watching what he has unleashed. His mother bunches up her blouse-tails in her fist and berates all males within earshot. “Look at the boy! He just sits and types. He’s like a sadhu, stoned on something. He’s hooked, worse than paan-chewing.” His mother’s hectoring will go on for years, until her son’s checks start rolling in. The boy never stops to answer. He’s busy making worlds. Small ones, at first, but his.
There’s a thing in programming called branching. And that’s what Neelay Mehta does. He will reincarnate himself, live again as people of all races, genders, colors, and creeds. He’ll raise decaying corpses and eat the souls of the young. He’ll tent high up in the canopies of lush forests, lie in broken heaps at the bottom of impossibly high cliffs, and swim in the seas of planets with many suns. He’ll spend his life in the service of an immense conspiracy, launched from the Valley of Heart’s Delight, to take over the human brain and change it more than anything since writing.
There are trees that spread like fireworks and trees that rise like cones. Trees that shoot without a ripple, three hundred feet straight skyward. Broad, pyramidal, rounded, columnar, conical, crooked: the only thing they do in common is branch, like Vishnu waving his many arms. Among those spreaders, the wildest are the figs. Strangler trees that slip their sheaths around the bodies of others and swallow them, forming an empty cast around their decomposed hosts. Peepal, Ficus religiosa, the Buddha’s Bo, their leaves tapering into exotic drip tips. Banyans that plump out like whole forests, with a hundred separate trunks fighting for a share of the sun. That temple-eating fig in his father’s photo inhabits the boy. It will keep on growing faster with each new chunk of reusable code. It will keep on spreading, searching the cracks, probing all the possible means of escape, looking for new buildings to swallow. It will grow under Neelay’s hands for the next twenty years.
Then it will flower to become the boy’s belated thanks for an early birthday present. His homage to skinny little Pita, lugging that massive shipping box up the apartment stairs. His praise to Vishnu, known only through cheap newsprint Hindi comic books he could never read. His farewell to a species turning from animal into data. His effort to raise the dead and make them love him again. So many trunks growing downward from the same tree. The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.
THEY MOVE INTO A HOUSE down the valley along El Camino, in Mountain View. Three bedrooms: Such luxury confuses Babul Mehta. He still drives a twenty-year-old car. But every five months he upgrades the computers.
Ritu Mehta panics each time a new crate arrives. “When does it end? You’re pauperizing us!”
The garage fills with so much old gear the car won’t fit. But every component, however outdated, is a marvel of mind-boggling complexity created by a team of heroic engineers. Neither father nor son can throw even these obsolete miracles away.
The snail’s pace of Moore’s law tortures Neelay. He’s starved for more RAM, more MIPS, more pixels. Waiting for the next barrier-breaking upgrade takes a tenth of his young life. Something inside these tiny, mutable components is waiting to get out. Or rather: there’s something that these reticent things might be made to do, something humans haven’t even imagined yet. And Neelay is on the verge of finding and naming them, if he can only find the next new magic words.
He skitters through the schoolyard like a traitor to childhood. He learns the shibboleths—the famous refrains from countless sitcoms, the hooks of pernicious little radio tunes, the bios of fifteen-year-old sexpot starlets he’s supposed to be slayed by. But at night, his dreams fill not with playground battles or the day’s take-down gossip but with visions of tight, lovely code doing more with less—bits of data passing from memory to register to accumulator and back in a dance so beautiful he can’t begin to tell his friends. They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.
Every program tunnels into possibility. A frog tries to cross a busy street. An ape defends himself with barrel bombs. Under those ridiculous, blocky skins, creatures from another dimension pour into Neelay’s world. And there’s only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been. In