Alif the Unseen (25 page)

“Utility program,” whispered Alif. His face felt hot and he began to perspire. The thought that had been lurking in the back of his mind, just out of reach, rushed out like a
back-alley thief ready to mug him for his wallet. It filled him with commands and equations, cascading tiers of information, coding platforms. He looked at the sheikh with glazed eyes.

“Sheikh Uncle,” he said hoarsely, “do you remember that thing you told me when I was trying to explain quantum computing?”

“What’s that?”

“That thing, that thing! About the layers of meaning in the Quran—”

“Ah. Each word has seven thousand layers of meaning, all of which exist without contradiction at all times?”

Alif was flooded with euphoria.

“I know what he wants to do with
The Thousand and One Days,
” he said. “I know why he’s so desperate to get his fists on it.”

“Who do you mean?”

“The Hand,” said Alif. “He’s trying to build a computer.”

Mercifully, Sheikh Bilal had a DSL line in his office. He ran it into a Toshiba desktop that was several years old and clogged with malware, but which had enough RAM to suit
Alif’s purposes. After swearing to back up his Word files and archived e-mails in the cloud, Alif convinced the sheikh to let him blank the hard drive, leaving a tabula rasa, a clean void of
machine into which Alif could pour himself. He installed a Linux platform off of his netbook, feeling an almost erotic surge of excitement when the familiar home screen loaded, accompanied by a
series of energetic clicks from the guts of the CPU. Alif propped the
Alf Yeom
against a half-empty case of bottled water that sat at the back of the sheikh’s wide, cluttered desk,
opening the book to the story of the hind and the hare: the origin point. He took a breath.

“I’m sorry, my boy,” said Sheikh Bilal from the doorway, “I still don’t properly understand what you are attempting to do. You said this censor is trying to
build
a computer. My computer is not only built, but becoming a little out of date.”

“If I’m right, it shouldn’t matter.” Alif squinted against the pink dawn that flowed slyly inward through the latticed window. “I’m going to teach it how to
think all over again. I will give it a second birth.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Alif looked over his shoulder at the old man with a feeling of beneficent tenderness. He shouldn’t be impatient; he was on fire with meaning, with light colder and purer than the ruddy
dawn. He could explain anything.

“You remember our conversation about quantum computing?”

“Yes, roughly.”

“A quantum computer would theoretically perform data functions using ions—which are difficult to get, control, and manipulate. That’s why real quantum computing is still mostly
a dream. Not even the Hand has that kind of hardware. But. But.”

“But?”

Alif’s eyes gleamed. “But you could do almost the same thing if you could get a normal silicon-based computer to think in metaphors.”

The sheikh’s rheumy gaze sharpened. “If each word has layers of meaning—”

“Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states
simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero
and every point in between, all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature.”

“That sounds very complicated indeed.”

“It should be impossible, but it isn’t.” Alif began typing furiously. “All modern computers are pedants. To them the world is divided into black and white, off and on,
right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect.”

He could hear the sheikh shifting on his feet.

“When we spoke about the Quran, I was only trying to understand what you wanted to tell me about computers,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to use it so
literally—”

“I’m not using the Quran,” said Alif tersely. “I’m using the
Alf Yeom
. The Quran is static. You aren’t supposed to change a single dot. You have to
be trained to recite the words correctly, because if you mispronounce a single one, it’s not the Quran anymore. The
Alf Yeom
is something dynamic, changing. I think—I think
it
changes, I mean the book itself, depending on who reads it. The dervishes saw the Philosopher’s Stone, but I see code.”

“Knowledge must be fixed in some way if it is to be preserved,” said the sheikh. “That’s why the Quran isn’t meant to be altered. There were other prophets sent to
other peoples, but because their books were altered, their knowledge was lost.”

“I can compensate for that,” said Alif, feeling less sure than he sounded. “It must be possible. The Hand believes it is. He was going to translate the strings of metaphor into
strings of commands.”

