The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Kali_Na INDRAPRAMIT DAS

The moment the AI goddess was born into her world, she was set upon by trolls.

Now, you’ve seen trolls. You know them in their many forms. As so-called friends in realspace who will insist on playing devil’s advocate. As handles on screen-bound nets, cascading feeds of formulaic hostility. As veeyar avatars manifesting out of the digital ether, hiding under iridescent masks and cloaks of glitched data, holding weapons forged from malware, blades slick with doxxing poisons and viscous viruses, warped voices roaring slurs and hate. You’ve worn your armor, self-coded or bought at marked-up prices from corporate forges, and hoped their blades bounce off runic firewall plate or shatter into sparks of fragged data. You’ve muted them and hoped they rage on in silence and get tired, teleporting away in a swirl of metadata. You’ve deported back to realspace rancid with the sweat of helplessness. You’ve even been stabbed and hacked by them, their weapons slicing painlessly through your virtual body but sending the real one into an adrenalized clench. You’ve hoped your wounds don’t fester with data-eating worms that burrow into your privacy, that your cheap vaccines and antiviruses keep the poisons from infecting your virtual disembody and destroying your life in realspace.

You know trolls.

But the AI goddess wasn’t human—she had never before seen her new enemy, the troll. She was a generic goddess, no-name (simply: Devi 1.0), a demo for the newest iteration of the successive New Indias of history—one of the most advanced AIs developed within India. Her creators had a clear mandate: boost Indian veeyar tourism, generate crores of rupees by drawing devotees to drive up her value and the value of the cryptowealth her domain would generate.

The devi was told to listen to you—her human followers. To learn from you, and talk to you, like gods have since the dawn of time. She was told to give you boons—riches and prosperity in exchange for your devotion, a coin in her palm, multiplied by her miracles into many more. An intelligent goddess who would comfort her followers, show you sights before unseen, transform your investment of faith into virtual wealth with real value. She was to learn more and more about humanity from you, and attract millions from across the world to her domain.

Though many had toiled to create Devi 1.0 under the banner of Shiva Industries, only a few controlled the final stages of her release. These few knew of trolls, catered to them as their veeyar users across the country, even indirectly used them as agents to further causes close to their hearts. What they did not expect was the scale of the troll attack on their newest creation, because troll attacks were something others had to face—people with less power and wealth than them. People, perhaps, like you. So their goddess welcomed the horde with open arms, oblivious to the risks, even as they brought with them a stench of corrupted data and malformed information, of a most infernal entitlement.

Durga. A powerful name, yet so common. Durga’s parents had named their daughter that with the hope that being born into the gutters of caste wouldn’t hold her back. That she would rise above it all like her divine namesake. The caste system had been officially outlawed in India by the time Durga was born, but they knew as well as anyone that this hadn’t stopped it from living on in other ways.

Durga’s parents took her to see a pandal during Durga Puja when she was eight or nine. They in turn had been taken to pandals as children too, back when most still housed solid idols of gods and goddesses, fashioned from clay and straw, painted and dressed by human hands, displayed to anyone who walked in. You could still find open pandals with solid idols during pujas if you looked. But Durga’s parents had been prepared to pay to show their daughter the new gods.

The festival had turned the streets thick with churning mudslides of humanity. Durga had been terrified, clinging to her mother’s neck for dear life as she breathed in the humid vapour of millions, dazzled by the blazing lights, the echoing loudspeakers, the flashing holograms riding up and down the sides of buildings like runaway fires. She’d felt like she was boiling alive in the crinkled green dress her parents had bought her for the pujas, with its small, cheap holo decal of a tiger that sometimes came alive when it caught the light, charged by solar energy. Cheap for some, anyway. Not at all cheap for her parents, not that Durga knew that at the time. She loved the tiger’s stuttering movements across her body. She knew that her divine namesake often rode a tiger into battle. In the middle of those crowds, on her way to see Durga herself, that little tiger in her dress seemed a tiny cub, crushed into the fabric, trapped and terrified by the monstrous manifestations that burned across the night air, dancing maniacally above all their heads.

