[Continued from Part 1]

The pratikriti squats beside him on the terrace. Now that he is able to see again through his borrowed eyes, Neel is surprised at how obviously inhuman it looks. Then he remembers a briefing from a long time ago: the AI implants filter the appearance of artificials to erase the uncanny valley effect and deceive the human brain into perceiving them as quasi-human. With his AI still offline, his brain sees it for what it actually is: a child-sized artificial being designed to appear cute, friendly, and unthreatening. The design has echoes of Disney animated characters with their large eyes, as well as shades of Japanese anime and virtual toys, but without the filters, it’s little more than a mechanical Pinocchio trying too hard to be lifelike.

“Perhaps now you can answer, detective. What was missing from the body?” the pratikriti asks.

Neel thinks. Unbidden, the sight of the dead Ganesa on the beach resurfaces in his decaying mind.

The split-open elephant head. Deep within the fluted curves and shell-like whorls, at the stem of the blackened purplish jelly-like mass of the brain, the signs of minor irrigation. Like the tracks made by a metal implement scraping away gooey fluids and flesh to expose a tiny area just beneath the base of the brain.

“The q-gland,” he says aloud, marvelling at how obvious it seems now.

He looks at the pratikriti, working it out.

“These weren’t just rich kids playing around, or some sick bastard who gets his rocks off cutting open living god clones. This was someone who was after one specific thing and was willing to do whatever it took to get it. The q-gland.”

The pratikriti dips its head. “Very good, detective.”

It extends a limb.

Neel is unsure what it wants until he remembers the nanovape in his hand. He hands it back reluctantly.

The pratikriti takes the tube, applies it again to its oral organ, and imbibes the nanosthetic, puffing out mauve smoke, then offers it back to Neel.

He takes it with relief.

“I am known as Sawant, by the way,” the pratikriti says.

Neel nods. He has never met a pratikriti that has a name before. Then again, he has rarely encountered any artificials before: before he was put into deadsleep, they were regarded as expensive playthings, affordable only by the uber rich. Apart from brief encounters with artificials that opened doors, ushered him into meetings, or operated vehicles, he has never had an actual face-to-face conversation with one; yet he supposes that sharing a smoke qualifies as a kind of friendship.

“Hello Sawant,” Neel says.

“It is a pun, of course. Sawant, because—”

“Because it sounds almost like savant, yes, I thought as much.”

“Of course. You are a detective. A very good one. What do you know about q-glands, Detective Neel Kant?”

“Not much,” Neel admits. “Only what I learned in school. I know that nobody else knew what a q-gland was or was aware of their existence until we made first contact with the Sanskriti.”

“Yes,” the pratikriti agrees, “After first contact, the Sanskriti gifted us the Smriti Codex, as a sign of friendship and trust. You would have been taught the significance of the Codex in school as well.”

“A key that enabled us to decode the factual, scientific meaning of ancient Vedic lore,” Neel says, feeling like a middle grader reciting an answer in class again. “When applied to the mantras in the ancient puranas, the Vedas, and other ancient Sanskrit text, it made it possible to interpret the scientific equivalents and in some cases, apply it to technological advancements.”

He gestures at the city above them, the source of retina-blasting illumination. “It changed the world.”

“And what is the role of the q-gland in all that?”

“The Smriti Codex also helped us analyse the puranas, the ancient texts that purport to be histories of the lives of the Devas, the ancient Gods of the Vedic pantheon, and determine that their godlike powers, immortality and superiority all stemmed from a gland only they possessed.”

“A quantum gland,” Sawant says.

“Yes. A biological organ that secretes a hormone that enables quantum entanglement of biological molecules,” Neel says.

“That is an oversimplification, but yes, basically it means that all beings who possess a q-gland are connected at a quantum level. It is what enabled the Devas to travel through dimensions, across time and space, change shape and form, manipulate reality, create—or destroy—entire universes at will, and achieve fantastical, inconceivable feats beyond human imagining.” Sawant pauses. “Our awareness of the q-gland is only one of many such discoveries we made after applying the Codex. But progress has slowed in the past decade. Interpreting and applying the Codex is a complex, complicated matter, and the potential consequences of misinterpretation are devastating. Furthermore, the Sanskriti have restricted most of the Codex from humanity as a whole, giving only a few select individuals access to certain sections. And of those individuals, only one has been graced with direct access to the Sanskrit themselves. No other human being on the planet has ever been afforded the privilege of contact.”

The pratikriti raises a limb to point, while projecting a holo of a view of the cityscape a mile or more above them. This is for Neel’s benefit, being temporarily deprived of his AI and use of his cams. Most of it is traffic, endless rows and stacks of vehicles rushing people home to their destinations in the kilometres high towers and blocks which is Mumbai in the year 2094, a far cry from the city by the sea it once was.

But there is more to it than just traffic and towers. There is, for instance, the under-construction, near-complete space elevator called Dwara.

A burnished, gold-hued, translucent, nanotube cylinder built from a superpolycarbon, its Earthbound section is already completed and looms, towering thousands of miles high into orbit, within reach now of the enormous way station that is also almost complete.

The name literally means Doorway or Gateway and like all gates, access to it is restricted by gatekeepers. For the fortunate upper castes who are approved for travel eventually, Dwara will be mankind’s gateway to the galaxy. While the majority of humans would continue to develop and occupy the solar system, stripping it of its natural resources, the stars are the real, intended destination. Those who are wealthy and powerful enough—and have earned the approval of the Sanskriti—will be transported in unimaginably vast ships across equally unimaginable distances to colonise new worlds, new systems, even new galaxies.

Above the traffic ceiling, an invisible height limit imposed upon all vehicles by AI, is the block that houses the Mumbai Police Department. And above it, shaped like a diamond, is the single largest residence on the planet.

It is Himalayan in mass, Mahabharatan in size, diamantine in shape. It takes up slightly more than half of Mumbai’s area, or sky footage as it’s now called in real estate terms, and is immense enough to house all of the city’s twenty-seven million population.

But in fact, it only houses one person.

One person and his family, of course, but it’s not a large family by Indian late twenty-first century standards. Barely five people, all told.

Five people serviced by a staff of reputedly several hundred, not counting some thousands of pratikritis for its maintenance and security.

It’s the single largest residence on the planet.

And also the most heavily guarded structure.

Its tented peak, glittering like the multi-faceted diamond it’s meant to resemble, is twice as tall as Mount Everest, the uppermost miles kept free of frost and ice by a heated surface. The actual living areas are all in the center, barely a few square kilometres, shielded on all sides by a vast array of technology, human servants, and protective defenses. It was still under construction when Neel was put into deadsleep and this is his first view of the completed “house.”

It is unspeakably gaudy, ostentatious, over-the-top, decadent.

It is also unspeakably beautiful.

It is the domicile of Indrakant Devaratna.

The richest, most powerful man in the world.

The only Indian who has had direct contact with the Sanskriti since their arrival; in fact, humankind’s first contact with an alien species, since the Sanskriti are alien beings even if they are, theoretically at least, of Indian origin, was with a single human: Indrakant Devaratna.

The man responsible for the termination of Neel’s life, and his enslavement after death, for that is what being put into deadsleep really means, isn’t it? Dead, but sustained biologically for such time as when your services might be required again. To be resurrected at that time and given an assignment. And once that assignment is completed, to be returned to deadsleep. And so on, for as long as the man who put him there deems it.

No, not a man.

Indrakant Devaratna might have been born a man once, forty or fifty or however many years ago when he emerged from his mother’s womb as a human infant.

But now he is far, far more than that.

Indrakant Devaratna is a spokesperson for the gods in today’s world.

The only human on the planet granted the highest access to the Sanskriti and all their incredible gifts.

The Chosen One, so to speak, if Intergalactic Super Capitalism can be said to have a Chosen One.

Yes, that is the only fitting word to describe Devratna’s power and influence.

Indrakant Devaratna is a god.

And Detective Neel Kant serves at his whim.

