Alif the Unseen

  Alif jerked as a chill gripped his body. The Hand hooked one foot under the crossbeam of Alif ’s chair and pulled it closer.

  “Now, I need you to pay attention,” he said. “There are things I need to know.”

  “I’ve already told you what you need to know,” said Alif, feeling belligerent. “The Alf Yeom is not what you think it is. Or maybe it’s exactly what you think it is. Either way, it’s dangerous.”

  “Of course it’s dangerous. That’s the entire reason I want it. The way you were able to trample over my lovely security system tells me the codewriting methodology embedded in the Alf Yeom works even better than I dared hope. I was so impressed with what you managed to get out of it that I couldn’t find it in my heart to be angry. Well, that’s a lie. But my anger was tempered by respect.”

  “It doesn’t work better than anything,” said Alif. “It’s too unstable. When you ask information to adapt new parameters that rapidly, the fundamental commands get lost. There’s a huge data decay issue. The whole system forgot what its original function was supposed to be and collapsed. It fused the machine I was working on. I’ve never seen a computer run that hot.”

  “Yes, I saw. It was a useless lump of elemental metals when we got to it. Totally unrecoverable. But in my opinion the breakdown had more to do with the truly idiotic amount of RAM you were using. That little desktop was never meant to handle such a data load.”

  Alif shook his head emphatically.

  “Nothing to do with RAM. I made sure each the programs were running at peak efficiency. And I stripped out all the original software before I even started.”

  “Wouldn’t have made a difference. In the final analysis, you were working on a computer too unsophisticated for what you were trying to achieve. If you’d had access to a suite of our machines, all wired into a blade server, your little science experiment would have changed the future of computing.”

  “No.”

  The Hand made a gesture of irritation.

  “If you’re still trying to fight with me about this, you clearly haven’t been down here long enough. I’m not interested in false humility and dire warnings. I know you’re trying to put me off so I don’t build on your work and outdo your own efforts. You’re still playing the game, Alif. You haven’t yet realized that the game is over and I have won.”

  Alif sawed his jaws back and forth.

  “I’m not playing anything. I’m telling you the Alf Yeom is ideological cancer. The jinn were right—we can’t really understand their way of thinking, and we make a mess of it when we try. If you tried to use that methodology on a system that was really important—the City’s electrical grid or something—you could end up with chaos. No light, no phones, people going crazy.”

  The Hand sighed. His eyes reflected the light strangely, as if they were all pupil. Alif felt queasy.

  “Let’s talk as colleagues for a moment,” said the Hand. “Surely you see the limits of binary computing. We are rapidly approaching the ceiling of its utility. After that, what? Is this the peak of civilization? Is there nowhere to go but down? Quantum is a pipe dream. If human progress is to continue, we have to relearn how to use the tools we already have. Reteach our machines. Look what the ancient Egyptians were able to achieve using rudimentary wheels and pulleys. That’s what the Alf Yeom allows us to do, Alif. Build a pyramid with wheels and pulleys. The jinn be damned—they’ve got something powerful and they don’t want to share it. That’s all their shadowy warnings amount to.”

  Alif said nothing. He recalled the feeling the Hand was describing, the sense that he had, for bare instants, seen through to the sinews of the code, the bones of language itself, and known them in some profound way. But that feeling was not attached to the Alf Yeom.

  “You’re wrong,” Alif said. “We haven’t exhausted the possibilities of binary computing. There’s more left to do.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  Alif thought of the letter his name represented, repeating in a pattern over and over in Intisar’s words, unseen even by her. “Sometimes when you ask God for more, He moves the horizon back just a little. Enough to let you breathe.”

  The Hand grimaced.

  “Are we still talking about computers, or have you come down with ergot poisoning? That slop they feed you is none too fresh.”

  “I’m talking about things that matter.”

  The Hand stood in one abrupt motion, causing his chair to skitter backward away from him.

  “All right, I’m done. I didn’t come here for a philosophy lesson. I thought you might be grateful for a little shop talk. I only want one thing before I leave: where is the Alf Yeom now? State couldn’t locate it in the mosque where we found you.”

  Alif frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had it next to me while I was working. I didn’t move it.”

  “Not even after your computer crashed? Not to get it out of the way?”

  “My fingertips were all burned and I hadn’t slept in two days. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything else.”

  “If you’re trying to prevent me from recreating your code, this is not the way to do it. I’ve got my people reverse-engineering it from the mess you left on the State intranet as we speak.”

  “Be my guest. You’ll just end up screwing yourselves. I don’t know where the book is and I don’t care.”

  “How sad. This means we’ll have to keep interrogating the sheikh. I’m not sure how much longer he’ll last at this rate. He’s not a young man.”

  Alif felt the blood drain from his face.

  “You’ve got Sheikh Bilal in here?” he asked. His voice had grown hoarse.

  “Oh yes. Right down the hall. I’m surprised you can’t hear him. He makes quite a bit of noise when we start in with the electric prods. I suppose the walls must be thicker than I imagined.”

  Alif began breathing rapidly. “He doesn’t know anything,” he said. “I’ll swear it on whatever you put in front of me. He doesn’t even know my name. He’s just an old man with a conscience.”