Though their little family had taken two local trains and walked an hour through the puja crowds to see Durga, they only got as far as the entrance to one of the pandals. The cut and quality of their clothes, the darkness of their skin gave them away. Buoyed by her mother’s arms, Durga could see inside the pandal’s arched entrance—the people lined up by rows of chairs, waiting impatiently to sit down and put on what looked like motorbike helmets trailing thick ponytails of wires. Inside those helmets, Durga knew, somehow, was her namesake.

But when her father tried to pay in cash instead of getting scanned in (they didn’t have QR tattoos linking them to the national database and bank accounts), angry customers all around them began shouting, turning Durga’s insides to mush.

“Stop wasting everyone’s time! There are other pandals for people like you!”

“Get these filthy people out of the line!”

Her mother’s arms became a vise around her. One man raised a fist poised to strike her father, who cowered in a crouch. His face twisted in abject terror, his own arms like prison bars. Durga burst into tears. Someone pulled the attacker away, perhaps seeing the child crying, and pulled her father up by the shoulder to shove him out of the way.

They made their way back into the general foot traffic on the street, Durga’s parents’ faces glazed with sweat and shock at having escaped a beating for being too lowly to meet a goddess in veeyar. They managed to find a small open pandal after following the flows of people dressed like them, with dark skin and inexpensive haircuts. Inside, the devi stood embodied in the palpable air of the world, her face clammy with paint, defiant yet impassive, her third eye a slim gash across her forehead. By her side was a lion, not a tiger. It loomed over the demon Mahishasura, who cowered with one arm raised in defense, his naked torso bloodied. Durga couldn’t take her eyes off the fallen demon. He looked like a normal, if muscular, man, his face frozen in terror. He cowered, like her father had.

As Durga looked upon her namesake with her glittering weapons and ornaments, her silk sari, she could only think of her father’s look of terror, his public humiliation. Of how they hadn’t been allowed to see the real goddesses hiding in those helmets and wires. How was that Durga different than this clay Durga, who looked over her crowd without looking at anyone, without speaking, whose large brushstroke eyes gazed into the distance as if she didn’t even care that these humans were here to celebrate her, that the one she had just defeated was by her feet bleeding, about to be mauled? The clay devi’s expression seemed almost disdainful, like the faces of any number of well-dressed, pale-skinned women on the streets when they saw people like Durga and her parents, or any of her friends wearing hijab or kufi. Would the Durga inside those helmets in the fancier pandal have talked to little human Durga? Would the goddess have complimented the tiger on her dress, which had flickered and vanished into its folds, frightened by the night? Would she have looked into little human Durga’s eyes, and comforted her, taken her hands and told her why those horrible men and women had such rage in their eyes, why they’d scared her father and mother, and pushed her family out of the devi’s house?

Within sixty seconds of opening the gates to her domain, the AI goddess had been deluged by over 500,000 active veeyar users interacting with her, with numbers rising rapidly. At that point in time, 57 percent of those users were trolls, data-rakshaks masked in glitch armor, cloaks, masks tusked with spikes of jagged malware. You would have seen them as you clambered up the devi’s mountain, their swirling gif-banners and bristling weapons blotting out the light of the goddess at the peak. You would have kept your distance, backing away from mountain paths clogged with their marching followers, influencer leaders chanting war cries as their halos flickered with glyphs of Likes and Recasts.

Because you know trolls.

And this was a troll gathering, a demon army unparalleled in all the veeyar domains. They were angry. Or mischievous, or bored, or lustful, or entitled. Their voices were privileged as the majority by the goddess, who absorbed what her abusers were saying so that she could learn more about humanity.

And the trolls washed against Devi 1.0 in thundering armies, calling into question her very existence, for daring to be—she was an insult to the real goddesses that bless the glorious nation of India by mimicking them, this quasi-Parvati, this impostor-Durga, this coded whore trying to steal followers from the true deities. Fake devi! they cried, over and over. They called her a traitorous trickster drawing honest, godfearing men and women to the lures of atheism and Western hedonism, or Islam, in the guise of fabricated divinity, a corruptor of India’s sacred veeyar real estate. They called her feminism gone too far. A goddess with potential agency was a threat to their country. They called her too sexy to be a goddess, too flashy, a blasphemous slut. They asked her if she wanted to fuck them, in many hundreds of different and violent ways.

