Book Excerpts

Read from Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s Much-Awaited New Book The Inhuman Peace

It is the year 2034 A.D. Imagine that the British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. Britain conquered all that stood in her way, destroying the rebellions of the Americas and the British Raj.

In the middle of these grand and great political games, a little island called Ceylon floats peacefully in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Those who invaded it saw only the ruins of empire, and spent their lives planting tea and building holiday bungalows here. But Ceylon is far from peaceful. Many things have happened. And many things are about to change… Read this excerpt to find out more:

In the city responsible for all those glittering lights, a messenger took a turn at a little over sixty kilometers an hour. Ordinarily, given the topography of Kandy and its roads, this should have resulted in him falling to his death and bouncing off several curving roads on the way down, but the messenger in question was from the Ministry of Reconciliation, and the Ministry chose only the best riders for this kind of work.

His motorcycle, a Royal Enfield Bullet-E, skidded just enough to put the fear of several gods into him, but kept going, cutting through the crickety stillness of the Kandy night. He rode past rings of houses that grew progressively shorter and wider – land was a luxury, and the more you could build horizontally, the better off you were – and stopped at a lane where they were just two storeys tall and the owners rich enough to have actual courtyards in between.

One of these houses belong to Kushlani de Almeida, PhD. It was the only house in the lane with its lights still on. It was six months after the October Massacre; many years before Kushlani would fight the combined political might of Kandy’s old Houses in a court case and lose, and so commit the act of desperation that would see her die in a pool of her own blood, with a bullet in her belly. Her hair was still black and her face had yet to take on that expression she became famous for in her later years; the one that made people feel as if something immensely old and incredibly furious had picked them up and pinned them like butterflies to a corkboard.

She was, in short, still Assistant Two on the payroll, Assistant One in theory, and had just moved out here, very much against her parents’ wishes.

If asked why she was up, she would have responded first with the automatic complaint of all Kandyans – the nights were getting warmer, even in Kandy; this was absolutely unheard of; it was those bloody idiots and their plantations and factories, turning the topsoil to desert and the clouds into smog.

But it was not just the heat that kept her awake. For months now, the October Massacre had played in her mind.

In hindsight, it felt like the plot of a bad science-fiction novel. The Colombo Entertainment Zone, the ultimate in post-apocalyptic, high-stakes television, a city-sized set for killing machines. Aritha Bandaranaike, gormless villain #1 and playboy aristocrat, deciding that the Conductor robots that prevented all hell from breaking out were better used as a party prop. The Explorer, the chief antagonist; a bot designed to test the boundaries of the Zone, the situation, to discover and exploit weak spots, largely as a diagnostic tool, arriving at exactly the right time to exploit this loss. The train to Kandy, which had to be on a supply run at just that time.

Bystanders #12–13, innocent people, on the way back from the Wednesday market, their bags stuffed with whatever pola vegetables didn’t look too diseased, suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of all the violence they usually only saw on their televisions. And Kushlani de Almeida, #1 protagonist, forced to dissect something that, for all her time in robots, had made her actually think about the lives of the things they made and destroyed in the name of profitable entertainment. All this chaos, lining up perfectly.

Karma, her father had said. Karma, as if that explained the madness, as if it was a story written out in advance, with everyone playing roles proportionate to their sins. Kushlani had long stopped believing in karma. There was no order to history; only moments of order interspersed with chaos, and people trying to make sense of it afterward. But the dreams remained.

At first it had been just the panic of knowing that something had gone wrong, that bots meant to stay in Colombo had escaped, and they were coming here, heading to Kandy. Then the dream had changed. First to sitting in front of her parents’ old television, watching the news – three dead, twelve injured. The memory of monks ranting about robotics and karma.

But as of late it had changed again. The dream now began with the last act of that tragic drama; the memory of cutting into that little girl’s body, slashing away the steel and the wires and the clever cabling underneath the fake skin. In real life, she had performed the autopsy with flawless precision, falsified the report just enough to let everyone keep their jobs, and moved on. In the dream, however, instead of the precise cuts with the 1-2 scalpel, she slashed into the body with a knife, an ugly and rusted thing, and the body screamed and twitched and bled, and the head, separated from the corpse, whispered can speak, can speak, can speak, and opened its mouth in a rictus of terror.

Kushlani de Almeida was not a superstitious person, a fact that her family often deplored. But as of late she had taken her father’s advise and wore a panchayudhaya. The little golden disc, worn around her neck, held tiny avatars of the traditional bow and arrow, sword, trident, conch and disc. And because she was practical, it also had the decidedly nontraditional radio ID chip that signed her in and out of the office. And here she was, unable to sleep, turning that little golden disc over and over in her hand.

She heard the gutter whine of the bike before the lights washed over her windows. There was that initial moment of panic – it was, after all, quite late – but she recognized the voice at the gate, so she made her way downstairs and opened the door.

Sure enough, it was Jagath.

‘Miss,’ he said, holding out a little voice recorder. She played it.

‘We’ve got trouble on the project,’ said Hewage’s voice in the hot night. ‘Come. Immediately.’

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