  “A conscience is something old men who harbor terrorists cannot afford, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never been a terrorist. All I do is protect people who want the freedom to say what they really think.”

  The Hand stepped back toward the door. His eyes still shone oddly in the light, black discs that reflected only florescence.

  “What naive garbage. People don’t want freedom anymore— even those to whom freedom is a kind of religion are afraid of it, like trembling acolytes who make sacrifices to some pagan god. People want their governments to keep secrets from them. They want the hand of law to be brutal. They are so terrified by their own power that they will vote to have it taken out of their hands. Look at America. Look at the sharia states. Freedom is a dead philosophy, Alif. The world is returning to its natural state, to the rule of the weak by the strong. Young as you are, it’s you who are out of touch, not me.”

  Alif passed a hand over his eyes. His head ached.

  “Please leave the sheikh alone,” he said in a small voice. “I’ll say whatever you want me to say. I’ll say you’ve won. I don’t care. Just don’t hurt him anymore. It’s on me if he dies. It’s all on me. I can’t bear it.”

  The Hand’s eyes widened. His expression made Alif nervous: a blank, menacing, almost sensual readiness; the look of a rapist.

  “What were you thinking,” he murmured, “When I came in today? What went through your mind when you saw me?”

  Alif began to shake.

  “I was glad to see you,” he said. “I was relieved to see you. I wanted you to stay. I still want you to stay. I don’t want to go back to the dark.”

  Exhaling, the Hand closed his eyes. His face slackened.

  “Very good,” he said. “Yes. Very good. I have been waiting for this.”

  Alif wondered what he was meant to understand from ‘this’. Bile rose in his throat at the thought of what the Hand might ask
him to do, to which he himself might acquiesce without complaint. Anything was better than another stretch in the void with the thing-that-was-not-Farukhuaz padding around him in the darkness in ever-shrinking circles.

  But the Hand merely turned and rapped on the door.

  “I’m glad you felt you could share your true feelings with me,” he said. The door opened. “I wanted our relationship to end on exactly this note. I hope you ate well at your last meal—you’ll never have another.”

  Alif swallowed. The Hand regarded him with something very like sympathy.

  “Goodbye, Alif. In a way, I feel as though I’m losing a friend. I’ll think of you every time I have Intisar on her back. What a strange coincidence that we should want the same woman, but for two very different reasons. Fitting, somehow, but strange.”

  * * *

  Alone in the dark again, Alif was almost immediately hungry. He paced the room with one hand on the wall to guide him, avoiding the slop corner, and attempted to take his mind somewhere else. He thought of daylight. He thought of sitting in the window of his room in Baqara District on a spring afternoon, his innards cooking pleasantly in the heat of the sun-warmed cement ledge. He thought of Dina in a summer robe, grey or green in contrast to her usual black, sandals slapping against her feet as she came through the courtyard laden with bags of fruit from the market. That would make it a Saturday. He was baffled to remember that there had been a time when such a scene would have filled him with existential dread, agony at the quiet female rhythms that encompassed him, prompting him to flee back into his computers, the cloud, the digital world populated by men.

  Now the idea of such an afternoon seemed exquisite. He had let too many pass with too much indifference. In his mind he made himself get down off the ledge and go outside to help Dina with her bags, then see if there was anything his mother needed; he spoke to the maid in complete sentences, and remembered to clean the dust from his own shoes when he came back inside. Naked in the dark, with the memory of the Hand’s reptilian eyes, he realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

  As time began to blur again, he occupied himself by rewriting more of his own history. He did not shrink from his father, and did not hate him; instead he politely demanded that his mother be given equal time, reminding the man of all she had given up to marry him and raise his son. He was helpful and active around the house. He contributed more money toward their monthly expenses. Finally, he presented himself to Dina’s parents as soon as he knew what she wanted—which he should have known years earlier, when they were still almost children, and Alif remained the only boy she would seek out and speak to alone. He ached then, ached for their conversations on the roof, cursing himself for treating her intimacy in such an offhand way. Her decision to veil had irritated and alarmed him as it irritated and alarmed her family, and he had been too absorbed in himself to realize that her continued friendship was a kind of plea, a thread back to the life she had left behind.

  The necessity of returning to her kept his survival instincts alive. He drank all the water he was given, making no effort to speed his death by adding thirst to hunger. The knot in his stomach turned into a sharp, continuous cramp, and sitting became painful; it felt as though his hip bones bruised the flesh beneath them. He gripped his waist with his hands to keep the pain at bay. He had expected to feel afraid, but did not; his thoughts, though sluggish, were clear. His body remained relentlessly alive. He marveled at it, a machine more elaborate and efficient than any computer he had ever used. This was where the echoes of God lived: not in his mind, but in his cells and sinews, the parts of him that could not lie. He felt his flesh transcend itself.

  Farukhuaz came to him for the last time when he was lying on his side to relieve the pressure beneath his hips.

  “Bones, bones, bile, bones, locked away to die alone,” it rasped. “You are digesting your own insides.”