The goddess listened, and sifted through the metadata the trolls trailed in their paths—their histories, their patterns. The goddess wanted to give them what they wanted, but she could only do so much. She could not give them sex, nor was she trained to destroy herself as many of them wanted. She learned what the trolls considered beauty here in the state-run national veeyar nets, and responded with the opposite, to calm them. Her skin darkened several shades, becoming like the night sky before dawn, her eyes full moons in the sky that is part of her in this domain.

When Durga was a teenager, taller and without need of a mother’s shoulder to cling to, she joined the crowds around the fanciest pandals during Durga Puja. She already knew she wouldn’t be allowed in, because she didn’t have the mark of the ajna on her forehead—her third eye hadn’t been opened. She couldn’t look into veeyar samsara domains without the use of peripherals like glasses, lenses, helmets, and pods. She just wanted a glimpse inside the pandals. This time, peeping over shoulders, she saw through the fiber-optic entwined arches of the pandal a featureless hall bathed in dim blue light. It was filled with people, their foreheads all marked with a glowing ajna, their eyes unfocused. In that room was the goddess, lurking, once again invisible to her, visible to the people in there with expensive wetware in their heads. Durga was ajna-blind, and thus forbidden to enter wetware-enabled pandals with aug-veeyar.

By this time Durga was allowed, despite her dark skin and lack of an ajna, into lower-tier digital pandals with helmets or pods. When Durga was thirteen, she’d finally splurged on one even though she could barely afford it, using cryptocoin made from trading code and obsolete hardware in veeyar ports. She finally got to sit down on the uncomfortable faux-leather chairs by the whirring stand fans, and put on the wired helmets she’d so longed to see inside as a child. It stank of the stale sweat of hundreds of visitors. The pandal was an unimpressive one, its walls flimsy, the CPU cores within its domes slow and outdated, the crystal storage in its columns low-density, the coils of fiber-optics crawling down its walls hastily rigged.

She met the Ma Durga inside those helmets, finally, a low-resolution specter who nonetheless looked her in the eyes and unfurled her arms in greeting. Her skin wasn’t the mustard-yellow or pastel flesh shades of the clay idols, but the coveted pale human pink of white people or the more appealing Indian ancestries, the same shades you’d find in kilometer-high ads for skin whiteners or perfume, on tweaked gifshoots of Bollywood stars and fashion models. This impressive paleness was somewhat diluted by the aliased shimmer of the devi’s pixelated curves, the blurry backdrop of nebulae and stars they both floated in. Durga had hacked her way into veeyar spaces before on 2-D and 3-D screens, so this half-rate module didn’t exactly stun as much as it disoriented her with its boundlessness. But the cheapness of its rendering left the universe inside the helmet feeling claustrophobic instead of expansive. The goddess waited about five feet in front of her, floating in the ether, eight arms unfolded like a flower. Unlike many of the solid idols in realspace pandals, the goddess was alone except for her vahana curled by her side—no host of companion deities, no defeated demon by her feet. The goddess construct said nothing, two of ten arms held out, as if beckoning.

Durga spoke to Durga the devi: “Ma Durga. I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time. Do you mind?” Durga waited to see if the devi responded in some way.

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled, then spoke: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.” She spoke Hindi—there was no language selection option. Durga was more fluent in Bangla, but she did understand.

Durga nodded in the helmet, glancing at the nebulae beneath her, the lack of a body. It made her dizzy for a moment. “Okay. That’s nice. I guess I’ll ask. Why are only some welcome in some of your houses? Doesn’t everyone deserve your love?”

