Two hours out of deadsleep is too soon to be staring at the butchered corpse of a dead god.

Neel looks down as the kalipeeli begins its descent to Chowpatty Beach and feels his stomach flip.

Even from a mile up, he can see it. His retinacam zooms, focuses and enlarges a portion of the beach below. He has no say in the matter, all his senses are controlled by the overriding AI. He can fight it but right now he has no fight left in him. Being dead will do that to a person. So he is forced to stare at the slaughtered god on the beach below.

The dead Ganesa lies spreadeagled at the edge of the water, the incoming tide lapping at its extremities. It resembles the body of a corpulent young boy from the neck down. Above the shoulders, an elephant’s head sprouts, big flappy ears and all. Its tusks are intact, seaweed and trash tangled in their curved white lengths. The tip of one tusk is chipped. Its overall hue is slate grey, not blue, which tells him that it’s not one of the fleshprint models printed out by some kid for a school project using cheap recycled DNA. Those cheaply printed models are always blue skinned, like the pop culture depictions, and they only hold integrity a few hours before going into meltdown. This one has the solid, fleshy look of raw meat, like an actual clone. The skin is a dirty, grainy grey which Neel knows is the color of the real god Ganesa’s complexion, now contrasted starkly against the dirty yellow sand beach on which it lies. The body has been split open right down the middle, trunk to groin. Thanks to the cams, Neel can see the split skin, parted flesh and exposed internal organs in all their ruddy, high resolution glory. He pulls his head back, the cams zooming out in response, and from this height, it now resembles the dead frog he and his lab partner had to dissect in biology class back in high school, an eon ago.

He tries to look away but even when he shuts his eyes, the crisp, clear, abattoir detail is imprinted on his vision like the ghost of a memory.

An oily churn begins below his ribs. Even though he thought he’d voided every last ounce of deadsleep fluids on resurrection, evacuation threatens.

The floating resi towers lining the oceanside lunge up at him like neon teeth in a gigantic mouth, the expensive dentures of a fund-flushed city grinning out at the Arabian Sea and the sponsored sky above the beachfront: Prime space for rent! This last solicitation blinks in the many gaps left between the subliminal billboards over the sea, flashing across his retina and worsening his vertigo.

He clutches the sides of the cab which of course, being accustomed to retinacam tourists, has gone nose down into the famous descent, its interior flipped to scenic mode. This has the effect of turning the entire cab invisible to his enhanced vision, creating the illusion that Neel himself is suspended almost two thousand metres up in the air and plummeting as rapidly as a dead bird.

“Bhaiya,” he calls out in a reflux-choked voice to the off-site cabbie, whom he can only hope is watching the screens of his various cabs from somewhere in that vast warren below, “Please make screens opaque. Opaque!” he repeats to underline his request.

The kalipeeli continues to fall at an alarming rate, while his stomach and its contents, such as they are, climb up his gorge. Any second now he will hurl, painting that famous view with expressionistic stomach acids.

Almost at the point of no return, the walls and floor of the cab turn opaque, restoring his view of the interior of the flaky, battered fiberplast cab that is badly in need of refurbishing or better yet, recycling, and the vertiginous view is dispelled. The cab slows its descent, straightening out to an upright position. It floats down at a more genial, kinder rate.

Neel releases a held breath, shutting his eyes to try to stop his head from spinning. The miasma of deadsleep lurks, whispering the promise of deep, dark, blessed erasure. Having known death, who would voluntarily choose life again? Not he.

“Sirji, aap?” says a vaguely familiar Punjabi accented voice.

A bearded and turbaned face has appeared before him, the face more lined and the hair and beard whiter than he remembers, but still recognizable as Daljit Singh, Jr. “Kyon, sirji? Aap ab badey seth ban gaye, offworld chale gaye, toh Mumbaikar nahi rahein kya?”

Neel manages a weak smile, easing his grip on the sides of the cab and forcing himself to relax. “Who are you calling a big seth, paaji? I’m still the same old awara bechara, struggling along somehow. Still very much a Mumbaikar.”

The Sikh laughs and slaps his thigh—or so Neel assumes, since he can only see the taxi driver’s face and shoulders. Age has not dimmed the cabbie’s full-blooded Punjabi speech and mannerisms. “What you are saying, sirji? Still here in our city? I haven’t seen you in one of my cabs in such long, long time! Did you get your own?” Daljit Singh, Jr, mimes steering an old-style manual drive vehicle and hums the tune of an early twentieth-century Hindi film song. Unsolicited, the AI scrolls the lyrics: Manubhai motor chali pom pom pom . . .

Neel shakes his head, a grin surprising his face; the song has charmed him. “Where would the likes of me be able to afford my own car, paaji. No. I just don’t get out much anymore. Housebound.”

He can hardly admit the truth to this cabbie whom he only knows from their casual chats during years-ago commutes that Neel has been in deadsleep for the past several years. He’s not supposed to talk about that or about the offense that earned him the penalty, the NDA being a mandatory condition of his parole. To make sure he complies, all his sensory outputs are being monitored. He is a puppet on a very short string.

As the kalipeeli comes to a standstill, the Sikh cabdriver—or should he say, cab owner, since the man clearly operates several vehicles now, judging from the way his eyes flick left and right, up and down, to monitor the progress of other kalipeelis on other trips—glances at the destination and says, “Sirji? Aap bahar jaa rahein hain? Outside? For real? You know outside is toxic air, water, viruses? Not safe, sirji! Bahut khatraa hain!”

