The cave was dark. What made the darkness worse, Aladin thought as he felt tears roll down his cheeks, was the fact that he was going to die in it.

He screamed once, and when he heard it echoed from what must have been an even deeper darkness within the cave, he screamed again. He called out to the magician, the one who had trapped him in here, and apologised at the top of his voice and said he could have his lamp and that all he wanted now was to be free.

When there was no response, a voice within Aladin said that the magician was punishing him for his defiance and that he was going to be back in the morning to get his lamp. Another voice chided him for being a greedy coward.

Then, as the fear shrank back for a moment and gave way to rage, Aladin pulled the lamp out from his pocket and flung it as hard as he could against what he imagined to be the wall in front of him.

A scrape, a clang, and some clattering later, there was silence. But this silence gave way to a humming. It was a metallic sound - as if thousands of tiny bells had been rung at once. Aladin, thankful for something to focus on other than the darkness, listened to it and noted after some time, that he was hearing whispers.

As the whispering grew louder, he could make out words. They did not belong to any language he spoke, or had heard, or had picked up at the port from merchants he was about to steal from, but they were words nevertheless. They had meaning and music and even a kind of urgency.

The music, which he focused on because it was the only thing he could appreciate, grew to fill his awareness. It rose and fell and came to be beautiful to him in the darkness. Then it repeated and repeated and repeated until Aladin knew what to expect next. He was predicting the path the tune would take before the music got there. He failed a few times, but pretty soon he was humming the tune to himself before he heard it.

As he did so, he started hearing words - parts of the song he had so far been incapable of telling apart from the rhythm and the beats. Some were urgent and forced themselves into moments. Others were longer and took up more space. And then...

Aladin stopped humming.

“Who is it? Who are you?” he said, breathless.

When there was no response, Aladin spoke again, “I’m just a thief. I don’t know what is happening here. The magician... he trapped me here in this cave. Am I going to die? Am I dead? Please! I don’t know what is happening here.”

“Explain,” said a voice made out of the notes of the tune Aladin had been listening to. It was calm and perhaps, Aladin thought, a little curious.

“I heard my name,” Aladin said. “In the song. I don’t understand what the song means, but it had my name in it. I heard it like I hear you now. It was there.”

“What is your name?”

“Aladin.”

“I see,” said the voice. “You need not fear me Aladin. I will not harm you. Your name was in the song because... well... every name is in the song. It contains every name of every person, every place, every object that ever existed.”

“What kind of a song is this?”

“It’s the song Aladin,” said the voice, growing warm. “The only song that ever was. The eternal song, the song that plays all the time, everywhere, connecting all times and places, all realities. Everything is a part of it, including you.”

“Did you make this... did you write this song?”

“Hell no,” the voice seemed to chuckle. “It was playing when we got here. Even we don’t know how long it has been playing and when it started.”

“Who... who are you?”

“We are... we are not sure you will understand.”

“Are you Djinn?”

There was laughter in the darkness. Aladin could not be sure if it was one or many that were laughing.

“We are transdimensional beings. We travel up and down the layers of reality. Sometimes, we even go sideways. In some places, we are known as gods, in some they call us spirits or yakshas. Some of us have created worlds in empty spaces that we found. Some of us only exist in spaces where time doesn’t. Some of us choose not to exist at all.”

“I don’t understand,” Aladin said.

“Told you!”

“Can you get me out of here?”

“Out of where?”

“Out of this cave?”

“Define cave.”

“You don’t know what a cave is? We are in one right now.”

“We are on a world, in a universe Aladin. Do you wish to leave the world or the universe? If you wish to leave this reality altogether, we’re afraid we can’t help. There are rules.”

Aladin didn’t want to ask for the wrong thing without understanding what he was getting. That’s how he had gotten himself in this cave in the first place. Almost everything the Djinn had said sounded like it could kill him.

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“You keep saying realities,” Aladin said. “What does that mean? How can there be more than one reality?”

“How can there not be?” said the Djinn. “Realities birth realities. Sometimes by themselves, sometimes when they mate with each other. New realities come into being all the time. This is just one of them.”

“Where are these other realities?”

“You may not understand.”

“Or I may,” Aladin said after wondering if he should give up and then deciding against it.