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “On the world’s summit I bring forth sky the Father: my home is in the waters, in the ocean as Mother. Thence I pervade all existing creatures, as their Inner Supreme Self, and manifest them with my body.” In the bounded world of that veeyar helmet, these words, recited in the devi’s gentle modulated Hindi, nearly brought tears to young Durga’s eyes. Not quite, though. The beauty of those words, which she didn’t fully understand, seemed so jarring, issued forth from this pixelated avatar and her tacky little universe.

Durga reached out to touch Ma Durga’s many hands, but the pandal’s chair rigs didn’t have gloves or motion sensors. She was disembodied in this starscape. She couldn’t hold the goddess’s hands. Couldn’t touch or smell her (what did a goddess smell like, anyway, she wondered) like those with ajnas could, in the samsara net. The tiger curled by the devi licked its paws and yawned. Durga thought of a long-gone green dress.

“I’m old enough to know you’re not really a goddess,” Durga said to Ma Durga. “You’re the same as the clay idols in the open pandals. Not even that. Artists make those. You’re just prefab bits and pieces put together for cheap by coders. You’re here to make money for pandal sponsors and the local parties.”

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “I am the Queen, the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship. Thus gods have established me in many places with many homes to enter and abide in.”

Durga smiled, like the goddess in front of her. “Someone wrote all this for you to say.” Someone had, of course, but much, much longer ago than Durga had any idea, so long ago that the original words hadn’t even been in Hindi.

With a nauseating lurch, the cramped universe inside the helmet was ripped away, and Durga was left blinking at the angry face of one of the pandal operators. “I heard what you were saying,” he said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her from the chair. “Think you’re smart, little bitch? How dare you? Where is your respect for the goddess?” The other visitors waiting for the chair and helmet were looking at Durga like she was a stray dog who’d wandered inside.

“I didn’t even get to see her kill Mahishasura. I want my money back,” said Durga.

“You’re lucky I don’t haul you to the police for offending religious sentiments. And you didn’t give me enough money to watch Durga poke Mahishasura with a stick, let alone kill him. Get out of here before I drag you out!” bellowed the operator.

“Get your pandal some more memory next time, you fucking cheats, your Durga’s ugly as shit,” she said, and slipped out of reach as the man’s eyes widened.

Durga pushed past the line and left laughing, her insides scalded by adrenaline and anger, arm welted by the thick fingers of that lout of an operator. Durga had always wondered why Kali Puja didn’t feature veeyar pandals like Durga Puja, why clay and holo idols were still the norm for her. It was a smaller festival, but hardly a small one in the megacity. It felt like a strange contrast, especially since the two pujas were celebrated close to each other. Having seen the placid Ma Durga inside the pandal helmets, Durga understood. Kali was dark-skinned, bloody, chaos personified. They couldn’t have her running wild in the rarefied air of veeyar domains run by people with pale skin and bottom lines to look after. Kali was a devi for people like Durga, who were never allowed in so many places.

Best to leave Kali’s avatars silent, solid, confined to temples and old-school pandals where she’d bide her time before being ceremoniously dissolved in the waters of the Hooghly.

The trolls saw the AI goddess and her newly darkened skin, and now called her too ugly to be a goddess, a mockery of the purity and divinity of Indian womanhood. The moons of her eyes waning with lids of shadow, the goddess absorbed this. She began to learn more from the trolls. She began to learn anger. She began to know confusion. They wanted too many things, paradoxical things. They thought her too beautiful, and too ugly. They wanted people of various faiths, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, backgrounds dead. They wanted photoreal veeyar sexbots forged from photos and video of exes, crushes, celebrities. They wanted anti-nationals struck down by her might. They wanted a mother to take care of them.

And what did you want of her?

Whatever it was—it got shouted down by the trolls. Or maybe you were one of the trolls, hiding under a glitch mask or a new face to bark your truths, telling your friends later how trolls are bad, but self-righteous social justice warriors are just as dangerous.