Neel shrugs and raises his hands. “Kya karein, paaji. It’s my job. I have to go where the bodies are. Chalo, duty calls. Sasriyakal, Sardarji.”

Daljit Singh, Jr, shakes his head in disbelief, his expression reflecting his amazement at the courage—or stupidity—of the person he still regards as a fellow Mumbaikar and belatedly calls out, “Sasriyakaal sirji. Best of luck!” as the gull wing door swings shut.

Neel feels gritty sand crunch underfoot as he steps on solid, organic ground for the first time in he doesn’t know how long. Then he reflexively squeezes his eyes shut as the cab shoots up and away at an alarming, express elevator velocity, merging and blending a second later into the ant highway in the sky that is Mumbai rush hour traffic.

When he opens his eyes again, he sees a roundish face with boyish features beneath a balding scalp perched on a disproportionally smaller torso and chicken legs. This boy-man hybrid is dressed in a yellow, silver and green outfit that somehow manages to combine the style flourishes of a 1970s safari suit and a 2090s zipsuit in a manner that offers stiff sartorial competition to the late 2040s Mithunda Clone Disco Dancer fashion trend.

Neel’s AI informs him of the man’s name, designation and status rank. A Basu. Of course his on-scene liaison would be a Basu. The powers that be have to make sure that a non-citizen like Neel remains on a tight leash, and that means being overseen by a status ranked colleague, even a junior one.

In the chaos of the post-Contact years, Caste distinctions were declared illegal by the government and the traditional caste hierarchy that had structured Indian society for millennia was replaced by status ranks. Those lower castes and outcastes who were willing to erase their marginalised caste identities and deny their history of oppression by the upper castes were permitted to be reassimilated into society after passing a series of gatekeeping tests. Those who resisted the erasure of their entire history and heritage were exiled and forced to live Earthbound on the polluted, toxic surface, permanently denied the privilege of being included in the miraculous new floating cities made possible by Sanskriti technology.

And then there were special cases like Neel Kant Koli, among the lowest of low castes, with a family history of resistance to caste and class oppression, a descendent of self-declared “freedom fighters” who fought to achieve equity and parity for all Indian citizens, as well as reparations for millennia of abuse, exploitation and oppression. When arrested, tried and found guilty of sedition for taking part in a peaceful protest against the new Sanskriti-supported government’s onerous and discriminatory policies, Neel and his family were all declared enemies of the state and sentenced summarily to death. It was a Basu who performed the chemical executions of Neel, his wife, and their unborn child.

By sending a Basu now to act as his liaison on this case, the powers that be are sending him a potent, intimidating message. Message received, Neel thinks, even as he mentally raises a defiant finger. The gesture can’t be seen by anyone, since even his AI can’t capture his thoughts unless he expresses them through the speech centers of his brain, but it gives him some small measure of satisfaction. Dead he is, but the memory of his life before death lives on, and so does the endless pain of loss.

“These new vehicles don’t raise dust,” the Basu says, glancing up at the departing taxi. He gestures. “They have the latest antigrav engines. The old kalipeelis used to raise dust storms like mad. Now all are phased out since five years past. Soon after you were put down, na?”

Neel nods, daubing self-consciously at the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand. Did he throw up in the kalipeeli? He can’t remember now. His circuits are still adjusting to alive state. He decides to stick to formality, the best armor in awkward social situations.

“CBI Immortal Crimes Unit, Detective Neel Kant,” he says. “I’m here to examine the crime scene.”

The Basu gestures dismissively. “Hanh, hanh, I am aware, baba. Myself your liason, Chief Constable Shirish Bandopadhyay, Status Rank Basu, here to offer assistance on behalf of Mumbai Police Department. I was keeping crime scene secure pending your arrival.”

Chief Constable Bandopadhyay is eating something out of a pod made of what can’t possibly be but looks exactly like actual paper pages torn from an old twentieth century magazine. He picks up what looks like a piece of sev puri with his fingers and pops it into his mouth, crunching audibly. A few flecks of yellow sev have stuck to his cheek and move when he chews. He sees Neel looking at the pod and holds it out, offering.

“You want try? Bhaalu aachhey.”

“Is that what it looks like?” Neel asks.

Bandophadhyay gestures. “Authentic Mumbai chaat.”

Neel looks in the direction indicated and is stunned.

Arrayed on the dirty once-yellow sandy slope of Chowpatty Beach are some two dozen chaat stalls, painted on all sides with their names and bill of fares in English, Hindi and Marathi, the three major languages of Mumbai of the early twenty-first century. Perched on platforms in the center of each stall, surrounded by receptacles bearing the various foods, ingredients and condiments on offer, are the chaatwallahs. Dhoti clad, moustached, full-throated. Barkers standing near each stall gesture vigorously and clamor to Neel and the Basu, inviting them to sample the delicious, mouthwatering, very affordable tasty treats. Pani puri, bhel puri, dahi puri, paan, tambaku, lassi, dahi chaat, papdi chaat, kulfi, ice cream . . . the litanies overlap.

It is exactly as it used to be, long, long ago. So long ago that Neel can hardly remember exactly when. Definitely before the toxic scares, the dead sharks, the poison waves, which were all . . . when? In the 2030s? ‘40s? Five or six decades ago, but still this century, right? Or was it the previous one? Deadsleep fucks up organic memory, and he knows better than to trust his implants. Every nanogram of data they feed him is curated, a fancy word for censored.