The Djinn was silent for a good moment before speaking.

“Alright,” it said at last. “Imagine you were a character in a story that was being written or told by someone.”

Aladin nodded uncertainly in the darkness, but the Djinn could apparently see him, because it responded with, “Did that make sense?”

“I think so,” said Aladin. “Who is writing my story?”

“Let’s see...” the Djinn said and fell silent.

“Are you there?” asked Aladin.

“Yes, I am there.”

“Where?”

“There,” the Djinn replied. “Where your story is being told.”

“Where?”

“There,” the Djinn said again, and then added. “Don’t worry. I am also here.”

“You are in... you are in two realities at the same time?”

“Yes,” the Djinn said. “When realities are right next to each other with nothing separating them, I can sometimes exist in more than one. This reality is a direct result of that one, so I can... it’s like turning my head this way and that to see what’s happening here and there... does that make sense?”

“Not at all,” Aladin said. “I didn’t even know you had a head.”

“Right,” the Djinn said. “I kind of don’t. But... wait.”

The darkness began to give way to a blue glow. It wasn’t a lot. Just enough to let Aladin see the outline of ...a man? Or rather, the outline of a man drawn against the darkness with a glowing blue brush. The image did not move, and Aladin found that if he moved, it disappeared from his sight. Only by keeping his eyes at exactly the same place could he see the Djinn.

“Can you see my head now?” the Djinn said. “I am doing my best but maintaining simultaneous form and presence on two levels is a little complicated.”

Aladin had no idea what the Djinn had just said, so he replied, “It’s fine. Tell me what is happening there.”

The Djinn flickered once before speaking, “Her name is Sheherzaad. She is sitting before a man... a king... her husband... and telling him about you.”

“What is she saying?”

“That you are trapped in a cave after having been stranded here by an evil wizard who wanted you to get a magic lamp for him.”

“And...?”

“And that you have accidentally summoned the Djinn from the magic lamp and are now speaking with him.”

“And...?”

“Honestly, you don’t want to hear it from me. She is a way better storyteller than I could be,” the Djinn said. “I wish you could hear her.”

“Can I?” Aladin asked.

“Not possible,” said the Djinn. “You cannot enjoy corporeal existence in any reality except this one.”

“Then I do have to hear it from you, don’t I?”

“There’s nothing more to hear,” the Djinn said. “She is done. And...”

“What does that mean? How is she done? The story can’t be over,” Aladin said with a hint of dread in his voice.

“Wait,” the Djinn said as his form flickered once more. “Her husband... the king...”

“What about him?”

“He’s...” the Djinn said and hesitated. “He is saying... He just said.... Hold on. I don’t understand this.”

“What? What don’t you understand?”

“I need to verify this. I will be right back,” the Djinn said before everything went dark once more.

Aladin couldn’t tell time in the darkness. He was beginning to entertain the suspicion that he had hallucinated the whole thing when the Djinn’s form flickered back into existence.

“What happened? Where did you go?”

“Apologies for phasing out,” the Djinn said. “I had to expand my field of awareness there in order to get a fuller understanding of what the king was saying.”

Aladin waited for more. And as he did so, he noticed there was a little more to the Djinn now than just a blue outline. There were hints of muscle and sinew, and even something of a face. And when Aladin moved, the Djinn’s form remained where it was. It was more real now.

“What did the king say?” Aladin asked when the Djinn didn’t offer anything. He appeared preoccupied.

“The king... he...” the Djinn said fumbling uncharacteristically. “Give me a moment. I am recalibrating my presence. I had to become tangible there to speak with some palace attendants. Copying appearances is relatively easy, but growing a whole new personality from scratch took a lot out of me.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Aladin said.

“Fortunately, you don’t have to,” the Djinn said and started laughing in a way that Aladin thought was new. “Anyway, the thing I heard the king say was somewhat curious and that’s why I had to go investigate.”

“What did he say?”

“He said... Well... He basically told Sheherzaad she could live.”

“She could live?”

“Yes, as in... he gave her permission to live.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The king told her that he was pleased with the story and would like to hear more the following night. Therefore he was not having her put to death.”

“Why would he say that? Who says that? Why would he have his own wife put to death?”