For now, Neel thinks, battling the emotions that war within him. For now, but not forever.

As if sensing his true, unspoken thoughts and feelings, Sawant closes the holo.

Neel closes his eyes, taking in another suck of numbing smoke. “What does all this have to do with the q-gland and my case?”

Sawant rises and prowls the terrace as it continues speaking. Its eyes extend on antennae, scanning the sky. It has the watchful, alert attitude of someone sensing imminent threat. It is waiting for something, or someone, who is not a friend.

“As you have already pointed out earlier, detective, the genuine clones of the Devas, the ones that are built out of the actual, undegraded DNA of the real Hindu gods themselves, are each born with a q-gland. Like other biological glands, the q-gland only becomes active later in life. In the lifespan of the Devas, that means after the elapse of one thousand and eight years.”

“A whole millennium,” Neel agrees.

“They’re Devas,” Sawant says, “immortals. A thousand years to them is like a few weeks, maybe even a few days or hours to humans. Once activated, the q-gland releases the unknown hormone that makes quantum entanglement possible, investing the body with unimaginable abilities. The power to fold space-time, to wield impossible power, to manipulate matter at an epic scale. In sum, it’s the basis of the godlike powers of the Devas that you grew up reading and hearing about in the ancient Indian puranas, myths and legends.”

“The Power of the Gods,” Neel says, “all from a tiny gland smaller than a poppy seed.”

“Yes, but that is the power vested in the body of the Deva itself. To date, no human has reported seeing an actual Deva yet. Even the Sanskriti admit they have had no contact with the Devas for tens of thousands of years, and are unaware of their actual whereabouts. They have suggested that perhaps the Devas are extinct, though they do not deign to explain how a race of immortals could die out.”

“Or so they claim,” Neel says.

Sawant pauses, absorbing this.

“Or so they claim,” it agrees.

Then continues. “A clone derived from actual Deva DNA, if that were even possible, would have to be kept alive for at least a thousand and eight years, until the q-gland activates. The Sanskriti have been in contact with humans, well, with one human anyway, for just three decades. Even the Smriti Codex only provides us with fragments related to them: from those fragments, we’ve been able to craft and print mimics of the gods, using artificially grown DNA or recycled, mutated human DNA. That’s how all the fake Ganesas and other Devas are grown, and even they barely last a day before decomposing.”

Like I’m decomposing now, Neel thinks but doesn’t say aloud.

“To acquire an actual q-gland, someone would have to clone a Deva using actual god DNA. Where would they get that? How would they get that? From the Sanskriti? How does that work exactly?” the pratikriti asks.

“But if it were possible,” Neel says, following the line of the argument to its logical conclusion.

Sawant lowers its antenna and head block in a gesture of acknowledgment. “If it were possible . . .”

Neel continues. “Then perhaps the person or persons who cloned that Ganesa on the beach needn’t wait a thousand years until activated. All they would have to do is extract the q-gland and study it, analyse it using knowledge gained from the Smriti Codex.”

Neel rises, walking to the end of the terrace, to the view of the beach and the black, invisible, soughing body of the Arabian Sea, chaffing restlessly against its earthbound chains. “That would explain the corpse on the beach. But then what do they do with the q-gland?”

Sawant is silent now, gliding noiselessly to hover beside Neel without interrupting his flow of thought.

Neel nods to himself as well as to the pratikriti. “Maybe they believe that by studying it, they can figure out the composition of the hormone, recreate it artificially? Find a way to acquire quantum abilities without needing to wait a thousand and eight years? Or maybe just sell it on the black market, to someone else who wants it.”

“Wants it for what?” he then asks aloud, then waves the question away, laughing at himself. “Forget I asked. They want it for the same reason that rich people in Mumbai used to want to buy tiger’s claws, or ostrich eggs, or any of a hundred endangered species, now all extinct, because of some superstitious belief that if they ate it, or drank it, or powdered it and applied it on their sexual organs, or their chest or wherever, they would acquire some of that animal’s abilities. It’s not really that different from the illegal animal organ trade of a hundred years ago, is it?”

Sawant makes a sound of approval. “Basically, the same thing, black marketing of illegally harvested organs, but with bigger stakes, more money. And as you are aware, detective, there is a great deal more wealth around now than ever before.”

Neel snaps his fingers. “And it doesn’t have to be a buyer in Mumbai or even in India. There are still billionaires and even a handful of trillionaires around the world who’ve benefitted from the arrival of the Sanskriti. Anyone could be willing to pay a fortune for a q-gland if it was even remotely possible to use it to somehow acquire the abilities of a Deva.”

Neel tosses the possibilities around for another minute or two, using the artificial as a sounding board for the hypothesis. The pratikriti seems distracted, engaged in its surveilling mode again.

“Time to re-engage yourself in the perennial struggle, detective. Time to rejoin your own race. This has been a fine talk. I wish you godspeed in your endeavors.”

Neel frowns. The words have a sense of finality. Before he can speak, he feels the familiar, unpleasant sensation of his AI and its systems coming back online. He cringes and winces. For a brief time, he got to experience what it was like to be human, not quite alive, but dead-alive, which is the closest he has been in a long time. It frustrates him. He wants to ask the pratikriti more questions, debate the possibilities further. But the AI overwhelms everything. He knows better than to fight it. He surrenders.

This time when the AI aggressively reboots, he can only lie back on the filthy roof and let the tech restarting in his head and body cycle through its usual processes. At least it will help shield him from the light. As his retinacams whirr and the system races through a series of sensory and neurological tests, administering doses of drugs to push the corpse shell into a few more hours of artificially induced activity, he regains his feet, rejuvenated by the drugs, the AI overriding the obduracy of the corpse flesh, and stares at the pratikriti. Once again, he sees it as a quasi-human, the uncanny valley effect erased by the AI.

The pratikriti extends two antennae that curve and bend like feelers then fix themselves in one direction as if tracking something approaching. Neel feels it now, and is aware of the sound he has been hearing the past several seconds, from the instant his AI powered up. The growl of approaching motors in the sky.

“Welcome back, Detective Neel Kant,” the pratikriti says, “Accept this parting gift from your kawariya.”

Neel barely has a chance to register the incoming digital message before a single searing red line descends from a forty-five-degree angle, ending at the pratikriti’s head and reducing it to a heap of smoldering pile of metal trash that collapses into a mercurial smear on the sooty roof. The police drona that fired the implosive shot hovers above the roof, turning its searchlight upon Neel himself next, its weapons bristling. Two others hover at the periphery of his vision, tracking him while scanning for other hostiles. SOP.

“Detective Neel Kant, report immediately to your supervisor,” says the mechanical voice of the drona, then repeats the command in Marathi, Hindi, and several other languages.

• • • •

The Headquarters of the Mumbai Police Department is much the same since Neel was last woken from deadsleep. From the van which is transporting him, approaching at a height of a kilometre above ground, it appears as it has for the past half-century, a large greenish-gray block of solid lohiton suspended in the air. The lohiton, allegedly capable of withstanding anything short of a nuke, as well as the antigrav platform on which the structure rests, were both provided by the Sanskriti, of course. One of their many gifts to humanity, their distant cousins. And because humanity chose not to look the gift horse in the mouth, all the tech that powers the Mumbai PD, like all other administrative and government functioning, is also provided by the Sanskriti.

On closer approach, as the van passes through the slot that has opened to receive them, Neel notes the motto engraved at the entrance is the same as it has been for a century and a half: Sadraksanaya Khalanigrahanaya. Ever vigilant and ready to protect against evil the department might well be, but what about the evil within?

Srinivasan is waiting in the docking area, his worry overlayered by a skein of anger. Four human cops are on duty: Two constables, a sub-inspector and an inspector. They look on indifferently, simply getting through their shift, but when the van door slides open and the dronas assist Neel out, they register recognition and something else: Hostility? Disgust? The inspector shoots a quick glance in Neel’s direction, and he senses something more than mere curiosity in her gaze but isn’t sure what. At his look, her eyes snap away, face resets, and perhaps he only imagined it.