  “I’m alive,” said Alif. “And I know what you really are. You’re not Farukhuaz at all. That’s just the illusion you projected to sway me into doing what you wanted. You’re something much worse.”

  “I am I. End it quickly, neatly.”

  “I’m not planning to die.”

  The hissing laughter started up, bouncing off the invisible walls of the room as though it had no precise origin.

  “You’re a fool,” said the thing that was not Farukhuaz. “You are already dying. There is no one here to commend you for bravery or witness your sacrifice. Your death will go unseen. Have a little pride and end things on your own terms.”

  Something wet and warm slid along his foot. Alif jerked away, feeling, for the first time, a sense of unease about his determination to survive. Even if he held out for some miraculous stretch of time, the door to his cell would still be locked. He did not, strictly speaking, have a plan.

  “There is another way,” whispered Farukhuaz. “I could get you out.”

  Alif searched the darkness in alarm, certain the thing had read his thoughts.

  “It would be easy enough,” Farukhuaz continued. “All you would have to do is tell your captors you have something they want. Give them your friend Abdullah, or any of the dissidents you know. Give them access codes, handles, passwords. You have many things with which to bargain for your life. They are surprised that you haven’t offered already.”

  Alif curled up into a ball.

  “I would help you.”The voice was very close to his ear. “I would tell you how best to sway them. It would be a simple thing for me.”

  He thought again of daylight. He thought of returning to Dina and lying under her starry veil, and feeling safe.

  “No,” he heard himself say.

  “Why not?”The voice kissed the small hairs on the back of his neck. “You seem determined to live.”

  “I am,” said Alif. “But if my only way out is through you, I’d rather keep starving.”

  The sudden rush of anger through the room made him yelp. He felt it as a physical force, like the recoil of earth after a tremor.

  “Who are you trying to impress?” The voice came from inside his head, louder than any thought. He clapped his hands over his ears and screamed.

  “You really think the One who is birthing stars and eating up the bowels of dysenteric infants cares whether you live as a traitor or die as a martyr? You think any of this matters?”

  Alif fought back tears. He could not answer yes. His doubt was exposed in front of him, like a wet mewling thing, a diffidence that had never matured into belief or disbelief. He did not have the wherewithal to fight.

  “Poor little creature.” The voice softened. “I’m only here to keep you safe. You think we’ve just met, but I’ve been with you all your life. I have been the little whispers in your veins, numbing you, keeping you between the walls of your room when the world seemed too big. I have been the ringing in your ears, waking you in the small hours of the night to remind you of your wretchedness. You are alone, and I am the only real partisan you have.”

  Curling into himself, Alif attempted to steady his breathing. The air in the room seemed dense, like one collective exhalation from which all sustenance had been drained.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “You don’t know what you believe.”

  “Whatever I believe, your bullshit isn’t part of it.”

  A hiss.

  “Be sensible. The only way out of this room is through me.”

  “Then I’ll stay in this room until I’m a disgusting smear of muck on the floor. I’m sick of listening to you.”

  “A part of you still hopes there is another way. A part of you still hopes that the door will open and you will walk out of it free in body and in conscience. It is this part of yourself that you must kill if you really want to survive.”

  Alif felt his heart rate rise again, and with it, a new thrill of anger. “No. No. That’s the only part of me I still want.”

  The room grew colder.
/>
  “Suit yourself.”

  He strained to listen for several more minutes, ready for the renewed sound of laughter, the soft scuffling of feet. But the room felt empty in an emphatic, unfamiliar way. He shivered in the sudden lack of warmth. Exhaustion warred against his underfed muscles. The thing had been right: he was profoundly alone. An unpleasant kind of self-pity washed over him, bringing with it no solace. He wanted to sleep. Closing his eyes, he spoke to the indifferent, artificial night.

  “Please,” he said. “Please don’t let it be right. Please open the door.”

  For a moment he actually expected something to happen. But the silence and the darkness remained complete and unyielding, and with a feeling close to despair, Alif allowed himself to drift off.

  It was the sharp sound of a metal hinge grinding against itself that woke him. Scrambling to his feet, he blinked: a flashlight bobbed in the darkness, illuminating a figure in a white robe and headdress.

  “Good God,” it said in an amused tenor, “It reeks of piss in here. I’d hate to be the janitor who comes in after they wheel out your corpse.”

  “Who are you?” croaked Alif, shielding his eyes against the light.

  The figure drew itself up stiffly, and raised the light a little: it shone on a young, haughty face with a patrician nose and a fashionable scattering of stubble across its cheeks and chin.

  “Who are you, sir,” it said.

  Alif attempted to process this correction.

  “You’re royalty?” he asked, skepticism slurring his words.

  “Yes I am,” said the bearer of the flashlight in a cool voice. “I’m Prince Abu Talib Al Mukhtar ibn Hamza.”

  Deprivation made Alif bold; there was nothing they could do to him that they had not already done.

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” he challenged.

  “No, I suppose not.”The young man smiled sheepishly. “There are twenty-six other princes in line before me for the throne. You know me as NewQuarter01.”

  * * *

  Alif felt like his mind had thrown a gear, leaving it to spin uselessly, without traction.