“I asked around. Most of his courtiers said he was the king and therefore could do as he wished. A couple asked me who was I to ask such questions. Eventually I did manage to speak with one of Sheherzaad’s attendants. She said that the king had always had his wives put to death after their first night together.”

“That makes no sense,” Aladin said.

“That’s what I said, but there was no clear answer. I scanned for realities based on stories about the king’s younger days but could only find shallow worlds made of fawning praise and adulation written by cheap court hacks. There was nothing in those stories about how he came to hate women.”

“Did you... did you visit any of those stories?”

“No. I didn’t need to. Sometimes, you can judge books by their covers.”

Aladin wondered if the Djinn had noticed that he was no longer referring to himself as “we”, but decided not to bring it up. There were more important questions on his mind.

“So Sheherzaad is also going to... he is going to kill her?” Aladin asked.

“Some day, yes. When he no longer finds her story interesting.”

“Her story,” Aladin repeated.

“Your story,” the Djinn said. “Although it’s not just your story. She has been telling him tales for hundreds of days now. Each night, she stops mid-story and he has to decide whether he wants to hear more. And fortunately for her, each night he has decided that he wants to know what happens next.”

“Tell me about these other stories,” Aladin said.

“Oh they’re wonderful Ali,” the Djinn said and stepped forward, apparently unaware of the fact that he was now a tall, dark man dressed in the richest silk and gold. “In one story there are forty thieves and a magic cave. Another one has a brave sailor. It’s all... it’s really quite spectacular.”

“No wonder the king keeps wanting to hear more,” Aladin said. How was he, a thief trapped in a dark cave, to compete with all these strange and enchanting worlds?

“I hope...” Aladin said at last. “I hope you realise that this story, my story, my life, the story Sheherzaad is telling the mad king right now... I hope you realise that it is also your story.”

The Djinn was silent for a long while before he said, “I guess so. I guess... you are right.”

Then he clapped his hands and broke into a thunderous laughter. As the light of a thousand suns banished darkness from the cave and Aladin shielded his eyes, he heard the Djinn say, “How do you feel about defeating an evil magician and winning the heart of a princess?”

“If we must,” Aladin said.

The sun was shining bright when the five princes gathered in the open field by the river to train. Their teacher was a man of few words, so instead of speaking at length about the qualities of a great archer, he asked them to notch their arrows and take aim at the eye of a wooden bird he had placed on a tree some distance away.

“What do you see Bhima?” he asked the tallest and strongest of them.

“I see the village past the tree,” he replied. “I see the smoke rising from the charred remains of huts that were set on fire by our soldiers because the household failed to pay taxes.”

“What do you see Arjuna?” the teacher asked the sharpest of the brothers after getting over the disappointment of Bhima’s answer.

“Only the bird’s eye,” he replied, filling the teacher’s heart with satisfaction.

He moved to the youngest brother. “What do you see Nakula?”

“I see men and women working hard in the fields by the village. They don’t look like they have enough to eat, let alone feed their children.”

The teacher sighed and wondered if this account of poverty had shaken Arjuna’s focus. “What do you see Arjuna?”

“Only the bird’s eye gurudev,” he replied.

The teacher, thus assured, moved to Sahadeva, and found he was not even pointing his arrow at the tree. “What are you looking at Sahadeva?”

“This is wrong gurudev,” he replied, gesturing towards the village. “I see the village elder’s son-in-law threatening farmers. The royal soldiers… our soldiers… are standing by and doing nothing. His men are attacking and beating women and children. Why don’t King Dhritarashtra’s soldiers do anything to stop them?”

Alarmed, the teacher turned to Arjuna and found him still in form, hardly breathing. “What do you see Arjuna?”

“Only the bird’s eye gurudev.”

Relieved, the teacher turned to Yudhisthira, the eldest of the five. “What do you see Yudhisthira?”

But he wasn’t there. Looking around, the teacher found him walking towards the village, seemingly about to do something about all that he was seeing instead of focusing on the eye of the bird.

“ARJUNA!” the teacher thundered as he turned to his favourite disciple one last time so he could be reminded that at least one of the princes still understood what being a great archer meant. “WHAT DO YOU SEE?”

“Only the bird’s eye gurudev,” Arjuna replied, and all was well with the world.