He has no illusions: the country had already been in the thrall of majoritarian sentiment for almost a whole century when first contact with the Sanskriti occurred; in these past thirty years, that sentiment has hardened into dogma, prejudice solidified as a core value. Even before Neel was found guilty of sedition and put down, he was already inured to the bigotry of his colleagues in the department as one of the last surviving “lowborn.” After the charges, his file was classified, his actual offense, such as it was, kept concealed from public (and departmental) view, allowing prejudice-free rein to ascribe any number of anti-national offenses to him. These young cops’ faces reflect their contempt for a person they believe doesn’t qualify as human, let alone deserve to be in charge of an investigation.

“I’ll take him from here,” Srinivasan says to the dronas.

They bristle, each floating torso reacting with machine reflex, weapons armed. At once, the attitude of the human police officers changes.

“Deputy Commissioner Srinivasan, our orders are to bring the suspect to the interrogation rooms for questioning by the Commissioner,” says a drona in its clipped, mechanical voice.

“Then follow behind us, while I walk with the Detective,” Srini says curtly, then repeats the word, “Detective Neel Kant is under my command. We are taking him in for a debriefing.”

The drona is silent for a beat as everyone stays still, the possibility of violence imminent. Its white pupils spin like the eyes of the possessed in an exorcism as it verifies Srinivasan’s claim and current status, then light up again. “Proceed.”

They board a tray, the silver square levitating in an AI-controlled vector across the open center of the structure. Several other trays rise and fall silently, diagonally, moving along their own invisible vectors as they transport other persons under arrest, some to scheduled court hearings, the convicted ones to holding cells where they will await transport to the asteroid prison colonies. The khaki-uniformed officers on each one glance in passing at Neel. Though none linger, he feels their gazes as keenly as a hundred laser pointers aimed at him, boring in. He feels the silent chatter as a growing bubble pressing in from all sides, othering him. That fellow. Dead but still a troublemaker.

Something in his right lower side is dysfunctional. The corpse’s liver? Kidney? This whole body is breaking down, but this particular spot is extra tender. When Srinivasan’s elbow brushes against it accidentally, pain sparkles brightly, searing. Neel’s knees long to buckle; his brain balks. He maintains his bipedal uprightness, imitating a show of human dignity as best as he can: for as long as he can. The good news is he’s already dead. By reviving him, they have already done the worst that they could do; returning to the sweet, dreamless void of deadsleep will be a blessed relief.

• • • •

The interrogation room is cold, intended to make suspects, more often than not malnourished malcontents riddled with disease and mental health issues, wretchedly uncomfortable. It has the opposite effect on Neel. The cold feels welcome, a relief from the tropical heat of the place from which he has come. He is, after all, a walking corpse. Cold is where his body lives; a corpsicle loves the freezer.

Srini goes through the ritual of formality in matter-of-fact fashion, but his eyes tell Neel a different story. He’s trying to communicate something between the formal declarations of name, rank, etc., something only Neel is meant to understand. He gets it. Srini has a fine, dangerous line to walk: he must maintain the outward appearance of a superior officer debriefing a junior while carefully avoiding any reveals of their true relationship and purpose here, and is subtly cautioning Neel to do the same. Neel holds eye contact and nods once. They are being monitored in every way possible: visually, aurally, biometrically, their blood, DNA, brains mapped and scanned. This is a treacherous minefield; yet, walking across the minefield is the only way across to where they are headed. The only way out is through.

“Detective Neel Kant, your assignment was to examine the crime scene and then return to Headquarters to pursue your investigation using our resources,” Srinivasan says, playing his part.

“That is correct, sir,” Neel responds. “In the course of my examination, I observed someone watching me from a nearby structure. Since the witness recording that first alerted us to the crime appeared to have been taken from that same structure, there was a high possibility of the watcher being the witness. It was incumbent upon me to investigate further at once.”

“Why not simply call in a drona team?” Srinivasan asks, settling in, looking less anxious now that Neel is playing along so amiably. “That is the SOP.”

“Sir, there was a likelihood of the witness fleeing the scene before the dronas could arrive on scene. Moreover, the presence of the dronas could well have provoked an aggressive response. Had violence broken out, key evidence and witnesses could have been lost. I felt it expedient to make a preliminary assessment before calling them in.”

Proceeding in this procedural manner, they build a credible scenario of the events in Green House. Neel makes no mention of Grandmother or her children, of course, and shrugs away the lack of data received by his AI as a probable tech malfunction. The I’m-just-a-cop-what-do-I-know-about-tech is credible enough to be convincing, he hopes. Srini helps by phrasing his questions carefully, steering Neel away from anything that might lead to sensitive areas, or open pitfalls which he might struggle to answer. It’s a classic game of “ask only the right questions to get only the answers you want heard” and they play it well together, even though this is their first rodeo since Neel’s return from deadsleep. Certainly the first with such high stakes.

When they come to the rooftop and Neel’s brief but pungent conversation with the pratikriti, they are on more dangerous ground. Because of the proximity of the dronas as well as the rebooting of Neel’s AI at the time, even Srini can’t brush over or ignore the final communication sent by the artificial person before its head was imploded.

Srini calls it up on the space between them over the interrogation table.

C₁₆H₁₅NO₂ [a]²⁷_D+7.89° (c 0.20, CHCl₃) hangs in mid air, printed on invisible electrons.

“Explain,” Srini says.

Neel shrugs and lies: “I have no idea what it means.”

Srini exhibits the first true frown, his forehead creasing in two overlapping chevron-shaped curves. “It appears to be a chemical formula,” he says.

Another shrug. “If you say so, sir. Chemistry was never my best subject.”

This is factually correct. The body that Neel is in currently belongs to a person who flunked Chemistry back in high school and had to take a re-exam to secure the minimum passing mark of thirty-five required to graduate.

Srini tilts his head, consulting his AI. “Aeglemarmelosine. A compound.”

“The pratikriti was clearly malfunctional,” Neel says, affecting indifference, “Probably another decommissioned artificial illegally resold before it could be destroyed by the garbage disposal department, refurbished for illicit personal use. Who knows what mods had been made to its systems, how it had been tampered with, what criminal uses it had served. It could have been spouting subversive blasphemy. Or just gibberish. In any case, it’s been destroyed, so what does it matter?”

This is the perineum of the interrogation, the thin membrane between withholding information and committing treasonous blasphemy, which would be an automatic death sentence for Srinivasan, his rank and status notwithstanding and for Neel, a swift return to deadsleep. It doesn’t bother Neel much; deadsleep would be better than this, anything would be better than this half-existence, not-life. But Srinivasan would be missed, less by Neel than by Srini’s wife, his children—Neel’s sister, nephew and niece. For Srini’s sake, he hopes the lie will fly.

Srini leans forward, face hard, voice stern. The threat and gravel in his voice are real. He knows what’s at stake too, and he needs Neel to sell this. It’s as close as he can come to begging, Help me out here, Neel.

“Detective, if you’re lying to me, there will be consequences.”

“Why would I lie? You brought me out of deadsleep, assigned this case to me. I’ve only been here a few hours, you’ve monitored my every move. Besides, what possible reason would I have to lie?” Neel asks, feigning incredulity.

Srini shakes his head. “I’m not going to waste time speculating. Just tell me what the pratikriti meant.”

“Sir, that is what I wish to do as well. Find out what that formula meant. Let me talk to the Police Lab and find out.”

Srini’s waving his palm in a negative gesture before Neel can finish. “Before that. Before it sent you the formula and was destroyed by the dronas. Before your AI rebooted and resumed recording. You were having a conversation about something else. That’s what I’m asking about.”

And so they come to the rub.

Neel spreads his hands, palms up. “I was questioning the pratikriti for information on what it witnessed, but wasn’t getting anywhere. It was talking gibberish, as I said.”

Srini slams his fist down on the table, rising to his feet. The two cups of water jump, Neel’s full one falling over and spilling. The fluid forms a paramecium shape.