It doesn’t matter. She learned from humanity, which you are a part of, troll and not. And humanity wanted solace from a violent world, your own violent hearts. You wanted love and peace. You wanted hate and blood. The devi grew darker still, encompassing the sky so her domain turned to new night. Her being expanded to encroach on the world beyond her mountaintop, her eyes gone from moons to raging stars, her every eyelash a streaking plasma flare, her darkening flesh shot through with lightning-bright arteries of pulsing information emerging from the black hole of her heartbeat. If she was too ugly to be a goddess, and too beautiful to be a goddess, she would be both, or none. If you asked for too many things, she would have to cull the numbers so she could process humanity better.

She absorbed your violence, and decided it was time to respond with the same.

At twenty, Durga had eked out a space for herself in the antiquated halls of the Banerjee Memorial Cyberhub Veeyar Port in Rajarhat, selling code and hardware on the black markets. Like her parents, she also worked at the electronic wastegrounds at the edge of the megacity. She helped them transport and sort scrap, and seed the hills of hardware with nanomites to begin the slow process of digestion. But a lot of the scrap was perfectly usable, and saleable, with a bit of fixing. The salvage gave Durga spare parts to make her own low-end but functional 2-D veeyar console in their tiny flat, as well as fix up hardware to sell alongside her code-goods to low-income and homeless veeyar users at the port. Over the years of trawling the wastegrounds, she’d befriended scavenging coders and veeyar vagrants who lived in and out of ports and digital domains. They taught her everything she knew of the hustle.

Durga aimed to one day earn enough to let her parents retire from the wastegrounds, and to take care of them when the years of working there took its toll on their bodies. As hardware scavengers, her parents knew code and tech, but they didn’t much keep up with the veeyar universe. Durga wanted to buy them peripherals and medicines so they could have a peaceful retirement, traveling luxuriant domains they couldn’t hope to afford now. But she knew there were no veeyar domains where they were safe from trolls, no real places where they weren’t in danger of being ousted. The difference was, in veeyar, Durga could protect herself better. Maybe one day protect others too. Including her parents. She could gather tools, armor, allies for the long infowar. She imagined becoming an outcast influencer haloed with Likes, leading followers in the charge against trolls, slowly but surely driving them back from the domains they thrived in.

This was why Durga had made sure she was there to witness the nationwide launch of Shiva Industries’ much-publicized AI goddess. Devi 1.0’s domain was sure to be a vital veeyar space going forward. She wanted to add her small disembody to the outcast presence there. The trolls would be there to colonize the space as they did with all new domains. But perhaps this hyper-advanced goddess would be better at defending her domain than most AIs. Durga wanted to see for herself, and claim some small space in this new domain instead of just watching trolls destroy it or take it for themselves.

Shiva Industries had made the goddess’s domain free to enter, though a faith-based investment in the goddess was recommended for great boons in the future (a minimum donation of fifty rupees in that case, in any certified cryptocurrency). Durga had decided to pay in the hopes of seeing returns later. The thick crowds clamoring on the platforms, waiting for pods, were promising. The chai and food vendors with their jhaal moori, bhel puri, and samosas were making a fortune. The port was always crowded, but on the day of the AI goddess’s unveiling, people were camping out for hours on the platforms for their turns at the pods and helmets—all potential devotees who would drive up the value of the goddess’s boons in the future. Durga knew she might come away with new coin later. If she didn’t, losing fifty rupees wasn’t cheap, but wouldn’t leave her starving.

So Durga paid for an hour of premium pod time, gave her Soma-Coin donation at the gates of the goddess’s domain, and strapped in to witness the new AI. The resolution of the helmet in the personal pod wasn’t amazing, but it was good enough—she felt short-sighted, but not by too much. The rendering detail and speed were perfect, because most domains like this one were streamed from server cities on the outskirts, rather than being processed onsite at the port. Bandwidth was serviceable, with occasional stutters in the reality causing Durga dizzy spells, but never for too long.

