Read River of Gods for Free Online

and the house full of noise and the
lights waving across the garden. That she remembers most; the cones
of torchlight weaving over the rose bushes, coming for her. The
flight across the compound. Her father cursing under his breath at
the car engine as it turned and turned and turned. The flashlights
darting closer, closer. Her father, cursing, cursing, polite even as
the police came to arrest him.
    "I'm lying in the back of a car," Najia says. "I'm
lying flat, and it's night, and we're driving fast through Kabul. My
Dad's driving and my Mum's beside him, but I can't see them over the
backs of the seats. But I can hear them talking, and it sounds like
they're very far away, and they've got the radio on; they're
listening for something but I can't make the voices out." The
news of the raid on the women's house and the issue of their arrest
warrants, she knows now. When that bulletin came, they knew they
would have only minutes before the police closed the airport. "I
can see the streetlights passing over me. It's all very regular and
exact, I can see the light start, go over me, and then up the back of
the rear seat and out the window."
    "That's a powerful image," Lal Darfan says. "How old
would you have been, three, four?"
    "Not quite four."
    "I, too, have an earliest memory. This is how I know I am not
Ved Prekash. Ved Prekash has scripts, but I remember a paisley shawl
blowing in the wind. The sky was blue and clear and the edge of the
shawl was blowing in from the side—it was like a frame, with
the action out of shot. I can see it quite clearly, it's flapping.
I'm told it was on the roof of our house in Patna. Mama had taken me
up to get away from the fumes down at the ground level, and I was on
a blanket with a parasol over me. The shawl had been washed and was
hanging on the line; odd, it was silk. I can remember it as clear as
anything. I must have been two at the most. There. Two memories Ah,
but you will say, yours is manufactured but mine is experience. How
do you know? It could be something you've been told that you've made
into a memory, it could be a false memory, it could have been
artificially manufactured and implanted. Hundreds of thousands of
Americans believe they've been spirited away by grey aliens who stick
machines up their rectums; utter fantasy, and undoubtedly false
memories each and every one, but does that make them fake people? And
what are our memories made of anyway? Patterns of charge in protein
molecules. We are not so different there, I think. This airship, this
silly elephant gimmick I've had built for me, the idea that we're
floating along over Nepal; to you it's just patterns of electrical
charge in protein molecules. But so is everything. You call this
illusion, I'd call it the fundamental building blocks of my universe.
I imagine I see it very differently from you, but then, how would I
know? How do I know what I see as green looks the same to you? We're
all locked up inside our little boxes of self; bone or plastic,
Najia; and none of us ever get out. Can any of us trust what we think
we remember?"
    I do, computer, Najia Askarzadah thinks. I have to trust, because
everything I am comes from those memories. The reason I am here,
talking in this ludicrous virtual-reality pleasure dome to a tivi
soap star with delusions of significance, is because of those
memories of light, moving.
    "But in that case are you—as Lal Darfan—sailing
pretty close to the wind? I mean, the Hamilton Acts on Artificial
Intelligence."
    "The Krishna Cops? McAuley's hijras," Lal Darfan says with
venom.
    "What I'm saying is, for you to say you're self-aware—sentient,
as you seem to be claiming—is signing your own death warrant."
    "I never said I was sentient, or conscious, whatever that is. I
am a level 2.8 aeai and it's done very nicely for me. I'm only
claiming to be real; as real as you."
    "So you couldn't pass a Turing test?"
    "Shouldn't pass a Turing test. Wouldn't pass a Turing