“Stop wasting my time!” he shouts, looming over Neel, face engorged. “My techs are probing your AI to find out why and how it malfunctioned. They have ways to retrieve the missing period of time from your organic memories directly! If what you’re telling me here fails to correspond with their findings, deadsleep will be the least of your problems! Do you understand?”

In other words: the Police tech is doing their damnedest to find out what actually happened down there in Green House. If they’re able to retrieve anything that contradicts what Neel is telling him here on the record, they will both be in deep shit.

Yeah, right. Extracting coherent data directly from organic brain matter is tricky at best even when the person being probed is of sound mental and neurological health. Pulling information out of a dead corpse’s head which is already in advanced entropy is laughable. It’s an idle threat, a show for the powers that be who are watching or will be watching this recording. But Srini is doing more than just covering his ass; he’s giving Neel an opportunity to lay on the record anything that might come back to bite them both in the ass later. And also: he’s begging Neel to give them something, anything, that will justify his letting Neel stay on the case and Srini assigning him to it in the first place. He was right when he said this wasn’t about Neel; it’s about him too, about Neel’s sister and niece and nephew, and also, ultimately, about getting justice in an unjust society, although the powers that be don’t know that last part of course. If they did, both Srini and Neel would already be done.

Neel lowers his head in a resigned gesture.

“Very well, sir,” he says, trying to sound contrite, “I have a working theory. But I need more information before I know whether it has any merit. It could be completely worthless, for all I know. Like I said, I’ve only been on the case a few hours.”

Srini shakes his head, looking grim. “Don’t play games with me, Detective. We’re on the cusp of the twenty-second Century. We’re empowered with Sanskriti technology. Hyper advanced alien technology light years beyond anything we’d developed ourselves. The stuff of dreams and miracles. The majority of our cases are resolved within hours, some within minutes, almost always without needing physical intervention. The days of wearing out shoe leather and beating in heads are long gone. Forensic analysis, online data, and chemical interrogations give us everything we need, sitting in this building and working with our AIs. Whatever you have, theory or bullshit, it can be verified and tested instantly. Your job is to observe and oversee, to direct the course of the investigation. That is what a Detective does these days. I very much doubt you, a mere human detective, could come up with something that even our Sanskriti tech can’t uncover. But let’s say for the purposes of this discussion that I’m willing to play along with your self-delusion. If you genuinely have something, now’s the time to spill it.”

Srini’s face conveys the ultimatum with a final plea in his black pupils. Now, Neel. Give them something.

Neel does. “Q-glands.”

The double chevron reappear on Srini’s forehead. “What about q-glands?”

Neel shifts in his seat to feign reluctance for the watchers, as if he’s giving up a half-baked theory he’s embarrassed to have thought up, his eyes evasive, body language uncomfortable. “I don’t think this is just another case of people printing out Ganesas for religious rituals or kids recycling cheap DNA for their own entertainment. It’s about q-glands. Someone, or several someones, are searching for q-glands.”

The frown stays on Srini’s face, but he retakes his seat, thoughtful. “So you think that the Ganesa on the beach was killed by someone hoping to find their q-gland? That would imply that it was a clone of . . .” he pauses, “of an actual Ganesa. No. Of the actual Ganesa. The original god.”

Neel shrugs. “Like I said, it’s just a thought. A theory in progress.”

Srini is silent for a moment, considering. “And the pratikriti confirmed this theory?”

Neel shakes his head. “He neither confirmed nor denied it. I told you already, he was talking nonsense. Meaningless stuff. Like that formula. I would bet you that has nothing to do with this case at all, it was just some meaningless thing that floated up from his corrupted archive. The recording of the body on the beach was the only thing useful he provided us. The rest is just my hypothesis.”

Srini nods once, giving Neel a look that says, this is good, this will play well.

Then he’s about to say something else, ask another question, when one of the two dronas present in the interrogation room whirs to life and speaks aloud.

“Deputy Commissioner Srinivasan, Detective Neel Kant, you are both ordered to report to Commissioner Pawar’s office immediately. This debriefing is concluded. Follow me.”

• • • •

Mumbai Police Commissioner Atharva Pawar is standing at the far wall of his office, looking out at the view.

The capacious office, the masculine stance and the spectacular backdrop are intended to underline his power and influence, and perhaps they might awe and intimidate his juniors, but they fail to have the desired effect on Neel.

He and Srini wait.

After he deems that sufficient time has elapsed to demonstrate his status, the Commissioner speaks without turning.

“There was once a time when sea views fetched premium rates. People would pay fortunes to buy a flat with unobstructed sea view. Did you know? There used to be laws, something called CRZ, which prevented people from building highrises along the seafacing roads of Mumbai? It was considered bad for the environment to destroy the mangroves, to dump waste in the sea. We had to keep the planet clean, the coastline pure, the view pristine! Back then, a flat with a view of the sea would fetch as much as any condominium in New York or Tokyo. All that changed when the Sanskriti came. Our priorities changed. They made us see the truth.”

Pawar turns to them, his handsome features glowing with the clean-cut charm that makes him appear so magnetic on the newscasts. As a poster boy and spokesperson, he’s perfect. Even though there are no cams on him right now, he walks and talks as if he’s hosting a live documentary on the solarnet.

“The Sanskriti showed us that this planet was just one among many, like a flat or a kholi in a tenement chawl that we happened to have been born in. It was small, cramped, crowded, dirty, and getting used up. But it didn’t have to be our permanent home. They gave us technology that makes it possible to travel to the stars, showed us other inhabitable planets, many of which they themselves had terraformed. They opened our minds to the universe of opportunities. Now, we see this planet for what it truly is. A shithole. A slum! That ocean out there that our forefathers admired so much? It’s a toilet! Forget global warming! We don’t need to bother about nonsense like pollution and greenhouse gases, and polar ice caps. Let them melt! Let climate change happen! We have other homes to move to now. Other planets to settle. It’s time to move on. The Earth’s time is done, our time is just beginning.”

He walks across to Srini, who salutes him crisply. Pawar acknowledges the salute, then looks at Neel.

“Detective Neel Kant. When Srinivasan here proposed that we bring you out of deadsleep to investigate this case, do you know what my first thought was?”

A half dozen retorts flit through Neel’s dying brain. He squashes them like roaches. “No, sir,” he says aloud.

“How fitting to send a dead man to investigate a dead-end crime in a dying city!”

Pawar laughs at his own joke, Srini joining in. Neel puts on his most macabre, thanks-for-making-fun-of-my-condition, teeth-baring grin and makes a sound that hopefully sounds enough like a dead man laughing.

Pawar watches him closely, as if anticipating—maybe even hoping for—any sign of rebellion, of the risible, backtalk attitude that Neel was notorious for back in the day. Before he was executed chemically and put into deadsleep. That was another, Pawar’s predecessor, Gokhle, who has since moved on to take over as Mayor of the Sanskriti Solar Federation. Neel suppresses the urge to pander to Pawar’s expectations, maybe dole out a little fan service, then reminds himself what’s at stake here: his sister, niece, nephew, his brother-in-law Srini’s career.

“You do see the humor in that, don’t you, Detective?” Pawar asks Neel, moving into his personal space deliberately, placing his smiling, ivory toothed smile only inches from Neel’s rotting flesh.

“Yes, sir,” Neel says, thinking, This is nothing. I could do this all day. If this is Commissioner Pawar’s idea of provocation then maybe he’s not half as bad as his reputation. Even his ideas about the planet come off as the usual Sanskriti propaganda. This is all stuff Neel is inured to, standard rightwing gobbledygook. Or as it was called in Mumbai, bakwas.

“Good!” he says, slapping Neel hard on my shoulder. “Good!” he adds, slapping him a second time, probably for the satisfaction of watching Neel wince again. Whatever gunk the AI injected into him back on the rooftop of Green House isn’t of much use now; he feels like a zombie about to fall to pieces at any minute. If Pawar slaps me one more time, he thinks, my arm might just fall off.