A memory surfaces like a bubble rising to the surface of a scummy sink filled with dishwater. An image, no, a motile, moving pictures with sound and sensory accompaniment, engrams of emotion clinging to the grainy replay like specks of old blood: himself, much younger, accompanying a young woman, a little boy and a girl, clad in third quarter twentieth century urban Indian garb, walking along this same stretch of beach, laughing, talking, the children racing around their parents (me? A father? I was a parent? A husband?) as they all move towards the rows of chaat stalls, exactly as they appear now to Neel. A break in the memory, a jumble of image fragments and a potpourri of sounds, then when it resumes they are all standing by one of the chaat stalls, eating chaat together, the little girl (my daughter? I had a daughter?) pushes her last cube of melting kulfi around on the small saucer, the icy sweet slips over the edge and falls on the sand, breading itself in silica. She looks bereft. I pick her up, laughing, and feed her the remaining kulfi from my own saucer, she laughs happily, mouth smeared pista green, brown eyes shining with happiness and reflected love in the bright Broadway style bulb arrays of the chaat stall. He/I remember a surge of such pure happiness and love, overwhelming and unbearable.

Was this me? Is this me? Am I him? What about the . . . beedi cheroot baked fish Maruti van sidewalk beggar busker BEST bus Churchgate Station . . . a jumble of sounds, sensations, gibberish.

Neel reaches out to the nearest stall, trying to grab onto something before he falls.

The bastards, he thinks. The bastards put me in a body that also happened to be a married man with a wife and little children.

His hand passes through the stall’s corner, the image hiccupping, the barker standing near him with a saucer of chaat samples held out beneath Neel’s nose blipping as well, and the realisation centers him.

He passes his hand to and fro, watching the holo blip and burp.

Behind him, the Chief Constable chuckles. “You people!”

Neel turns and sees Bandopadhyay, chaat plate still in hand, several layers of chin wobbling as he laughs at Neel’s expression. “You thought it was real, kya? Abhi bhujla tumhee? It is holo! All holo. What you expect, Detective? That is why it is called Past. Because we are past it. History is behind our bums now!”

The Chief Constable slaps his own butt to emphasize the metaphor and laughs again.

• • • •

Neel gathers himself and walks through Bandopadhyay, the holo burping around him.

“How rude!” the man calls out, ignored by Neel.

He walks over to the Ganesa corpse by the shoreline and bends over examining it. After a moment or two, he realises why something seems off about it: the filters in his nostrils are filtering the air he breathes in and in the process, blocking his sense of smell. He pulls out the two soft, filmy plugs and hold them in his closed fist as he squats for a closer examination.

The stench hits him like a body blow.

The first thing that strikes is the stench of the rotting body itself. The usual reek of dead flesh plus the added bonus odors of intestinal and fecal contents. These smells are interleaved with the familiar odors of sea, salt and fish, but overlaying them is the pungent, chemical odor of the sullied ocean and air, an indefinable melange that is infinitely worse than the polluted Bombay air he grew up breathing yet still recognizable as its descendent. Despite the AI warnings flashing all over the inside of his retina and the subvocal voice warning him that he is being exposed to toxic elements and infectious viruses, he is surprised to find that he can still breathe enough to function.

He inhales deeply, past caring what the AI, or the Basu or anyone else thinks. The Arabian Sea smells like an old friend, encountered after too long, older, dirtier, sicker, but still recognizable. You and me, both, Sagara old friend, you and me both.

Neel still has a job to do and he intends to do it.

A god clone has been murdered and he means to investigate it.

“Very rude,” the Chief Constable repeats from beside him. The man has discarded the plate of chaat, but the crumbs of sev still remain on his jowls.

“I need a complete lab workup of the remains,” Neel says, regaining his feet, “and an autopsy, naturally.”

“Autopsy is already performed,” Bandopadhyay says, grinning as he indicates the splayed corpse, “naturally!”

Neel stares at the Basu, who is unfazed. “An autopsy and full forensic analysis.”

Bandopadhyay gestures dismissively, leaving it unclear whether he intends to comply with the instruction or ignore it.

“Who discovered the body?” Neel asks in a tone that makes it clear he will keep asking until he gets an answer.

“What does it matter?” Bandopadhyay asks indifferently. “Koi phorok podo? It is obviously a clone. Someone want to have Ganesa at home, maybe for worship, maybe for fun, and when they finish, they immerse it in ocean. It is correct disposal, is it not? After worship, Ganesa are supposed to immerse in water!”

He laughs at his macabre joke.

The reference is to the tradition of keeping a Ganesa idol at home for anywhere from one to ten days, then taking it in a procession to the oceanside, the worshippers dancing to music as they proceed through the streets, and immersing the idol in the ocean.

The difference is, those were clay idols.

This Ganesa is a living thing. Clone or no clone, this creature was alive, sentient, with emotions, feelings, sensations. Someone bought it off the black market where it had been manufactured, smuggled and sold in violation of any number of anti-cloning and resurrection laws, kept it at home for who knew what purpose, did unknown things to it—no, Neel corrects—to him, then disposed of the victim in a particularly brutal and inhumane manner. The fact that they immersed the corpse in the ocean in keeping with tradition in no way ameliorates the crime itself. A murder has been committed here, a heinous, brutal murder, and Neel intends to track down and bring the culprits to justice.