“But the book is ancient! Its writers couldn’t have known anything about computers.”

“They didn’t need to. It’s not what they said that matters, it’s the method they used to say it—the way they encoded the information. They threw everything they
knew into one pot and developed a system of transmitting knowledge that could accommodate the contradictions. It’s that system I want to replicate in your computer.”

Alif’s fingers paused on the keyboard. A vision pressed itself against his sinuses from inside his head: Dina, outlined in black against their rooftop in Baqara District, her veiled face
a floating interruption of the dust-pale minarets strung out along the horizon. She held his copy of
The Golden Compass
like an enemy flag. Alif blinked rapidly. The screen in front of him
came back into focus.

“I’m still not sure how it all connects,” he admitted.

“If that is the case, I would be very careful,” said Sheikh Bilal. “The greatest triumph of Shaytan is the illusion that you are in control. He lurks on the forking paths,
lying in wait for those who become overconfident and lose their way.”

“I have to code,” said Alif. He heard the swish of cotton robes as Sheikh Bilal withdrew. The sun had grown more persistent, throwing an intricate pattern of light and shadow on the
floor as it came in through the wood-latticed window. His head began to ache as he bent to his task. Every so often he could hear the sound of rifles, and once or twice something heavier, a dull
boom like distant thunder. The noise always ceased abruptly, replaced by the desultory calls of sparrows in the courtyard outside. Once he heard the static-laced sound of a megaphone, and a voice,
faint by the time it reached his ears, announced that anyone who laid down his weapons and came out would not be harmed.

“—think that we have weapons?” Dina’s voice, muffled by stone, carried through the door, along with the echo of her sandals as they slapped against the floor of the
corridor outside.

“I don’t know, my daughter,” came Sheikh Bilal’s weary answer. “Perhaps your friend—well. They can’t get in, at any rate. This place was built to
withstand Bedouin raiders . . .”

The voices faded down the hall. Alif squeezed his eyes shut until they smarted and then, opening them again, he was assaulted by pinwheels of light. Despite the sun, he had the sense of some
malevolent pressure in the air around him, a sentience he recoiled from investigating too closely. The feeling came in waves, and each time it receded, Alif could half-see Vikram, who appeared to
his fevered consciousness like a coil of dark matter uncurling itself against the invisible threat. Alif could tell Vikram was tiring.

He worked steadily. His fingers knew what he needed to do before his mind did. Pieces of the fragmented Hollywood hypervisor were still useable; he plugged lines of the familiar code into the
sheikh’s machine, watching with satisfaction as algorithmic towers grew before his eyes. Every so often he paused to reread a portion of the
Alf Yeom,
separating the frame story into
two threads of code: Farukhuaz, the dark princess, became a set of Boolean algorithms; the nurse, her irrational counterpart, non-Boolean expressions. There was nothing he could not interpret
numerically. The numbers themselves, like stories, were merely representative, stand-ins for meaning that lay deeper, embedded in pulses of electricity within the computer, the firing of neurons in
Alif’s mind, events whose defining elements blurred and merged as he worked.

The sunlight strengthened until nearly midday, when the lattice over the window served its purpose, folding a matrix of shadows into one flat stretch of shade. Alif marveled as the sheikh’s
office went suddenly cool and dark. Centuries ago, a woodworker had measured the changing angle of light against this room’s east-facing wall and built a wooden screen that would provide
shade in the hottest part of the day without interrupting a scholar’s view of the courtyard. It was simple, elegant. Alif felt a pang of envy—his own creation, when it was finished,
would be neither simple nor elegant. It would be a lumbering, evolving miasma, a vastness, perpetuated by the sheer pressure of information. It would be capable of functions beyond counting, but on
its own it would be meaningless.

* * *

Dina appeared in the late afternoon. She brought a glass of tea and a plate of
ful
that had obviously spent a long life on the inside of an overheated tin can. Alif
sniffed at it before taking a bite.