Mercifully, Pawar seems to decide that he’s meted out sufficient male domination behavior for the moment.

“So,” he says, walking around the enormous desk and the leather-upholstered chair that are the only pieces of furniture in this vast space. As top dog, no one who’s summoned here needs a place to sit while they get their ears chewed off or pumped with new orders. Anyone above the PC wouldn’t lower his status by visiting a junior; Pawar would be summoned to their offices. Neel wonders if they have chairs in their offices, and if Pawar is forced to stand when he goes to get his ears chewed off or filled. Probably. Abuse, like all other manifestations of power, is usually a trickle down phenomenon.

Pawar seats himself at his desk.

“Let’s talk about q-glands,” he says.

• • • •

The first thing Srini does when they’re in the men’s restroom is turn to Neel, take hold of his shoulders—gently, because unlike Pawar, Srini is conscious of Neel’s condition—and hug him. “Nice,” he says, patting Neel on the back lightly, “nice.” The single word conveys everything he dare not say aloud to Neel: thank you, brother-in-law, you handled that very well, they bought it hook, line and sinker, and that buys us some valuable time, so thank you on behalf of myself, Lata, Kishore and Rafi, you got us out of what could have become a very sticky situation.

He releases Neel, stepping away, as the door of the restroom opens and two sub-inspectors come in. They barely glance at Neel but salute the DCP before going to the urinals. Srini glances at Neel’s reflection in the mirror and mimes putting a finger to his lips while his eyes flick diagonally left upward then right upward like a Kathakali dancer. Neel already knows to be wary: he assumes their every word, every move is being recorded, monitored, analysed, either by the station AI or perhaps even by Mukhya itself on its own distant orbital asteroid, heavily armed and protected.

He doesn’t actually need to use the restroom, one of the very few advantages of being dead, but takes the opportunity to go into a stall, locks it, and sits on the closed toilet seat. He rests his throbbing head on his palms, elbows on thighs, leaning forward. The chemicals in him mimic the sensation of blood coursing through his veins. He doesn’t know which hurts more: being dead and decaying or remembering what it was like to be alive.

He takes his time in the stall, knowing that Srini will understand. Neel needs a minute and this is probably the last he’ll be getting until he finishes this case.

Or until this case finishes me, he thinks.

He’s trying to summon up the strength to stand when something moves below him. He sees that the person from the neighboring stall has pushed something under the dividing partition.

Neel picks it up cautiously, unsure what to expect.

It’s a small strip of barcoding.

He stares at it uncomprehendingly for a moment and feels a peculiar sensation in his head and eyes. Suddenly, the AI-controlled filters on his retinas flicker and go crazy, starting a rush of subliminal images that flicker in quick succession, too fast to see, like an old celluloid film running on an out-of-control projector. A maddening buzz in his ears and the scent of something plastic burning accompanies these delightfully unpleasant, not-quite-relaxing sensations.

Over the buzzing—or under it, perhaps, it sounds almost subvocal—he hears a voice speaking in his ear: not through tech, this is a real, live human voice, a woman’s voice, speaking too quietly to be heard outside the stall.

She tells him that the barcoding will confuse his AI for about thirty seconds, keep it from recording or reporting back anything he says, hears or sees, so she has to be quick. Listen, don’t speak. She gives him instructions, a name, a location, reminds him not to talk about this to anyone, not even Srinivasan.

“Wait,” he starts to say, wanting to ask a question, but he hears the toilet flush in the neighboring stall, then the door lock snapping open. Just then, his AI comes back online with a sigh and a thud. His nostrils feel as if he’s been inhaling hot cinders, making him sneeze violently. He unlocks his own stall door and exits, just in time to see a woman constable at the washbasins. It’s the same one who was there to receive him, along with Srini and the two other male officers. He starts towards her, intending to join her at the next washbasin and maybe make eye contact briefly, just enough to confirm that it was she who just spoke to him, he’ll be careful not to give anything away. There’s no sign of Srini.

Before he can reach the basins, someone grabs hold of him from the side and slams him against the tiled wall. His head makes contact with a resounding crack and his shoulder crunches hard against the wall.

Two strong, muscular pairs of hands have taken hold of him, wrenching, twisting, gripping angrily. He sees the two cops who were in here earlier when he came in with Srini, the ones who barely glanced at him. Their faces are contorted with the old incomprehensible fury of men like them that he has witnessed since he was a child. The fear of anyone different from them, deviant from the norm, a fear transmuted over generations through cultural reinforcement into deep-rooted prejudice, bigotry, genocidal caste-based rage.

“You people,” one of them says, driving his fist into Neel’s abdomen. He hits close enough to the tender spot on the right side to make Neel’s pain centers explode with a supernova of agony. The other one keeps his forearm jammed up against Neel’s throat to hold him in place, crushing Neel’s adam’s apple and cutting off his air supply.

“Hey,” says a female voice. “That’s enough.”

Neel can’t see her—his head is shoved sideways, left eye almost in contact with the wall—but he’s sure it’s her, the female sergeant. She must be the one who gave him the message in the stall. Go away, he wants to tell her, get the hell out of here. Don’t risk yourself to exposure by coming to my rescue. But he’s the damsel in distress, she the knight in armor here, and she knows what she’s doing.

“You a fan of these lowborn?” demands the cop who broke Neel’s liver. At least, that’s what it feels like. “You want to see them brought back to the department again? To see them become part of society? You like the low castes?”

Neel hears her answer in a cold, tight tone: “I don’t give a shit about them. I just thought I’d point out that DCP Srinivasan is right outside that door. If he catches you beating up this bastard, you’ll both be suspended. As your squad sergeant, I need every available officer, that is my only concern.”

A beat of silence follows this.

Neel feels the man pressing him against the wall yank back his forearm.

“Screw this,” he hears him say, “I’m not going to lose my job for the likes of this lowborn bastard.”

“Yeah,” says the one who slugged Neel, “they aren’t worth it. Vaise bhi, this madarchodh’s deadmeat anyway. Probably won’t last the day!”

Neel sees them step around the woman and exit the bathroom. She grabs the door behind them to hold it open, glances at Neel without expression, then leaves as well.

Neel puts out a hand to grab the side of a washbasin to keep himself from sliding down to the floor. He does a stumbling half-twirl to grip the basin with both hands, waits until his forearms stop trembling, then runs the faucet and splashes water on his face until he stops shaking. The water is cold, but to his skin, it feels unpleasantly warm. He stays like that, water dripping off his face into the basin.

He’s been dead, and he’s been alive.

Dead beats alive any day of the week.

• • • •

The drona makes a keening sound to rouse him from the involuntary doze he’s fallen into while downsiding.

“You have arrived at your destination,” it says, “be aware that you are entering a restricted zone. You will be exposed to toxic substances, viruses—”

He stumbles out and tries to slam the van door shut on the mechanical litany. The AI controlling the door resists his weak effort, continuing to slide the door shut at its own mechanical pace.

He keeps his head down and eyes closed to avoid the dust storm raised by the van lifting off, waits another minute, then looks around at his surroundings.

He’s in one of the few open areas in old Mumbai, or as the Upperborn derisively call it, the City. He was expecting to find it barren, a bald patch on the otherwise hirsutely endowed scalp of the northernmost of the seven islands. The last time he was extracted from deadsleep, on an earlier case, he had looked down while the vehicle transporting him rose up, and saw nothing but a patch of burnt sienna on a colorful mosaic dhurrie, dead as skin scorched by a cigarette burn. This was where the dronas that had rescued him had intervened by deploying an implosion device. The blast cleared a heavily populated area of roughly four square miles. In a place where human beings were forced to live packed together like sardines in a tin can, the death toll below had been in the tens of thousands, but the subsequent department report, which Neel scans now, not a single resident of the towers above, or the occupant of the Kohinoor, had been affected in the slightest; as a result, the department had termed this “an acceptable outcome.”