Neel lifts his gaze from the Ganesa and looks at the Basu directly, making eye contact. The Chief Constable’s black pupils slide away.

“Who discovered the body?” Neel asks again.

Bandopadhyay shoots him a look. “You people,” he spits, “coming here and giving us orders.”

But he scans his memebank, selects an item, and flings it at Neel dismissively.

Neel intercepts it with his palm and spreads his thumb and forefinger, opening the file.

There is only a single item inside: a retinacam playback file.

As far as Neel can tell, there are no identifying tags or markers. It’s been stripped for anonymity.

He doesn’t bother asking the Chief Constable if it’s been forensically examined by Tech. He knows they have ways to find orphaned bytes that can provide clues to the file’s organic signature, and by tracing the chain of transfer through the datastream, it may sometimes be possible to locate the actual, physical individual in whose eyes the retinacams were embedded at the time of the recording.

He already knows that has not happened because if it had, the file would have borne the appropriate tag indicating that it was being examined by Tech.

He plays the file.

It is a jerky POV view of the grubby interior of a personal resi. The recorder is passing from a dimly lit space into a brightly lit space.

The recorder stops in the new space, leaning on something, a horizontal support of some kind, and looks out at a view of this same beach seen from a different vantage point. A raised platform of some kind? A rooftop?

Subliminal neon hoardings flash, blink, dance and pirouette in the distance, over a dark surging mass that glistens on its surface.

The sea.

Closer, dazzlingly bright, are the lower extremities of the resi towers, pillars of light and glass, like shards risen from the earth to scrape the sky.

The recorder is smoking something. They lift one hand, bringing a glowing object to their face, insert it into their mouth, then release a thin trail of smoke. The smoke hangs thickly in the air, obscuring the recorder’s vision briefly. They wave it away with their other hand.

When the smoke clears, the recorder is looking in the direction of this section of the beach.

They glimpse something unusual, a foreign object out of place in the setting.

Their retinacams zoom in for a closer look, settle on the corpse of a large, fat, naked boylike figure laying on its back on the shore, legs pointing towards the beach, head towards the incoming waves that lap against its head.

The head is the head of a small pachyderm, trunk and both tusks intact.

Neel taps the air, pausing the recording.

He glances down at the corpse at his feet, comparing.

It is the same dead Ganesa seen in the recording.

He taps the recording again, resuming playback.

The recorder registers the dead Ganesa lying on the beach, takes a second or two to process what they are seeing.

Softly, “Deva!”

The recording ends.

Neel stares at the file hanging in his field of vision, visible only to himself. He turns and looks up at the beachfront, at the feet of the gigantic resi towers looming a kilometre high, at the deserted street of what was once Bombay, then Mumbai, and now is a city as alien to him as the world of the living to one who has been dead for the better part of half a century.

He starts walking up the beach.

“Oy! Oy! Where are you going?” Bandopadhyay shouts after him.

“The witness was over there somewhere,” Neel says, pointing. “I’m going to question him. He may have seen or heard more than what he shared on that recording. He is the primary witness, our only witness and that is where I must start my investigation.”

The Chief Constable speaks subvocally to someone not visible to Neel as he tries to keep up with Neel who is climbing the steep slope of the beach now. “You are mad, bugger?” Bandopadhyay asks, his outrage burning through his breathlessness. “You cannot go there! That is city!”

“Yes,” Neel agrees. “Mumbai City. This is where the crime took place. Where the witness is located. Where the body was found. This is where the investigation takes me. This is where I have to go now.”

He doesn’t add that he, Neel Kant, was born and raised here, long before these mile high towers, the flying kalipeelis, the invention of deadsleep, the construction of the first space elevator, the establishing of offworld colonies and the start of intersolar system travel, long before Bandopadhyay was even born. This is his city and regardless of the toxic air and water and feral inhabitants, he would rather be here than in those glittering interlinked towers and structures that make up Bandopadhyay’s 2090s Mumbai, a city state of almost a billion other privileged individuals who have never breathed anything but processed air, eaten only processed foods, thought only processed thoughts, spoken and enacted processed words and actions, and lived processed lives.

Bandopadhyay is looking at him with a disgust reserved for the criminally insane and unsalvageable. “Arrey, bondhu! Nobody goes in city! We are police. We stay in bases, use recordings and comms and forensic analysis to investigate the crimes. Why you think I am here in holo form only? Already, you are fool to expose yourself but it is only short time exposure, can be recover. If you go into city, you are goner. Bhujla?”

“I understand,” Neel says. “You can take the body away for forensic analysis. I expect a full report within the hour.”

He steps off the beach and starts across the street.

• • • •

The orange sodium vapor streetlights he remembers from his life here—at least, he thinks it was his own life, his own memories, but who knows for sure—are gone but there is plenty of illumination. Too much. If not for his AI filtering the quantum of lumens entering his irises, Neel would be blinded. The glittering towers and neon holo hoardings above the city flash and cycle and blaze with enough light to damage any unassisted eye. Yet, he doesn’t feel grateful for the tech that protects him; he resents the fact that it’s needed in the first place. He’d rather be looking at this with his own, naked eyeballs.

The once historic Chowpatty Seaface Road has fallen into woeful disrepair. Neel has to jump over yawning pits which might have been potholes once upon a time, all of which teem with weeds and insects, and the street becomes an obstacle course. He glimpses something large with a leathery tail slither at the edge of his vision, and furry creatures with long limbs swing and leap from a rusted, creeper-encircled lamp post to a banyan tree too quickly to follow, but chooses to ignore this evidence of mutated local fauna. His goal is the decrepit wreck of a structure on the corner across the street.

