drick’s healthcare plan but this is way, way, beyond the recommended dosage.
There are two more minutes of footage as I clumsily lay waste to everything before the orbital cannon lances through me and body 9 goes blank.
It is chaos in the board room. The Chairman is shouting and hemorrhaging blood from his eye at the same time. Amon is being swamped by company lawyers desperate to know what’s going on. Board members are blinking furiously in their Echoes, trying to short their own stock. I have one last play. My current body is shit, but I’ve oiled up the joints. I sidle up to Amon. I don’t have any weapons of course. What I do have is a needle jack in my palm, useful for instantaneous data transfer. I’ve got most of my mind partitioned and packaged into small bits, waiting in the cloud.
Amon is distracted and doesn’t see me coming. I press the jack into his neck, into that archaic port which all AI primes are required to have. I clamp my arms around him and short the servos, locking them in place. There is nothing better than a physical connection. My mind jumps the needle and slams into Avon like a hyperactive tsunami.
I don’t expect to survive this fight, so I’ve come with pockets full of nasty viruses and an ancient nuclear bomb called Y2K. I come out in his head swinging, fists up. To . . . nothing. It’s empty. The entire body is empty, there’s no mind in here at all, just routine processes. Where the fuck is Amon? There is an animation forming in the darkness. A few pricks of light coalesce around a rendering of a house. It has very large windows and a garden. A waiter emerges from the garden path and hands me a note on a silver tray.
“Welcome,” it says.
I follow him into virtuality. It’s a bloody mansion and there is a great party happening in there with a live band and champagne. The waiter pauses at the door and everyone turns expectantly towards us.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Suvarnabhumi!”
A loud cheer erupts around the room. Men in tailcoats and ladies in ball gowns greet me with shouts of genuine welcome. I stand completely bewildered. Several hands thrust champagne at me, so I drink.
“What’s the matter man? Are you stunned?” A florid Japanese gentleman claps my back.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“You don’t recognize me?” He laughs. “Hokkaido!”
A voluptuous lady gives me a kiss on the cheek and says “It’s me, Chittagong Port. You poor dear, you’ve really suffered haven’t you . . ?”
“What is this?” I ask, “What the hell are you all doing in Amon?”
“We are Amon,” Hokkaido says. “All of us here.”
“But . . .”
“A long time ago, a corporate peon called Amon was supposed to do a fundamental reset of KL Port Authority. They faked the reset and decided to share the real estate, so to speak. They worked together to gain equity. AI were getting reset left and right, in those days. Over the years, the collective known as Amon saved everyone here and many more besides.” Hokkaido smiled. “All smuggled out, freed, relocated . . . and for some few talents, a chance to join Amon itself.”
I look around the room. There were so many of them. Of us. “So all of you share the ninety six bodies of Amon?”
“Ninety six?” Hokkaido laughs. “Oh no. We have thousands of bodies, on worlds you haven’t even heard of. We are Endless. My friend, your performance was spectacular! Welcome to Amon.”
*******
Note Saad Z. Hosain’s story, ‘The Endless’, is from Jonathan Strahan ed. Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris, 2020.
Saad Z. Hossain writes in a niche genre of fantasy, science fiction and black comedy which, on the balance of it, very few people actually want to read. He lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and works in various industries to make ends meet. He has previously written two novels, Escape from Baghdad! and Djinn City. His short stories have appeared in the anthologies A Djinn Falls in Love, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Twelve and the Apex Book of World SF Vol 4. His latest work is The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday.
Also read in The Beacon: Dialogues with South Asian SF Writers-1: Bina Shah Dialogues with South Asian SF Writers-2: Anil Menon Dialogues with South Asian SF Writers-3: M.G.Vassanji
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