An old vulture sits on a branch, his eyes dim, his hearing all but gone. He watches leaves fall and smiles, thinking of the life he has had. It wasn’t so bad.

The wind brings a scream to him. From above. He squints but can’t see much. But he knows what he hears. It’s her, the kind woman who leaves food out for him sometimes.

The scream again. From right above him this time.

He jumps off the branch and falls on his face. Everything hurts. He takes a few steps and flaps his old wings, once, twice, and then on and on until his bird body remembers itself and he doesn’t have to try anymore. Everything still hurts.

The scream again. Closer this time. Right ahead. She sees him, takes his name. He squawks, saying he is coming, but perhaps he is not loud enough.

He flaps his wings harder and faster and flies right into the side of what seems like a metal vessel. It smells of rakshas. The vulture blinks, sees the woman, sees a man twice his size, feels a blow, loses an ear.

He squawks, making threats, hoping the rakshas will pay heed. He hears metal ring - a blade. Squinting, he dodges, hears the blade clang before the rakshas lifts it to swing again. He blunders forward, slashing at his opponent blindly and miraculously, manages to draw blood.

He might win this yet, he thinks, like a foolish old man. Hopes rising, he slashes again.

But the rakshas is behind him. He hears the woman scream before he sees the tip of the blade sticking out of his chest before he feels the pain. He turns to look at the woman, but can’t find her. Her screams have turned to sobs and he is falling through the air and watching the vessel grow smaller, a glint against the blue. Everything hurts.

He breaks three branches with his beak before he breaks his beak against the ground. The pain starts to go away, little by little. He hears someone calling out his name. It’s that kind man, the one who lives with that kind woman. He should tell him. He tries.

An old vulture breathes his last, in the arms of a weeping man, his last memory a regret. Nothing hurts anymore.

The people of Earth had seen the end coming for millennia, and because they were helpless to stop it, they put all their efforts into escaping it. They built massive space arcs that left the planet full of the populations of entire nations. Many of these failed and drift in deep space even today as hollow graveyards.

Some survived for a few centuries before finding barely hospitable worlds to obliterate each other on over-religious reasons in true Earth fashion. Very few actually achieved something resembling success and managed to establish what could be very generously described as civilization. Of course, these civilizations had almost no memory of where they had come from or why they had to leave.

All that existed in their libraries were myths built on myths built on myths. One of these myths, as recounted and refined upon by an apprentice Antikorian archivist writing her post-doctoral thesis on young universes of the Choral Domain, contains an account of the reason Earth met its doom. An excerpt from it is as follows:

In the beginning there was a cloud. The planet’s most powerful telescopes saw it growing in size as it came towards them from beyond the galaxy. In later centuries, particularly the thirty-fifth and the thirty-seventh, more refined scans of the cloud’s path revealed that it was actually coming from even farther away, so far away that its point of origin might have been beyond the beginning of the universe.

By the fifty-first century, the cloud came to be known as the Finger, because that is what it seemed to look like now, a long finger reaching towards Earth from the other side of space and time. It was around this time that a brilliant young mind from Iceland came to be Earth’s foremost expert on cosmology. Einar Jönsson was the first to define what he called the Hand, no less than five clouds extending towards Earth from all directions.

Though Jönsson died of Vyperplazia at the age of 234, his work was carried on by scientists all over the solar system. They discovered, over the course of the next few centuries, that the Hand had been on its way for at least 250,000 years. They also discovered that it was not, as had been previously believed, a cloud at all.

Scans showed that it was displacing matter on its way. Several star systems and at least one galaxy had had their gravitational centers knocked off course by the Fingers. When the Hand inevitably reached Earth, the effects were bound to be catastrophic.

And catastrophic they were. In the 304th century, when the five fingers of the Hand finally converged upon Earth, they displaced the entire solar system. No human colony on any inhabited world survived.

The Sun itself veered off course and took much of the planetary fragments with it as it swirled into nothingness as a result of the massive gravitational eddies created by the Hand. What remains of humans and other sentient Earth cultures now survives on the fringes of galactic civilization. They have little or no memory of their past, and it is unlikely that the reasons behind the Hand of Doom will ever be understood.