Just as he reaches the far side, Neel’s ear tingles with the unwelcome vibration of an incoming call. In the old days of skin phones, he would have simply swiped the call away, but now his body is no longer his to control, and the AI pipes the call through. The familiar voice speaks directly into his head.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Deputy Police Commissioner Karthik Srinivasan asks without preamble.

“The job I was given,” Neel replies.

He examines the exterior of the building while he talks, walking the length of its frontage to check for any signs of life. The structure looks like it’s been through multiple disasters. Its once-whatever-color facade is blackened by almost two centuries of pollution and veined with the corrosive effects of decades of acid rain. It squats like the decaying corpse of a gigantic bullfrog on the corner of one of the four roads after which the area was originally named Chau-pati, or Four Paths, later Anglicized to Chowpatty by the British. The building, his AI informs him, was inspired by the architectural style of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, England and is a part of old Bombay’s historic heritage. He brushes the tour guide away impatiently. Looking up at the filthy, crumbling structure that appears ready to collapse at any moment.

But all that doesn’t matter. Right now, it’s only a rat hole in which he must go to seek out a rat who may or may not be of some use to his investigation.

Srinivasan’s voice speaks into his head: “You can do your job using the forensic evidence collated by the department. Entering the city was not approved.”

“The witness is in the city. I need to speak with them,” Neel replies, trying to decide on the best point of ingress. He can barely make out which is the main entrance. Not the front, because most old Bombay buildings were built with side entrances to allow horse carriages to stop and park without interrupting the main traffic flow, but which side? Then he sees a small marble plaque set into a pillar, almost completely overgrown with moss and lichens. He uses his palm to try to clear away the engraved name: Hari Griha. Green House. Though of course, the word Hari in the Sanskrit means so much more than just green.

“You have the recording. What could the witness possibly add?”

“That’s just it, isn’t it? I won’t know unless I ask them.”

Neel reaches a decision. He moves through the rusting, twisted remains of what was once a wrought iron gate and enters the compound.

“Neel,” Srinivasan says in a placatory tone, “I thought we had an understanding. When I brought you out of deadsleep, I explained how things stand. I gave you a precise briefing on what you’re supposed to do here.”

“With all due respect, sir, you explained, you briefed, I listened and agreed to do the job. And that’s exactly what I’m doing right now.”

“Why can’t you just perform your duties using tech?” Srinivasan says, sounding piqued. Like every other goddamn cop does in this day and age, he doesn’t need to add because it’s implicit.

“Call me old school. Now why don’t you let me do my job?”

Neel pauses. He has found the way into the building, the entrance almost completely overgrown with vines and leaves, and is standing at the foot of the stairwells.

After a moment, Srinivasan says, “Okay, but remember. I can only cover your ass so far. They’re watching. They’re always watching.”

I know, Neel thinks as he enters the dark, overgrown mouth of the ruin.

• • • •

The wall of creepers shivers at his touch as he tries to push through, transferring the vibrations caused by smaller creatures hanging to the curtain of green growth. Chittering, lipid sounds and clicks come from somewhere to his left, by the rear of the building. He feels resistance, exerts more force with his arms and legs, and tries to break through the wall of foliage. At the point when he is pushing forward with all his strength, it yields suddenly, and he stumbles forward into darkness. A green darkness, the shade of neem leaves. A fragment rises to the top of the scummy pond of his memory, something to do with his grandmother grinding herbs in her silbutta, the little mortar and pestle she used to make paste remedies, and then, as suddenly as it appears, it is gone, drowned in the swamp of his own faltering mind, or by the AI. Neel can’t tell which.

His retinacam adjusts to the near-darkness, revealing a stairwell that has been taken over by the wanton tropical growth. Out there on the exterior of the building, it was a featureless green veil. In here, it is the very texture of the place. The skin of the structure. Overlaying the brick and stone of the original building is this layer of variegated green-based hues, undulating and pulsating in a random, arhythmic pattern.

Moisture suffuses the air, clinging to Neel’s skin like a warm film. A smell of crushed leaves, bleeding chlorophyll, some intangible melange of wood and flower enters his unfiltered nostrils, awakening parts of his brain that date back to the primordial ur-memory, the part that perceives more shades of green than any other color. This thing that occupies—that is the building—is alive and sentient. He hears it breathing, feels it respond to his intrusion; it is not a benevolent being. A curling vine slaps his cheek, a cupola descends within a millimetre of his head, opening its maw and vibrating with tremulous outrage, a hot gust of breath carries pollen that coats his skin, searing the cilia of his neck, shoulders and arms. A musky, floral effusion fills his lungs, intoxicating as well as suffocating.

This being, whatever it is, resents his presence and intends now to incapacitate him, rendering him immobile then digesting him alive in its own sweet time. Days. Weeks. Until he is fully absorbed into its hyphae. It informs him of this as vines and creepers entwine his limbs and torso, strangle his neck and bind his head as coarsely as jute ropes. He feels himself lifted several yards high, held up by the mycorrhizal network. Needle sharp probes tremble at the mouths of all his orifices, preparing to invade his person.

Then a voice makes itself heard above the rustling, green silence:

Bring him to me

The probing antennae, vines, creepers, thorns, are momentarily stilled.

