Hari Kunzru - Transmission

PENGUIN BOOKS
Transmission

Hari Kunzru was born in 1969 and lives in east London. He was an associate editor at Wired and was named the Observer Young Travel Writer of the Year in 1999. He is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and music editor at Wallpaper*. He was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists, 2003, and is the author of The Impressionist and Transmission, both published by Penguin.

HARI KUNZRU

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
1

Copyright Hari Kunzru, 2004
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-91026-0

Its for the Fran

Signal

It was a simple message.

Hi. I saw this and thought of you.

Maybe you got a copy in your inbox, sent from an address you didnt recognize: an innocuous two-line email with an attachment.

leela.exe

Maybe you obeyed the instruction to

check it out!

and there she was: Leela Zahir, dancing in jerky quicktime in a pop-up window on your screen. Even at that size you could see she was beautiful, this little pixelated dancer, smiling as the subject line promised, a radiant 21-year-old smile

just for you

That smile. The start of all your problems.

Its not as if you had asked for Leela to come and break your heart. There you were, doing whatever you normally do online: filling in form fields, downloading porn, interacting, when suddenly up she flounced and everything went to pieces. For a moment, even in the midst of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Leelas talent. Making you believe it was all just for you.

But there were others. How many did she infect? Thousands? Tens, hundreds of thousands? Impossible to count. Experts have estimated her damage to global business at almost 50 billion US dollars, mostly in human and machine downtime, but financial calculation doesnt capture the chaos of those days. During Leelas brief period of misrule, normality was completely overturned. Lines of idle brokers chewed their nails in front of frozen screens. Network nodes winked out of existence like so many extinguished stars. For a few weeks she danced her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step.

Of course the whole thing made her famous, beyond even her mothers wildest imaginings. Leela was already a rising star, Indias new dream girl, shinnying up the greasy lingam of the Mumbai film world like the child in the conjurers rope trick. But while Leelas mother had thought through most eventualities, she hadnt factored the march of technology into her daughters career plan. Mrs Zahir was decidedly not a technical person.

And so Leela found herself bewitched the girl with the red shoes, cursed to dance on until her feet bled or the screen froze in messy blooms of ASCII text. Yet despite what her mother may have thought, she was a surface effect. The real action was taking place in the guts of the code: a cascade of operations, of iterations and deletions, an invisible contagion of ones and zeros. Leela played holi and her clinging sari diverted attention from the machinery at work under her skin.

A chain of cause and effect? Nothing so simple in Leelas summer. It was a time of topological curiosities, loops and knots, never-ending strips of action and inside-out bottles of reaction so thoroughly confused that identifying a point of origin became almost impossible.

Morning through Venetian blinds.

A cinema crowd watches a tear roll down a giant face.

The beep of an alarm. Groans and slow disengagement of limbs.

She shuts down her machine and

They sit together in a taxi

A curvature. A stoop.

swivels her chair towards the window and

Someone in the stalls makes loud kissing noises

poor posture

between the two of them a five-inch gap

she takes another bite of her sandwich

laughter

the posture of a young man standing outside a New Delhi office tower.

An arbitrary leap into the system.

Round-shouldered, he stands for a moment and pokes a finger inside the collar of his new polycotton shirt. It is too tight.

Around him Connaught Place seethed with life. Office workers, foreign backpackers, messengers and lunching ladies all elbowed past the beggars, dodging traffic and running in and out of Palika Bazaar like contestants in a demented game. For a moment Arjun Mehta, consumed by hesitation, was the only stationary figure in the crowd. He was visible from a distance, a skinny flagpole of a boy, hunching himself up to lose a few conspicuous inches before making his entrance. The face fluttering on top wore an expression of mild confusion, partly obscured by metal-framed glasses whose lenses were blurred with fingerprints. Attempting to assert its authority over his top lip was a downy moustache. As he fiddled with his collar, it twitched nervously, a small mammal startled in a clearing.

Finally, feeling himself as small as he would ever get, he clutched his folder of diplomas to his chest, stated his business to the chowkidar, and was waved up the steps into the air-conditioned cool of the office lobby

Marble under his feet. The traffic noise suddenly muffled.

Behind the front desk sat a receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relic of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away. For a moment or two the image hung around ominously in his brain the globe contracting like a deflating beach ball.

It was punctured by a cleaner pushing a mop over his toes. He frowned at the man, who stared unapologetically back as he continued his progress across the lobby. At the desk the receptionist directed him to a bank of elevators. Stepping out at the eighth floor, he walked up and down a corridor searching, with rising panic, for Office Suite E. Just as he was beginning to think he had been given an incorrect address, he came to a door with a handwritten sign taped over the nameplate: INTERVIEWS HERE . He knocked, received no reply, knocked again, then shuffled about for a while wondering what to do. The shuffling did not seem to help, so he kneeled down and polished his smudged shoes with his handkerchief.