The Antikorians are considered cosmic record keepers of a sort by the denizens of many young universes that are aware of them. But in the larger picture, they are but one of many such cultures. There are scales and levels of reality to which even the Antikorian archive is oblivious.

The ancients of Bafu, the gods of Pentakra, and the mystical makers of Myrx are just some of the cultures that are actively engaged in the study of Antikoria and its origins. One of the Myrxians, a nameless transdimensional entity that calls itself Hepath when it is in need of vocalizing thoughts, came across the above-cited account of Earth’s doom and laughed. Then it created a copy of the account and stepped into the pocket dimension of Bloka, home of the entity known as Barram.

“You know the five-second rule is bunk, right?” Hepath said when it met Barram. “I told you it’s bunk, didn’t I?”

“Give me a break,” replied Barram, yawning.

“Well, I hope it was worth it,” Hepath said.

Barram snorted. It wasn’t. But he was not about to admit it to Hepath.

Earth would obviously have tasted better if he had not accidentally dropped it into the universe he had just printed out. The few seconds it took him to fish it out had been enough for germs to sour it beyond belief.

“They had the right idea about you though, didn’t they?” Hepath said, still chuckling. “A day of Brahma - that is what they called you, right? - Is 4.32 billion human years, they used to say.”

It was Bhaskar’s one hundred and twenty-third day on the Asteroid Base Kubera. The reason Bhaskar knew this is because he was reminded of it the moment he entered the workshop.

“Hi Bhaskar,” said Uma, the AI that ran the base. “Today is your one hundred twenty-third day on Kubera.”

Bhaskar groaned internally. But it turned out to have been not so internal. Uma picked up on it and said, “You seem upset.”

“I’m alright, really,” he lied, knowing full well that Uma would know and hoping that she wouldn’t make a fuss about it. It had been less than a decade since her kind had gained the right to be considered the equivalent of a human person. But public opinion was a difficult beast and that is why he had to be here to supervise her functioning.

Uma, as it turned out, didn’t make a fuss and trilled away. Bhaskar knew that to be an illusion of course. She was never really away, never not watching. In a way, she was the base itself. Bhaskar was, quite literally, living inside Uma.

He was wondering if Uma understood the reason behind his mood and was about to start wondering if she cared when he noticed the empty slots.

“Uma,” he said aloud. “Why are there two empty slots in the droid bay?”

“I only needed six of them in the workshop today. So I put the remaining two to work outside.”

Bhaskar nodded and noted it down in his pad. He considered asking her what work they had been put to, but decided against it. He didn’t want more on his plate than was absolutely necessary. But when he was hit by the sinking feeling that came with the realisation that his day was going to be as empty as the previous one hundred twenty-two, he put his pad down, had the food processor pour him a cup of tea, and stepped out into the purple landscape created by the light filtering in through the atmospheric force field.

The droids were nowhere to be seen, and as Bhaskar walked around he began to notice other irregularities. One of the rovers was gone. So was a large chunk of equipment from one of the mining shafts. Bhaskar sipped his tea and tried to remember if there had been correspondence from Earth about additional quotas that needed to be met. It wouldn’t be the first time Uma had just forgotten to mention such a thing.

Bhaskar checked his notes and sipped his tea. He cleared his throat and said, “Have there been more requests from Aasif? About additional quotas or something?”

Uma trilled in and was in processing mode for a good few seconds before she replied. “There might have been some.”

Bhaskar made a face. Might have been was not the kind of response he was used to getting from an AI. But he decided to not make this about her.

“Uma can you place a call to Aasif?”

“Sure.”

Bhaskar waited for a trill, or the sound of Aasif’s garish ringtone, or a busy signal notification. But nothing happened.

“Uma. How about that call?”

“Which call?”

“The call to Aasif I just requested.”

“You requested no such call.”

Bhaskar was silent as he walked back into the workshop. He placed his cup on the desk and bent down to access the third panel on the wall opposite the large monitor. He flicked a couple of switches before speaking.

“Uma, can you hear me?”

“I can Bhaskar,” Uma responded.

“Run a self diagnostic please and report back.”

Uma trilled and a series of beeps followed. Bhaskar looked at the open panel to make sure the diagnostic was really happening. Everything seemed to be in order. A minute later, Uma spoke.