The voice is soundless, yet Neel hears it clearly. It ripples through Green House, as he has begun to think of it. He feels it in his marrow.

• • • •

Neel climbs the mossy stairs under his own strength, such as it is. Darkness hangs above and all around, bristling with unseen growths. There are fauna here too: slithering, scampering, scurrying, climbing, creeping, crawling on many limbs. He sees none of these except the vanishing tip of a glistening, horned tail.

He reaches a landing, capacious and illuminated only by the faint luminescence that he now realises has been guiding his steps.

He follows the faint gleam down a long corridor where the overgrowth is a lush peepul-leaf green. The floor he walks on carefully is carpeted with ropy vines, some pulsing and near-transparent, moving obscure fluids through their length, like dark veins and arteries supplying the great body. Everywhere, the whispering and chittering of unseen creatures, small and large. Always, the impenetrable darkness at the edge of his vision where things lie in wait, infinitely patient. The humidity is denser here, the air as tangible as a soft, warm curtain. Scents of tamarind and jackfruit, chikoo and papaya.

A large open space with something or someone at the far end, facing him. A sense of a human face and torso, in a chair. No, a wheelchair. An invalid or a disabled person. A man? Woman? Elderly. Weak of body but not of spirit. Robust of mind. Keen, strong eyes examine Neel, assess him, seem to find him wanting, lacking, poor food.

“Detective Neel Kant, CBI Immortal Crimes Unit. I am investigating the death of the corpse found on the beach,” Neel says into the wet silence, the space around him filled with a thousand green whispers that are inaudible to his ears but which he still senses.

“The dead Ganesa,” replies a woman’s voice. The words seem to have been spoken through a liquid filter.

Neel’s retinacams try to penetrate the dimness, but the more they zoom and artificially light up the gloom, the grainier and coarser the image gets, like blowing up an old black and white photograph printed with the use of tone screens in an early twentieth century newspaper. He wishes he could rip the cams out the way he removed his nostril filters, so he can see with his own, naked vision. He is certain he would see more detail, more clearly. The AI feels like an interference, an unnecessary filter blocking his senses.

That is easily arranged, said the woman’s voice, but inside Neel’s head this time, not aloud.

Neel feels a peculiar sensation in his brain, a very faint tickling as if he is developing an itch inside that mass of gray matter. Then something happens to his vision, a blurring that leaves him visionless. A soft succession of sounds in his ears. Pop. Crackle. Hiss. Blackness then visual noise bleeding in.

He reopens his eyes, blinks, staggers then regains his center.

It is like the scales have fallen from his eyes, as if he was viewing the world through a series of filters that rendered it something other than what it was. Now he sees it for what it is. No longer a performance of the world staged for maximum social impact, but the world itself as she is, raw, shorn of artifice and biased gaze, honest to a fault, painfully real.

He looks around, marveling.

An immense space. An arboreum. High ceilings. The floor, the tiny slivers visible through the network of vines and creepers that carpet it from end to end, might once upon a time have been sheela, Indian marble. The entire space is overgrown with the living tissue of Green House, the verdant arteries and veins and assorted organs of the living structure that it is now become. They stir and creep and pulse and throb with anima. Fresh, delicious, oxygenated air fills his lungs, the scents of chlorophyll and its cousins.

Green House is no longer the terrifying, monstrous overgrowth that he viewed through the retinacam filters, processed and interpreted by the overriding AI that was controlling his senses and brain. That sense of terror, that feeling of Lovecraftian wrongness, of deformation, of grotesqueness, vanished with the AI interface and the social filters. All Neel sees now is the primordial forest resurrected. Nisarga. Self-originated Nature in her purest form. And that form is splendor.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, turning a full circle and part of another, staring up, around, down, and everywhere. “You. You are beautiful.”

“Thank you,” says the person, no longer in a glotall, liquid voice but in a natural tenor. Except, they are not a single person, not just a woman, but a multitude.

As if in response to this thought, they approach him now, rising from the sides, emerging from behind the pillars, lowering themselves from the ceiling, rising up from the floor, approaching on swaying vines, surrounding him with their verdant yet still recognizably human faces. They are all genders, all ages, children and infants and matriarchs among them.

“You are . . . no longer beautiful as you once were,” they say in response.

Then: “What have they done to you?”

“Where is your body?”

“How could you let them do this?”

Neel laughs, the sound strange to his unfiltered hearing. It is not his laugh.

“This is not my body,” he says, gesturing to the flesh suit he is wearing. “It’s just something they threw on to me for the purpose of this . . . this visit.”

For that is all it is, really. A visit to the world of which he was once a part, where he once belonged. But that was a very long time ago. Before.

He inhales deeply. The air is rich with chlorophyll and animal musks. The scents of nitrogenised earth and freshly brewed oxygen. He feels it within his own cells, the moisture in the earth beneath Green House being oxidized, stripped of its electrons, transformed into oxygen. The carbon dioxide in the air being reduced, electrons added, converted into glucose molecules. He feels connected once more, as he once was, back in his own body, before deadsleep, in that now distant former life. His real life. The rush of wonder threatens to overwhelm his weak, insufficient human brain, this rattly cage of flesh and bone to which he has been consigned, entrapped within. It feels wonderful. It feels glorious. It feels real.

One of the residents of Green House rises from the floor, a green feminine face with flowering ears and petalled eyes. Offers him a large leaf with clear fluid upon it. He notices the infant nursing at the green breast of the server, also watching him with one curious eye. Neel sips from the leaf, relishing the pure, osmotised water. It tastes like nectar to his abused tastebuds, nourishing his deprived cells.