“It’s all there is,” said Dina. “We can’t exactly send out for food.”

Alif studied her. She kept her eyes downcast; the translucent skin of her eyelids was discolored, as if from bruising or sleeplessness. He held out the plate.

“You eat it,” he said. “You need your strength. You should be lying down anyway.”

Dina made a restless motion with her good arm.

“I’ve eaten. It’s gone quiet outside—Vikram says the street is still blocked and there are snipers on the rooftops. We’re under siege.”

“Are we on the news?”

“You are. And they’re using your fake n—your handle. They’re calling you a terrorist.”

Alif let his head roll back, closing his eyes. His name. He thought of Intisar breathing it in the dark, sanctifying it. To see it made so ugly and public was worse than the terrorist label,
which he had seen applied to loftier and better men.

Dina pressed the tea glass into his hand. “You never told me you work for Islamist groups.”

“I don’t work for anybody. I work against the censors.”

“But you’ve helped the Islamists.”

“I’ve also helped the Communists. And the feminists. I’ll help anybody with a computer and a grudge.”

“Okay, well, I’m just telling you that the newscasters on
City Today
haven’t been making such fine philosophical distinctions.”

“Of course they haven’t. They never do.” Alif shoveled a spoonful of
ful
into his mouth. Dina lingered, glancing around the office at the piles of file folders and
books.

“What is it that you’re doing?” she asked after several moments.

Alif set his mouth in a thin line.

“The Hand stole my greatest idea,” he said. “Now I’m stealing his.”

“What’s the point? The only way you’re leaving this place is in handcuffs, with a black bag over your head.”

“It doesn’t matter. By that time I’ll have bombed out their entire system. All the data they have on me or my friends or anyone else in the City will look like scrambled eggs.
He won’t be able to use Tin Sari to hurt anybody else. They can kill me if they want—I’ll still have won.” A thrill went through his body. The scent of the
Alf Yeom
roused something unfamiliar in him, a dormant athletic instinct that made him want to run and rend and rip until his opponent was beaten. A small part of him was frightened by the ferocity of his
own aggression. He quelled it.

“I don’t like it when you talk like that,” said Dina. “Like you’re some kind of hero from one of those novels you’re always reading.” There was a quaver
in her voice that made Alif look up. Moisture rimmed her lashes. Guilt replaced his aggression. He half-stood, bungling his feet in the legs of Sheikh Bilal’s desk chair.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Please don’t cry. You have no idea how unfair it is when you cry—I can’t do anything but what
I’m doing.”

“I can’t help it,” Dina whispered, little catches in her voice. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to be here. I’m scared of whatever is going to happen next
but I want it to happen—not knowing is even more terrible.”

“Dina—”

“And when you talk like that, like you don’t care about what happens to you, like there’s no one who would miss you and worry about you, it makes me want to scream. You can be
so stupid about these things.”

Alif sank back into the chair, feeling bereft. He swallowed the remainder of his tea. In the thrall of some mysterious impulse, he kissed the rim of the glass twice before handing it back to
Dina. Her fingers closed around the imprint of his mouth.

“Bless your hands,” he said hoarsely. She turned and left the room.

* * *

By the time evening fell, Alif had begun to shiver. The air was not cold; the stone walls of the office radiated a pleasant warmth accumulated during their long hours in the
sun, but the combined pressures of coding and fear and a night without real sleep weighed on his body. Alif knew he was dangerously tired. He was alarmed by the thought of making a mistake,
creating a digital tick buried too far within layers of code for him to find without serious effort. On an ordinary day his own fastidiousness would have kept him from reaching this point; many
times he had interrupted himself on the downward slope of a coding jag and slept or eaten or washed, reasoning that time was less costly than error. Now he felt the pressure of each minute. Some
higher brain function recognized the absurdity of spending his last hours of freedom alone in front of a computer at a task he might not even finish but he ignored it, struggling instead to
maintain the trancelike level of focus he needed to continue.