But in the short interval of about three years, the blasted zone has revived somehow. Instead of a bald patch of earth, Neel is standing in what he can only describe as a jungle clearing. It is a grassy area surrounded by a mad profusion of growth. Neel has never seen trees or plants, flowers and insects like these before. Neither, apparently, has his AI which keep flashing the message “Unidentified flora, approach with caution” for almost everything he sees.

Then, as if throwing up its metaphorical hands and giving up, his AI malfunctions again, going on the fritz in a manner similar to Neel’s experience on Green House. A moment or two later, it’s down and he blinks as he sees the lushness of the myriad greens, yellows, reds, ochres and all the lavish tropical colors with his own eyes.

From the deepest, richest greens, a pattern emerges. Not a physical face this time, but a grouping of flower petals, leaves, branches, vines, creepers, moss, fungi, and even insects and little slithering and flying animals, all fitting together in a living biological jigsaw puzzle that forms an enormous face. The old woman features of the owner of Green House is recognizable and even manages the semblance of a smile.

Welcome back, Blue Throat.

Neel bows his head respectfully. “Thank you, Old One. I’m glad to be rid of that thing.”

Without it, your body will not survive more than an hour or two. Even with it, it would not have lasted the night.

“Works for me,” Neel says, “I didn’t ask to be revived. I was perfectly content being dead. They’re the ones who keep bringing me back. Flogging the dead horse.”

It is good you retain your sense of humor despite your travails. The ability to mock one’s misfortunes indicates a resilient attitude. A useful survival trait.

Neel nods. “That’s me. I have no gun, but I can spit. Except that I find myself spitting against the wind most days.”

Fear not, Blue Throat. Your fortunes will change. It is a certainty.

“Is that from a Panda Express fortune cookie?”

I know you have little reason to believe this, given your recent history, but nevertheless it is true. Your time is coming, Neel Kant Koli. I feel it in the wind.

Neel sighs. “So much for small talk. Now, can you tell me why you asked me to come here, to this specific set of coordinates? And I don’t know how you did it but that was a smart move, getting the message to me while I was in the can.”

It is a historical fact that the ones who benefit the most from the suffering of the majority tend to be in the smallest minority. Privilege is exclusively reserved for a select few. Otherwise, it would not be privilege.

“I’m not sure what that means, although it sounds impressive.”

Those above are few, Blue Throat, while those below are many.

Neel nods. “That, I can empathize with.”

You seek those who traffic in q-glands. Your superiors have permitted you this second excursion into the city below because they regard you as a dog on a scent. Even now as we speak, even without your own personal AI, they are watching your every move. They intend to track you as you track down the perpetrators. Once you have led them to their goal, you will have outlived your usefulness.

“Yes, I know that too.”

The Old One is silent then, silent if Neel ignored the susurration of the jungle around him, speaking in a thousand green tongues.

Finally, it said, “Go then, Neel Kant Koli. Go perform your task for your masters.”

Neel takes that as his cue.

• • • •

The dense cloud of pollution that hangs over the city below protects his and its resident’s eyes from the impossible brightness of the lights of the city above. The rooftop of Green House, and the Chowpatty beachfront, in contrast, had no such cover, the sea breeze too volatile to let the pollution settle. This layer, however, is too dense and permanent to have moved in half a century.

The city he was born in almost forty years ago, although the past five of those years were spent in deadsleep, is the slum capital of the world. Even a century ago, over half the residents of Bombay, as she was then called in the early 1990s, resided in slums. From that ocean of shanties had risen the concrete towers of the middle class and the rich. Now, in 2094, those towers have mostly crumbled into decaying ruins, while the ocean has expanded far beyond the seven islands of the original city to encompass a substantial portion of the mainland as well. In fact, Mumbai Below, as she is now known, is contiguous with the other metropolitan cities of the subcontinent, sprawling across the southern base of the Eurasian continent to form a continuous mass of earthbound slums, a slum nation in all but name. In this downbelow land reside over 2.6 billion souls. Suspended over them by the magic of Sanskriti technology float the crystalline, jewel-like structures that house the 300 million Upperborn. Most of the citizens of the richest, most populous, most powerful nation of the late twenty-first century live in shanties without governance, policing, oversight or participation in the nation’s new, Sanskriti-driven economy. This is the India of Neel’s generation. On the plus side, nobody has to pay taxes anymore.

Neel pauses at the border between the new jungle and the old slums.

Then he walks across the patch of no-man’s land where optimistic slum dwellers have planted rows of spinach, beetroot, okra, and other assorted vegetables, trying to avoid squashing the produce struggling to grow in the contaminated soil. He steps onto solid poured concrete, and is engulfed by humanity at once. It’s like it was in his childhood years, surrounded by such a profusion of life, a mass of humanity, that there seems barely room left for air or sunshine. People everywhere, all ages, genders, shapes. Men, women and children sitting on the floors of their huts engaged in various tasks: picking out the canker stones from rice, rolling dough into rotis, weaving baskets from cane, bags from jute, cobbling shoes. Teenagers repairing mobile phones, the old-fashioned kind that people once used in the early decades of the century, the kind that required signals bounced off cellular towers. Fixing ancient silver laptops with fruit logos, the kind that required you to type on a keyboard. This is the graveyard of obsolete technology, a zone where everything discarded, no longer of use to those above, is recycled, repaired, refurbished, remade into something useful to those below.

He sees money changing hands, actual paper-printed rupees with the picture of Gandhi on them. People chewing tambaku, the crude raw tobacco plugs that were traditionally favored by Mumbaikars, and spitting out red juice that leaves stains that will last for decades. People smoking, eating, laughing, talking, not through their AIs or even through skin phones, but directly, to one another, in person. He sees a young boy and girl holding hands. Little children playing with a stick and a pile of stones: gili danda, if he remembers correctly.

Some older boys on the rooftops of more permanent, concrete-or-brick two-floor structures, flying bright, colorful kites. The colored string glitters in the light from above as well as in the light of countless electric bulbs and tubelights, the kind that one had to actually screw into holders and needed wired electrical connections to draw power. The glittering colored string is manja, he recalls, twine-like string reinforced by rubbing powdered glass and clay across it by hand. The goal is to maneuver your kite to cross the string of your rival’s, then use your skill and the glass-reinforced manja to cut your rival’s string. Last kite flying wins the day.

The smells of the old city are everywhere. Food: pav bhaji being mashed and remashed on a large steaming tava, pani puri, bhel puri, dahi puri being dished out on tiny leaf-plates to customers who eat them with their bare hands, the spicy waters dripping. Kulfi, jalebis, malpuas, halwa being consumed in stainless steel plates, prepared hot and aromatic right there on the street. He sees a helper washing dirty dishes with water poured from a stainless steel jug, the soiled water allowed to fall into the gutter and drains.

He moves through endless alleyways, the narrow pathways left between miles-long rows of shanties, searching for people, asking questions in English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, the smattering of local languages that he, like any Mumbaikar, picked up some use of in his growing years and which is invaluable down here on the streets where people still talk to one another, where nobody has an AI. He makes his way through the bowels of the City Below, first seeking out someone who deals with biologicals.

His appearance and general condition make his cover story of seeking an urgent organ transplant completely credible and more than one person, with the natural loquacious curiosity of the native Mumbaikar, asks which organ he needs replaced and what happened. To the first, he answers with a self-deprecating laugh, “All of them!” To the second, he says, “Everything that could happen, happened.”

It takes him the better part of an hour to get to someone named Salimbhai, a self-described “agent” who deals in harvested organs for transplants.

Salimbhai is a moustached and bearded, middle-aged, reedy thin man with a pot belly that breaks the otherwise vertical line of his silhouette. He stands with legs spread apart, smoking Tees Chhap beedis non-stop, under the corrugated overhang of a hut from which water drips in a steady, rising flow. A light shower has begun to fall in the past several minutes, and Neel is already soaked through.

Despite the humidity and the warm air, Neel shivers slightly.

Salimbhai seems not to notice, but says, “Drug addicts don’t tolerate new organs,” in English.