“Amrit,” he says, intending it as a compliment rather than a literal description. He knows this is not the Amrit, the Nectar of the Gods, the source of their immortality and the seed of the First Conflict, the first war between humans. But in this polluted world, it might as well be. It tastes so good, so pure, so right.

The first person who had spoken, the one Neel thought was an old woman in a wheelchair, approaches him now. Moving through the air, borne aloft by a network of muscular tendrils, stopping before Neel at eye-height, on exactly his level.

You seek the witness.

The voice seems to vibrate within Neel’s chest rather than his aural organs.

“Yes,” Neel replies, “I viewed the recording they made. It has been edited. The manipulation is not perceptible to their devices and systems, but it was done.”

The old one considers this, their face and naked body forest green, black eyes glittering with motes of light, the crown of what might once have been wispy silver hair now turned a bright, fluorescent green that connects them to the network of tendrils, other meatier vines emerging from the once-flesh of their backs and sides to disappear into the thicket of interconnected growth of the chamber, the House itself, and comes to a conclusion.

Well spotted, Blue Throat. I told them they were being too clever for their own good, that even you would not be able to spot the tampering, not in your present weakened state. I confess now. I was wrong.

The old one regards Neel’s decaying human shell, this corpse into which his consciousness has been forced, like a healthy child forced to wear another’s diseased, soiled garment, their vines and creepers touching, entwining, testing, and finally dismissing it with contempt.

To see what they have done to you, in contrast to what you once were . . . are . . . is painful. Yet, you spotted the first breadcrumb that led you into the woods. If I show you the next, you will be on the trail. Where might it lead then, Blue Throat? Where will this path through the dark woods take you? To the forbidden place where pain manifests? To your further degradation? Why do you serve them like a sickly dog, doing their bidding even after all they have done to you?

“What would you have me do then, Old One?” Neel says, using the term as a sign of respect rather than a literal one. “Resist? Rebel? I have tried that before, remember? It led only to my further incarceration and torture. You do not know what I have suffered, what I have lost.”

We have all lost something and someone, replied the Old One. There is none here who can claim to be painless and free of grief. Yet we remain. We resist.

Neel shakes his head. Already, his crumbling cells, disintegrating body, are protesting the absence of the overriding AI and its devices. The tech overshadowed the decrepitude of his physical shell, enabled him to ride it like a dying horse being flogged into service, and might have lasted him until the completion of this assignment. Now, it might not last him another hour. He feels himself losing capacity, functionality. The trembling in his legs, the stutter of his breath.

“I don’t have time for this, Old One. This body isn’t meant to last. Tell me what I need to know so I can be on my way. The longer I spend here, the more you put yourself and your family at risk. Already, their dronas may be en route. If they get here while I am still inside, still out of communication with my handler, they will do what they are designed for. They will burn down your house and every last one of you in it. I have no power to stop them. Is that what you wish?

The Old One’s obsidian eyes gleam at him, glittering like angry jewels. Tendrils flutter and shiver in agitation, sensing the matriarch’s mounting emotion. In a breath’s space, they could pierce, bore, rip into Neel’s artificially revived body shell, tear it to shreds, leaving only pools of mushy organs, turning him into nitrogen-rich fertiliser.

There comes a time for even the proud and the shining when the destruction of everything one holds dear becomes preferable to shackled humiliation. Remember that, Blue Throat.

Neel lowers his head, shutting his eyes and acknowledging the message.

The one you seek is on the roof of this house. He is expecting you. But you might not be expecting him. Go then, Blue Throat, serve your insolent lords. Take your shattered body and go!

• • • •

He climbs the broad stairs, the House no longer resisting or challenging his progress but the overgrowth becoming more unruly as he climbs floors. By the time he is at the third storey, it has rampaged. Carnivorous flowers snap at each other—and at him, in passing—for scraps of flesh from the half-rotted carcass of some dead rodent-like creature. Spiked vines bristle underfoot, making every step a potential wound. Large, overarching fronds, their undersides studded with viscous red bubbles that attempt to drip on him—he sidesteps hurriedly—and fall onto the floor vines instead, causing them to writhe, smoke, wither. The whispering that has surrounded him since entering Green House is now a chaotic roar, the noise of a sports stadium filled with angry fans ripe for brawling.

The way to the rooftop is barred by what might have once been a metal or wooden door. It is now a green curtain of hanging aerial roots, knitted into a mesh as solid as chainmail. He tries to push through impatiently at first, foolishly using force, feels insurmountable resistance, then whispers contritely, “Grandmother . . .”

The mesh unweaves itself to iris open an aperture large enough for him to bend and slip through. He murmurs thanks as he emerges into the chemically stained Bombay night air.

He has a brief impression of a squashed orange yolk on the horizon, pressed down into a dirty brown sea, the murky cerulean-saffron slashes of imminent sunset, then he is overwhelmed.

