long. His head wags with pleasure. A look dangerously like pride spreads across his ascetic face. “Your father helped make this one.”
“That’s it, Pita? That’s a microprocessor? It’s like a bug with square legs.”
“Oh, but think what we managed to put inside.”
The boy looks. He remembers his father’s bedtime stories from the last two years—tales of heroic project managers and adventuring engineers who suffer more mishaps than the white monkey Hanuman and his entire monkey army. His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees. He grins, cagey but uncertain. “Thousands and thousands of transistors!”
“Ach, my smart little man.”
“Let me hold it.”
“Chh, chh, chh. Careful. Static. We could kill this fellow before he even comes to life.”
The boy blooms with luscious horror. “It’s coming to life?”
“If . . . !” The paternal finger wags. “If we get all our solders right.”
“Then what will it do, Dad?”
“What do you want it to do, Neelay?”
In front of the boy’s widening eyes, the component turns into a jinn. “It does whatever we want?”
“We just have to figure out how to get our plans into its memory.”
“We’re putting our plans in there? How many plans will fit?”
The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe’s weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits. “Someday, it may hold all the plans we have.”
His son scoffs. “This little thing?”
The man scrambles up to the bookshelf, takes down the family scrapbook. A few flips, and he calls out in triumph. “Hee! Neelay. Come see.”
The photo is small, green, and mysterious. A tangle of giant boa constrictors pour out of broken stone.
“See, na? A tiny seed fell on this temple roof. After centuries, the temple collapsed under the seed’s weight. But this seed just keeps going and going.”
Dozens of braided trunks and roots feed on the ruined walls. Tentacles drip down to fill the chinks and split stones open. A root thicker than Neelay’s father’s body creeps across a lintel and seeps like a stalactite into the doorway beneath. This vegetable probing horrifies the boy, but he can’t look away. There’s something so animal in the way the trunks find and follow the openings in the masonry. Like those other kinds of trunks—the trunks of elephants. They seem to know, want, find their way. The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil. But his father holds the photo in front of Neelay as if it proves the happiest destiny.
“You see? If Vishnu can put one of these giant figs into a seed this big . . .” The man leans down to pinch the tip of his son’s pinkie. “Just think what we might fit into our machine.”
THEY BUILD THE BOX over the next several days. All their solders are good. “Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?”
The boy sits frozen by possibility. They can release any process they want into the world, any kind of willful thing. The only impossible thing is how to choose.
His mother calls from the kitchen. “Teach it to cook the bhindi, please.”
They make it say, “Hello World,” in flashing coded lights. They make it say, “Happy Birthday, Neelay Dear.” The words that father and son write arise and start doing. The boy has just turned eight, but in this moment, he comes home. He has found a way to turn his innermost hopes and dreams into active processes.
Right away, the creatures they make begin to evolve. A simple, five-command loop expands into a beautiful segmented structure of fifty lines. Little portions of program detach into reusable parts. Neelay’s father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.
Over the course of a few months, they graduate from four thousand bytes of memory to sixteen. Soon they leap again, to sixty-four. “Pita! More power than any human has ever had to himself in all of history!”
The boy loses himself in the logic of his will. He housebreaks the machine, trains it for hours like it’s a little puppy. It only wants to play. Lob a cannonball over the mountain onto your enemy. Keep the rats out of your corn harvest. Spin the wheel of fortune. Seek and destroy every alien in the quadrant. Spell the word before the poor stick man hangs.