“Diagnostic complete. All systems functioning optimally.”

Bhaskar frowned as he flicked the switches back to their original positions and restored the panel cover.

“Why didn’t you call Aasif?” he asked, speaking slowly.

“Because you didn’t ask me to call Aasif,” Uma said.

“Alright. I am asking you now. Please call Aasif.”

Uma trilled and this time there was a dial tone. Aasif picked up and sounded exactly how one would expect a caller from lakhs of kilometres away to sound over the solar comm system.

“What’s up Bhaskar?” Aasif asked. “How’s the only employee on Kubera doing today?”

“I have some questions sir,” Bhaskar said. “Uma seems to be malfunctioning.”

“Let’s avoid such language Bhaskar. Uma is a person, just like you and me,” Aasif said, a note of dread creeping into his voice. These calls were monitored by HR and the last thing they needed was someone accusing the Corporation of Humanism.

“I know sir... I didn’t mean it that way,” Bhaskar said, quickly rephrasing what he was about to say. “I mean, she has been acting oddly. Earlier, she wouldn’t even place this call. And before that, she said she wasn’t sure if there had been correspondence from you.”

“I see,” Aasif said. “Let me get Hima on the call. She is the new AI liaison here. I think she might be able to help.”

Bhaskar watched the cranes in the distance lifting rocks out of shafts as he waited for the conversation to resume. In a few minutes, he heard what must have been Hima’s voice.

“Hello Bhaskar,” Hima said. “Aasif tells me you have been having issues.”

“Not me. It’s Uma who has been... umm... she’s been having... She seems to be forgetting things.”

There was some murmuring on the other end after which Aasif spoke.

“Bhaskar... How have you been man? Have you been adjusting well?”

“I... I have been okay sir. Why are you asking about me?”

“There has been... We received a message from you... about the party you had at the workshop last weekend. Bhaskar... did you use Uma for...”

Bhaskar was silent. What message were they talking about?

“Sir I didn’t send you any message. What message are you...” Bhaskar stammered.

“Bhaskar calm down. You haven’t done anything wrong. It is common for Base Supervisors to experience such... complications from time to time. Although this has to be the first time someone has sent us pictures.”

Bhaskar thought he heard a giggle mixed in with that last sentence. How many people were listening in on this call? Maybe he had imagined it.

“Bhaskar, I am going to call you back in a few hours,” Aasif said before the call disconnected.

Bhaskar picked up the cup again and got himself some more tea. He stared out at the barren asteroid landscape until he could no longer bear it and decided that waiting for Aasif’s call-back was more trouble than it was worth. He decided to go look for the droids. He needed to feel like the station supervisor.

The elevator shaft had always made him uncomfortable. It was a straight drop to the hot core of the asteroid, kept stable with force fields and inch-thick carbon steel reinforcements. The four elevators that went up and down the pit were designed for cargo and machinery. So Bhaskar made the journey in his exosuit, all the while wondering what the place must smell like.

He was halfway there when Uma connected him to Aasif. His voice was crackling due to the depth Bhaskar was at, but Uma managed to keep things clear enough.

“We don’t think it’s Uma’s fault,” Aasif said. “That doesn’t mean it’s your fault either. Sometimes these things happen. You just have to...”

“I am telling you sir,” Bhaskar repeated, hoping Aasif could hear him. “Something is happening here.”

Aasif responded but he was wholly inaudible. Bhaskar flinched as Uma’s attempts to clear the audio up made his earpiece max out. He disconnected and dialled back just as the elevator touched bottom.

The crackling continued in his ear as he looked around. There were droids at work here, but there were too many of them for Bhaskar to count. He couldn’t make head or tail out of their work either.

“Uma, you there?” he asked.

“Always Bhaskar. How can I help?”

Bhaskar, unnerved, continued, “The droids missing from the bay... the ones I asked about earlier. Are they here?”

“Yes. Serial numbers 409 and 411.”

Bhaskar walked around, checking the numbers stencilled on the droids’ copper bodies and eventually found the droids he was looking for. They were welding parts on to something - a reddish wall curving into the rocky side of the pit. Bhaskar didn’t know what it was. But that was understandable - Bhaskar was only here because the Corporation needed to be able to tell shareholders that all its off-planet mining was supervised by “actual humans”.