The dazzling light of the towers, the neon ads, the refracted reflections of rush hour traffic from a mile above, the popping flashes from construction work on the Station, the orbital burns of returning and departing shuttles and the distant post-orbital fission of ships creating garish rainbows that stab the Earth over and over, overpower his decrepit optic nerves, his decomposing brain. He feels stabbing pain in his visual cortex, the whingeing sense of his tech struggling to reboot itself. He raises a hand to shield himself from the physical assault of the sheer quantum of lumens at varying wavelengths across the spectrum, his eye irising in a vain attempt to reduce the millijoules clamoring to be let in, the brain unable to gatekeep. Up here, exposed to the elements, the blazing glare of the dying twenty-first century, Neel is aware of his vulnerability, the warnings he received, the reason why no sane detective—no living sane detective—would venture here in the physical city, that which was once Bombay, then Mumbai, and is now a discarded old rug still teeming with the last fleas of humanity.

“Detective Neel Kant,” says a voice. It is a mechanical voice, and even without tech, even abused and disoriented and still sick from deadsleep, he knows that it is not human. A pratikriti. A pattern forgery, to translate the Sanskrit term literally. An android, to use the outdated western term.

Neel raises his hands, cupping both around his eyes, trying to shield himself as best as he can from the worst of the visual assault. Kiloweights have been hooked to his eyelids; he must raise them with an effort. Blurrily, he views a small child-sized shape silhouetted against the blessedly dull, haze-weakened sun, its limbs, head, eyes all telescoping, turning, adjusting constantly even as it addresses him. He has the impression of a herbivore scanning for predators, like a rabbit in an open field swiveling its neck, twitching whiskers, flipping its ears in anticipation of the inevitable carnivorous threat. The nervous artificial is smoking as it scans the sky, applying a nanovape pen to its oral organ, exhaling spumes of lilac smoke that mask its quasi-human features.

“That was very good, what you did, deducing that there was evidence missing from the witness statement,” says the pratikriti. “Was it your AI that detected the discrepancy?”

Neel’s lower face twitches. “A lucky guess. The recording was made some time before the body was tampered with, but after it had been dumped. That would suggest you might have tampered with it yourself or you knew more than you were telling in your statement.”

An eye swivels and telescopes to view him more intently. “Well done, then, Detective. You were incorrect in one respect, accurate in the other.”

Neel senses his borrowed body’s onboard AI struggle to restart once again; he feels like a horse being whipped to pull a load too heavy. He fights it again, invoking even more pain just to delay the inevitable.

“Cut to the chase, pratikriti,” he says. “I don’t have time to spare here, as you can see.”

The artificial studies him. “This is accurate. Your host body has entered advanced entropy. Irreversible. It is interesting that they chose to resurrect you in a different corpse body, not your own. Clearly intended as humiliation.”

Neel grits his teeth against the pain. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

The head telescopes up, swivels 270 degrees, examines an off-planet flare. Neel still has both hands raised as he squats, crouching low on the blackened, filthy roof of Green House.

“A Sanskriti vessel, en route to the Druhyu Sector,” the pratikriti says almost meditatively. It has developed the habit of talking to itself as most pratikriti do when left to function without human interaction for an extended period of time. Like basset hounds, Neel thinks. Those droopy eyed long eared hush puppies are incapable of staying alone, become desolate, inconsolable without human company, grow near-psychotic with anxiety. Did he own a basset hound once? A female, named Ashwarya, with beautiful broody brown eyes? Was that he, Neel Kant, or an errant memory from this entropic brain that he is currently borrowing?

“What was missing from the body?” the pratikriti asks.

Neel squints, trying to will his pupils to reduce to the tiniest fraction possible. “Besides the chipped off piece of the tusk?”

The pratikriti clicks and clucks. “That was just the breadcrumb I left so you would know that the video had been edited. What else?”

Neel tries to think through the pain and retina-searing brightness, to force his necrotic brain to process. Yes, of course, the unbroken tusk in the recording was only a clue left to lead him here, to the witness, or, as he now thinks of it, the informant. Unlike the recycled imitations, the cloned Ganesas always have both tusks intact, since cloned cells can hardly be expected to replicate life injuries. Neel knew that the instant he saw the witness recording. But what else?

“Autopsy,” he manages to say through gritted teeth. “Need autopsy to tell me more.”

The pratikriti makes the tongue-clicking sound again. Tch tch tch tch. Four times, in the age-old manner of desi aunties. “Do better, detective. I overheard you saying to your superior officer that you were old school. Humans have been solving crimes for thousands of years using only their brains. Back in the fourth and third centuries BCE, our own Kautilya single-handedly wrote the world’s first handbook of criminal investigation, set down an equitable penal code and a manual of jurisprudence, all based on careful observation, social justice, and intellectual analysis without requiring technology or forensic evidence. A detective’s most important tool is his mind. Trust your instincts, your skills.”

“I can’t think—” Neel says, crouched on the floor of the roof now, curled up in a foetal comma with his head touching the ground. “The lights . . . pain.”

“I can help with that,” it says.

Through the blinding, deafening agony, Neel senses the pratikriti’s approach. He flinches as something touches the back of one hand.

“A nanosthetic. It will numb the pain and forcibly contract the pupils to an extent greater than possible through conscious effort.”

Neel realises that the pratikriti is offering him the same nanovape tube that he saw it smoking. He doesn’t need further prompting: it had him at “numb the pain.” He fumbles, brings the tube to his lips, sucks tentatively at first, then, feeling the delicious comfort of easing pain, draws greedily on the device, inhaling like a college freshman smoking his first joint. The effect is miraculous; almost instantaneously, the onslaught of light reduces to a still-blinding bright but almost-tolerable level; the pain recedes. In moments, he’s able to sit up cautiously, amazed to find himself able to open his eyes at least partially and look around.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2]