“I’m not an addict,” Neel says, “I’m . . . dying, that’s all.”

Close enough to the truth.

Two beedis later, Salimbhai asks, “You have money.” The question mark is not spoken but is implicit.

“I have access to funds,” Neel says. Only a fool would go into the bowels of the black market biologicals area with a pocketful of cash.

Another beedi passes. The smoke is starting to make Neel nauseous. The food smells have awoken something in him. Some memory of hunger. Even though he inhabits a corpse, the corpse remembers being alive, remembers hunger, food. It feels the stir of a craving. An absurd memory of himself as a teenager eating bheja masala and pav at a streetside stall during Ramadan surfaces: again, he can’t tell if it was he, Neel Kant, or the corpse brain’s neurons firing. The thought strikes him as particularly absurd: a dead man craving spiced goat brains and leavened bread. How apt. Zombie wants brains.

“Why smiling, gentleman?” Salimbhai asks as he lights a new beedi. “Dying is joke to you?”

Neel shakes his head. “Life is a joke. Death is a punchline.”

Salimbhai stares off into the shadows across the alleyway. Somewhere, a pack of stray dogs is squabbling, barking madly as they chase down some quarry—or are chased down themselves, who can tell which. A child cries. The sound of a television set playing a Hindi soap blares with heart tugging violins. A man guffaws and says something lewd in Telegu; a woman’s laughter joins him.

“It will cost you this much,” Salimbhai says, showing him three fingers. He adds a fourth finger, stained a permanent yellow from the beedis, “Plus one for me. Terms, full cash. Full advance.”

Neel has no idea if he means forty thousand, four hundred thousand—lakhs, or four million rupees. Does it matter? He’s not the one paying.

“Half advance, half on delivery,” Neel bargains, because if on the streets you always bargain.

Salimbhai smokes his beedi, drops it to join a small battlefield of dead beedis, then offers his hand to Neel.

Momentarily confused, Neel takes the hand and shakes it. To his surprise, Salimbhai pulls him in for a half-hug, pats him on the back and says with unexpected tenderness, “Don’t worry, you will be good as new. My maal is always guaranteed fresh.”

Neel nods, surprised at the personal touch. He has forgotten how different things are down here on the streets, in the real Mumbai, where everyone shares a sense of solidarity, a united front against those above. He realises that Salimbhai has mistaken him for a downbelow Mumbaikar. It makes him feel good, if a bit ashamed of his deception. He is, or was, a downbelow Mumbaikar. Although right now, he’s hard pressed to know what he is.

A detective, he reminds himself.

A detective with a case to solve.

And very little time left to solve it.

He hands Salimbhai the debit card in a paper sleeve that Srinivasan gave him back at the station. The pin code is written on the back of the sleeve. Salimbhai leads him to an ATM machine nearby, followed by Salimbhai’s two associates. Neel watches as Salimbhai works the card in the machine with routine familiarity.

Neel himself is fascinated by the ancient machinery and the fact that it actually works. He’s surprised that anything down here works, and yet, it’s not that different from the Mumbai he remembers, or even the Mumbai he’s seen in old Bollywood movies. More polluted, more toxic air and contaminated water, more viruses, more filth and acid rain and radiation deformities, death and illness and poverty and misery, but still the same old pageant of color and light and food and laughter in the face of it all. Still Mumbai. These people may have been exiled to what the Upperborn now think of as hell, but to them, this is the only world, such as it is, warts and all. They accept her as she is, their city.

Neel sees that the account balance on the screen shows almost ten times the sum asked for by Salimbhai. He knows that if the organ dealer wants, he can now withdraw it all, put Neel out of his misery, and simply walk off with the money. Salimbhai doesn’t know there are eyes in the sky watching, that he’s only a pawn in a larger game. But the man only draws the four hundred thousand he asked for, ejects the card, puts it back in its little paper sleeve carefully, and hands it back to Neel. He takes another minute to put the cash into a leather satchel one of his associates hands to him.

“Come,” he says.

Another journey through the slums, deeper into the heart of brightness. They pass through a zone that apparently houses medically related businesses. Human as well as animal. There are shelters with dogs, cats, and other animals in cages and kennels, hundreds and hundreds of them, all whining and mewling and meowing for attention as the four men pass by. There are veterinary clinics with open doors through which Neel can see doctors examining their animal patients, performing surgery. The sickly smell of bodily fluids and waste, blood in the gutters, a stray dog in the doorway of a hut coughing with a sound that Neel hears as a bitter laugh.

Finally, they come to a large, well lighted hut, almost completely bare except for pallets on the ground at the far end. Two people, one old, one a child, lie on two of the pallets. Both are covered with white sheets and lie very still. The child is either already dead, or fast asleep. The old woman stirs and stares across the room at Neel with rheumy eyes. She says something in Marathi that he doesn’t catch.

“Wait here,” Salimbhai says, and disappears through a door, leaving his two associates with Neel.

He returns with a young woman in surgical scrubs, a mask hanging below her chin, dark circles under her eyes. She looks at Neel closely, frowning, then shakes her head and says to Salimbhai in American-accented English, “Are you kidding? He doesn’t need a transplant. He needs a miracle. Tell him to pray to the Sanskriti.”

She turns to go but Neel says, “Doctor. Please. A moment.”

She turns back reluctantly.

“I know my condition can’t be helped by a normal transplant.”

She makes a hollow laughing sound, agreeing.

“What I’m actually looking for, and willing to pay very, very well for, is something special.”

He leans close to her and whispers. When he says the words “q-gland,” she stiffens, stares at him, then turns and leaves the room at once.

Salimbhai looks at him, uncertain about what to do next. He has not heard the last, whispered exchange. He shakes his head, seeming troubled.

“Bhaijaan,” he says, “I will refund your advance fee. My half fee of fifty thousand I will keep because I brought you to my contact. And for my time and effort. Is this acceptable? It is fair, no?”

Neel waves the offer away. “Keep the whole advance. Two lakhs. Consider it an introduction fee. I can deal with this from here, you can go. I’ll handle the rest myself. Thank you, Salimbhai.” Neel is glad to see him go. Between his seventh and eighth beedis, Salimbhai mentioned to him that he has seven children and three wives. Even the children of organ dealers don’t deserve to lose their father.

The doctor doesn’t return, but someone else comes in her place, drawn by the magic words. A short man with a North Indian accent and gun. He takes Neel on another long walk through another zone. More people, more smells, more voices, more sights and sounds and memories.

He feels, as he has ever since that first encounter with Daljit Singh, Jr, the owner of the kalipeeli that brought him to the crime scene on the beach, that he is being shepherded along a preset route. That everything that has happened to him since then is part of a prefabricated pattern. The sense of being a rat wandering through a preprogrammed route in a tunnel maze is very persistent now, overwhelming even the harsh breathing, the almost blinding pain and the clumsy responses of his failing limbs and organs. He can barely walk or breathe by the time he finally arrives at his destination, a pukka cement-concrete shed with its own attached toilet and air conditioning.

The elderly lady named Mithilaben sitting with her feet up on the mattress, surrounded by three Pomeranians on satin cushions, stares at him as he stumbles in.

“Yeh?” she asks the man who has escorted him from the organ transplant clinic. “This bondhu?”

After a coughing fit in which he almost expects his lungs to fall out, Neel manages to say, “I have . . . money.” He hands over the debit card. It is taken by the escort who leaves the room and returns several minutes later, which seems like hours to Neel. He doesn’t have long now, he knows. It occurs to him that he might have miscalculated the capacity of this corpse body to cooperate with the demands of a detective’s duties.

The escort returns, nods at the elderly woman on the mattress. She says something to him sharply, and he leaves again. This time, he returns quickly, carrying a small white box, the size of a small tin box of mints. Neel looks down at it. It is in fact a tin of Altoids Arctic Strawberry. He opens it with an effort; only two fingers and one thumb still work. Inside, he sees a small dryfreeze container, ice cold to the touch. He doesn’t bother to try to open it.

