TWTBACD Ch.34 - The Priest at the End of the World

Chapter 34

The Priest at the End of the World

2043

2043: Rajan and Arjun at the ghat, AGI approaches AII

[SHARMA FAMILY — Varanasi — Three Generations]

Rajan Sharma performed the evening aarti at the Dashashwamedh Ghat on the first of October 2043 as he had performed it four thousand times before: the brass lamps, the incense, the bells, the gestures that encoded a cosmology in motion. The river was lower than it had been the previous October. The sky was a colour that had not existed over Varanasi when he was young — a specific brown-orange at dusk that the particulates had added to the sunset palette over thirty years of industrialisation upstream.

He was seventy-three. His body was managing well. His mind was, if anything, accelerating — the conversation with Arjun and Priya about the AGI developments had given him a new vocabulary for questions he had been asking in older vocabularies for fifty years.

Meera sat on the steps above him, watching. She was sixty-three and had the particular quality of a woman who has spent forty years watching a man she loves do the thing he was born to do: a simultaneous pride and presence that required no expression.

Priya was twenty-six. She was in the water — knee-deep, collecting samples, the high-tech dissolved-oxygen meter incongruous in one hand, the brass measuring rod her father had used for forty years in the other. She had not been able to bring herself to replace the brass rod with the digital version. It had a quality the digital version could not replicate: the accumulated touch of the hands that had used it before her.

Arjun stood on the steps with his phone, not photographing but reading. The AII development bulletin had arrived that morning. He read it with the careful attention he brought to everything and filed it in the same place he filed all the bulletins: in a specific drawer of his understanding labelled 'approaching,' which was the correct label. Things were approaching. The question was what they would find when they arrived.

The four of them ate dinner that evening on the roof — Meera had made dal and rice and the specific pickle that Priya had loved since childhood — and talked about everything except what was approaching, because the approaching thing was large enough that the silence around it was itself a form of conversation.

After dinner, Rajan said: 'Whatever it becomes, it will have been made by human hands and human minds. It will carry what we put in it. That is both the comfort and the responsibility.'

'We didn't put enough kindness in,' Arjun said.

'Then the children of the children who made it will have to teach it kindness,' Rajan said. 'That is also how humans work.'