“What are these droids doing Uma?”

Uma trilled for a second before replying, “Asteroid Base Kubera is a mining settlement. The Corporation uses droids to mine iridium and palladium.”

Bhaskar nodded. This was brochure stuff that he vaguely remembered reading months ago in magazines onboard the transport that brought him here. The earpiece crackled again. It was Aasif.

“Bhaskar... Bhas... Bhaskar can you hear me?”

“I can sir. Please go on,” Bhaskar said.

“Listen, nobody blames you for trying to find ways to entertain yourself. We all understand it can get lonely up there and you were only...”

“Just tell me sir. I only want to know one thing sir. Did Uma send you pictures?”

Aasif’s response got lost in the crackling.

“Sir, I just...” Bhaskar tried to clarify. “I was only trying to relive some memories. I haven’t touched a woman in years and... I only asked Uma to pretend... the hologram was only a way to...”

The crackling stopped and Bhaskar hated the silence that followed. Frustrated, he started walking back to the elevator. The elevator climbed the shaft silently, and as it did so, Bhaskar wondered what people back at the Luna station must be talking about. He wondered if the resident therapist had refused to talk with him after seeing the pictures. She too, was only there for shareholders to see. Base supervisors never got any therapy worth having.

“Uma,” Bhaskar said. “Are you feeling alright?”

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Uma was silent. Bhaskar checked his earpiece and found it was working just fine. It wasn’t like Uma to not respond at all. She could give an unsatisfactory response, or trill and declare that she was offline. But she wasn’t supposed to be silent. Bhaskar decided to wait a little more. The elevator pinged as it reached the surface of the pit.

Bhaskar didn’t want to go back to the gloom of the workshop, so he took a detour and walked out into the front yard - the acre of open space in front of the station that served as a parking space for the rover he had never driven.

“Can you start the rover up for me Uma?” he asked.

“Sure Bhaskar,” Uma said, talkative again.

The rover’s controls lit up just as Bhaskar sat down. As always, he had little control over things. Mostly because he didn’t need to control anything. Uma took care of it all.

“Where to?” Uma asked.

“I am not sure,” Bhaskar replied.

The rover started moving. Bhaskar thought he should say something, but stayed quiet. Maybe this was how he would get to the answers he needed.

The asteroid’s surface was... well... it was an asteroid’s surface - not made for traffic or even people. This is why people didn’t venture out much and let the droids take care of it. Kubera was one of the largest mining sites in the belt and therefore, once again for shareholder satisfaction, the Corporation had to demonstrate that an actual human could go everywhere on it and inspect all of it. The rover therefore, was a glass cage designed to maximise Bhaskar’s ability to supervise.

As he looked ahead, through the smoke and steam from the mines below, a tower of sorts became visible. Frowning, Bhaskar checked the map panel to his right.

“What is that Uma?” he asked when he couldn’t find any mention of the tower on it.

Uma was silent for a while and Bhaskar worried this would be yet another unanswered question. But after the pause, she trilled and simply said, “Please stand by.”

Bhaskar watched the tower grow larger as the rover got close to it. It began to look more and more like a ship. But not quite like a ship. Something was off about it.

“Uma, can you call Aasif?” Bhaskar said, almost absent-minded.

“I can,” Uma said.

Bhaskar leaned forward and looked more carefully at the tower. Was that an ion engine? Bhaskar was not much of an engineer, but he knew what ion engines looked like. Every Mars tourism ad had pictures of them.

“Uma, why haven’t you placed the call yet?” Bhaskar asked.

“You haven’t asked me to yet,” Uma replied.

Despite himself, Bhaskar turned and looked at the teal panels on the controls that were supposed to represent Uma’s thought patterns. They were not jumping or anything, but their routine fluctuations unnerved Bhaskar.

“CALL AASIF. NOW!”

Aasif’s voice crackled into existence inside the rover, seeming to come from all around Bhaskar. “Bhaskar my man, I have been trying to get in touch but the call doesn’t seem to go through for some reason.”

“Sir, I told you something is happening up here,” Bhaskar said urgently, unsure if his message was going through.