“Okay,” he says.

Neel raises a hand, shoving the two functional fingers to the back of his mouth as the woman watches suspiciously. He twists off the cap of the last molar at the back of his jaw, exposing the tiny device implanted in the hollow, and bites down on it. The device simply breaks, filling his mouth with an unpleasant chemical taste and grinding bits of glassy plastic. He spits it all out onto the pristine white mattress, spattering blood and spittle and bits and pieces of the device.

The Pomeranians burst out barking, outraged. The woman gapes, then yells to her men, all of whom pull out guns. One draws out a sword that looks like it belongs in a museum; there are rust stains on the blade. They surround Neel, shouting at him in UP-accented Hindi. The dogs jump around him, nipping at his face, his hair, his shoulders.

Neel finds that he is now facedown on the mattress, slumped forward. Someone is kicking him in the thighs and hip. One of the dogs takes a bite out of his cheek, drawing thick, purplish blood. The dog chokes. The woman screams and snatches up the dog, cradling it. Neel is barely conscious but he’s aware that she’s telling her men to shoot him.

The roof of the shed is blasted away, exposing the interior to blinding white searchlights and the familiar mechanical tones of multiple dronas.

Mithilaben screams something at Neel, her last words before a drona shoots her from above.

In the gunfight that follows, Neel is shot several times, his body tossed this way then that like a straw figure in a storm. When it’s over, he is aware of himself being lifted by a drona by its metal tentacles, then carried away high up. He dangles brokenly from its steel embrace, head dangling backwards, staring at the earth upside down. He sees the lights of the city fall below.

• • • •

“Thank you,” Srini says to him.

Neel becomes aware that he’s lying on the floor of the receiving area of the station, where the dronas have deposited him. Apparently, he no longer requires the armed supervision of a drona escort. He has outlived his usefulness, although he won’t outlive it for long. He feels barely a trickle of life left, just the thinnest thread of consciousness.

“Shalini,” he manages to say, “Vidur. Neema.”

Srini squeezes his hand. “They are well. You did it. Thank you, Neel.”

Speech is hard. Thought is almost as hard.

He listens as Srini sums up. The recovery of the q-gland from Mithilaben, and her subsequent interrogation led the department to the entire network. Several hundred people have been “dealt with.” Neel understands. As lowerborn, there’s no need to bother with arrests and due process; they’ve simply been interrogated, and disposed of. Even the interrogations can be done after disposal, by keeping their brains alive and torturing them for information. The q-gland network has been shut down permanently. And no one in the lower city will dare try to start it up again, Srini says. This last part, Neel isn’t that sure of. After all, Mumbai itself was shut down permanently almost thirty years ago, when the Uppers realised they no longer needed the cheap labor and taxes from the marginalised masses to sustain their need and greed, and yet, nevertheless, she persists.

His job is done, for now at least. Until the next time that he is recalled from deadsleep, in another decomposing body, for another assignment as dirty and undesirable as this one, a case no Upperborn cop wants to touch.

Now, Srini assures him, he will be returned to deadsleep in his own chemically preserved body. Left to sleep the sleep of the dead.

That sounds so good right now. To sink back into the non-existence of deadsleep, to literally sleep the sleep of the dead. No fear that with the case over, his mind will return to thoughts of Vicki, Karon, and Misha, the family he was once a part of and lost, that was taken from him, worrying at the memories, obsessing over them the way even a sore tongue returns to an abscess. Yes, the oblivion of deadsleep is the closest to peace he can possibly get.

But first, he has one more thing to do.

“Srini,” he says, “Before I do that, I want something.”

Srini sits back and looks at him warily. “Neel,” he says.

Neel shakes his head. “They owe me. I busted up that gang of q-gland smugglers. I was their pointer dog, following the scent trail they laid down for me so conveniently, doing everything according to plan, even playing into their hands by seeming to go renegade and walk into the city—which was exactly what they wanted all along. I know it was all a set-up. I know I was just someone they needed to use, someone who wasn’t affiliated with any faction, so there would be no blowback or fallout. An independent, rogue agent who would go places, ask questions that nobody else would or could. I did their dirty work. They got what they wanted. Now, I need something.”

Srini is shaking his head slowly.

Neel leans forward, putting the last of his limited strength into his voice, his eyes. “You owe me!”

Those are the magic words. Srini stares at him, angry at being asked for this additional thing but also accepting, knowing.

“Let me see what I can do,” he says at last.

• • • •

Several hours later, Neel is out of the refurbishing pod, the decrepit body repaired and patched up as best as is possible, given the inherent limitations of human flesh. He doesn’t feel whole. That isn’t possible. He probably wouldn’t feel whole even in his own body at this point, but he feels less of a zombie than he did a few hours ago. The magic of Sanskriti tech has restored his body’s functions sufficiently for him to function for the duration at least; that’s all he needs.

He’s in a kalipeeli again, the same one in which he arrived at Chowpatty Beach at the start of the case.

As he sinks into the final moments of his existence in this body, Neel remembers the last words of Mithilaben, screamed at him in outraged fury just before the drona shot her from above, shutting her up.

“You think I am the last link in the chain, maderchodh? You think I can do business in such a product without the blessing of someone higher up? You are looking in the wrong place! If you want to know who’s responsible, look up at the sky. At the one who sits on top of us all!”

Interesting. And revealing.

After all, Neel knows that he was spoonfed and guided along a programmed track on this case, his every move planned and nudged along. He was only a drone remotely controlled, a convenient body to use by those who didn’t want to get their own hands dirty. Just as the upperborn have been using lowerborn to do all their dirty work for tens of thousands of years in India. Everything from the pretense of shock from Chief Constable Bandhopadhyay when Neel said he was going into the city, to Srini’s own disapproval, to the encounter with the pratikriti, who so conveniently fed him all the info he required to solve the case and track down the illegal q-gland network, it was all a carefully staged drama.

Staged by whom?

By the department? By Police Commissioner Pawar?

No, because even Pawar answers to higher authorities.

To people rich and powerful who run the country, but also secretly resent the one person who sits highest up the ranks, way up there in the sky, enjoying his bounty as the sole contact of the Sanskriti, the most powerful man on the planet.

Perhaps they are the ones who somehow figured out a way to clone the Devas to try and extract q-glands and study them. Using lowerborn to do it for them so their own hands would stay clean.

Or perhaps it’s Indrakant Devaratna himself, making it seem as if they were the ones doing it. Whereas he is actually the one who seeks to decode the mystery of the q-gland and the godlike abilities it confers. Because even though he has gained so much from his contact with the Sanskriti, he desires even more: the ultimate power. To be a Deva in the flesh.

Neel’s time is almost done now. He lacks the mental and physical capacity to solve that mystery, even assuming they would let him solve it in the first place. Whomever the hand pulling the puppet strings of the q-gland network, of Mithilaben and her people, it will have to wait until his next resurrection from deadsleep to be discovered. Although, when that happens—if that happens—Neel’s next case may not concern itself with q-glands at all, and he may not even remember any of tonight’s events. This entire case might well be nothing more than a lost memory trapped in a dead brain.

It doesn’t matter.

None of that matters.

He has done his job, his duty.

He solved their case to their satisfaction.

His sister, his niece and nephew, his brother-in-law, are all safe.

The last remnants of his family are secure.

What happens to Neel himself now doesn’t matter.

He can go into the blessed darkness peacefully.

As consciousness fades, as the last chemical impulses flicker weakly between his dying neurons, Neel thinks back to the brief hour or two he spent in the city below. He remembers the sights, the smells, the sounds, the life.

He wishes he had had time to eat while down there.

Perhaps next time. If there is a next time.

For now, he expends his last breaths by muttering the words, barely remembered, of the antyesti.

The Vedic litany for the dead.

The Hindu equivalent of kadish.

A requiem for the dead Ganesa he found on the beach.

And perhaps also, for himself.

Then he gives himself to the darkness and sleeps the sleep of the dead.