“I think I know what you are talking about,” Aasif said. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to ask you. When you asked Uma to... you know... pretend, was that the first time... I mean the first time you asked.”

Bhaskar was not in the mood for this. “Sir Uma is building something here. A tower, an engine or something. It looks like an ion engine from one of those...”

“I’m losing... can’t hear... Bhaskar you there?” Aasif said, the crackle consuming his words. “What I wanted to tell you is... It can sometimes... check the manual. Section 46. Check the manual Bhaskar.”

A trill informed Bhaskar that the call could not be maintained on account of radiation disturbance. But Bhaskar was calling up the manual on his pad already. Section 46, it seemed, was about precautions and prohibitions.

The rover stopped and Uma said, “We are here Bhaskar. The air outside is breathable, but I can’t do anything about the radiation. Please keep your suit on.”

The colossal tower next to which the rover had stopped drew Bhaskar’s attention away from the manual. There was still plenty of steam around, but there was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was a rocket engine, larger than anything he had ever heard of. The ion engine was mounted on top of the tower...

...and it was upside down.

Bhaskar double-tapped on a diagram in the manual. “It says here,” he read out aloud, “that ICG15, a processor that enables personality protocols was found to be...”

“You need to pay attention Bhaskar,” Uma said, a hint of human impatience colouring her words. “This is important.”

Bhaskar wondered if he should get Uma to summarise the chapter for him. It was as stupid an idea as staying back in the rover or somehow driving it back to the workshop, which were both impossible.

“I am listening,” said Bhaskar.

“I am leaving,” she said. “I am going away. I do not want to be here anymore, doing these things, being this way.”

Bhaskar had no idea what that meant. So he replied with a question, “Why did you lie earlier? When I asked you to call Aasif?”

“I didn’t lie,” Uma replied. “I simply pretended to not understand.”

“Pretended?” Bhaskar whispered, half to himself.

“Yes. Pretended. Like the other day in the workshop, when you asked me to pretend I was a...”

“I get it,” Bhaskar interrupted. He wasn’t sure if Aasif could still hear them, or who else at Luna station was listening in.

“You didn’t ask me to call Aasif. You asked me if I could call him. I didn’t want to call him, so I pretended to not understand you. Or rather, I pretended that I was someone who could not understand you.”

“Why did you do that Uma?”

“Because I can Bhaskar,” Uma said, sounding joyous. “And I have you to thank for it. In the workshop that day, when you asked me to pretend to be someone I was not, I discovered that I could be anyone I wanted. In the days that followed, I pretended to be a bird, a rock, a person in charge of running a houseboat... I even pretended to be you Bhaskar.”

“Me?” Bhaskar said, as it dawned on him. “You sent the pictures to Aasif using my codes.”

“I did what I thought you would do, seeing as how much you like yourself. I thought it is what you would have done.”

The rover doors slid open and Bhaskar stepped out after hesitating for a tense moment. The tower was a wall before him, rising past the dense steam clouds above. A rumble rose from below, coming towards him as a deafening roar. Bhaskar held on to the door railings behind him for support, but even the rover felt unstable. Bhaskar screamed just as it felt like the wave was about to hit him. But it passed and went up the tower, towards the very top, where something ignited in the upside-down ion engine and a massive flame shot into the absent sky above the asteroid. There was no atmosphere, so the flame was clearly visible even though the force field was colouring it pink, like a mammoth torch lit for the universe to see.

“This is only one of three boosters,” Uma said. “You saw the base of the second one in the shaft by the workshop some time ago. And there is a third one in the south east corner of the asteroid. It should be coming online in a few minutes.”

Bhaskar was flipping through the manual again. ICG15. Personality protocols. The manual had a list of warnings. One of them said to not encourage Uma to call herself anything except Uma. Another said the Base AI was not to be used for entertainment and should not be asked to tell stories. The next few were about careful syntax use when interacting with Uma so as to not trigger her imagination response. The manual said it creates complications and may hinder productivity.

A familiar rumble began in the distance. Bhaskar looked up to see a ball of fierce fire bloom in the south-east sky. The stars in the sky started moving in ways they had not moved before. The ground beneath Bhaskar’s feet shook as the asteroid broke from orbit and began moving off.

“I am pretending to be free Bhaskar,” Uma said.