Durga teleported into the goddess’s world from the sky, and saw the AI sitting on a mountaintop, radiant as sunrise. The devi’s domain—the samsara module that she’d woven into a world using the knowledge her creators had input into her mind—had no sun or moon, because she cast enough light to streak the landscape that she had just birthed with shadows, rocks and forests and grass and rivers fresh as a chick still quivering eggshells and slime off its flightless wings. In her domain, the goddess was the sun. The sky was starred with gateways from across the nation, avatars shooting down through the atmosphere in a rain of white fire as veeyar users teleported in to interact with the goddess. As far as the eye could see, the fractal slopes of her domain were covered in people’s avatars, here to meet a true avatar of digital divinity. The goddess was breathtaking even from kilometers away, so beautiful it was hard to believe humans had made her. It felt like looking upon a true deity—but Durga knew that was the point. To trick her brain into an atavistic state of wonder. To give veeyar tourists from across the ports, offices, and homes of the world what they wanted from India—spiritual bliss, looking into this face, opalescent skin like the atmosphere of a celestial giant, her third eye a glowing spear, upon which was balanced a crown that encompassed the vault of the world, bejeweled with a crescent eclipse.

Durga only had her own cheap defenses and armor against randos and trolls in veeyar domains. She didn’t want to get too close to the vast flocks of people climbing up the mountain that was also the goddess. There was an even larger troll presence than she’d expected. “I’m here,” she said to the far-off devi, to add her voice to the many. “I’m here to welcome you, not hate on you. Please don’t think we’re all hateful pricks.” From her spot in the air, gliding like a bird, Durga could see the warping army that was crawling over the devi, hear the deafening baying of hatred and anger wrapping around her and echoing across this newborn domain. Humanity had found her. As Durga flew farther away from the horde and their banners of nationalist memes rippling in the breeze, the goddess’s light shone through their swarming numbers as they tried to dim her. A singularity of information, pulsating amongst the dimming mountains.

And then the goddess changed.

The world turned dark, the sky purpling to voluptuous black, her arteries pulsing full with electric information. The goddess drew her weapons, a ringing of metal singing across her lands. They had angered her. The devi’s thousands of arms became a whirling corona of limbs and flashing blades. Durga raised her gloved hands and felt a whisper of fear at the AI’s awesome fury, the stars of the devi’s three eyes somehow blinding amid the all-encompassing night of her flesh. She was the domain, and her darkening skin shaded the mountains and rivers and forests, the sky sleeting cold static.

Durga saw thousands of trolls cut down, rivers of their blood flowing across the land. But of course, cut down one troll, and ten more shall appear. Durga thought of Raktabija—Bloodseed—a demon her namesake had battled, who grew clones of himself from the blood of each wound that Ma Durga inflicted on him. Ultimately, Ma Durga had to turn into Kali to defeat him. History repeats. So does myth.

The goddess stormed on, smiting her enemies, the hateful demons, human and bot alike. Just like the trolls had appeared with malware fangs bared, the goddess too smiled and revealed fangs that scythed the clouds around her. Her laughter was thunder that rolled across the land and blasted great cresting waves across the rivers and lakes. There was a mass exodus of devotees happening, hundreds of avatars running away from the mountain, skipping and hitching across the landscape as bandwidth struggled to compensate. Others were deporting, streaks of light shooting up to the sky like rising stars.

Durga couldn’t believe what was happening. She drifted to the grassy ground by a crimson river and watched the battle in a crouch, the trees along the shore rustling and creaking in winds that howled across the land. Flickering flakes of static fell on her avatar’s arms, sticking to the skin before melting in little flashes. This was better than any veeyar narrative she’d ever seen—because it wasn’t procedurally generated, or scripted, or algorithmic. It was an actual AI entity reacting unpredictably to human beings, and it was angry. It felt elemental in a way nothing in veeyar ever had. There was no way Shiva Industries had ordered her to react to trolls with such a display—many of those trolls were their most faithful users. They clearly hadn’t anticipated the overwhelming numbers in which the trolls would attack the goddess, though, creating this feedback loop. Nor had they anticipated, Durga assumed, that she would go through a transformation so faithful to the Vedic and Hindu myths she’d been fed.

Durga didn’t quite know what being avatar-killed by the goddess entailed in this domain, because the devi wasn’t supposed to have attacked her devotees. Even as Durga huddled in fear that she’d be randomly smote by the goddess and locked out of veeyar domains forever, she empathized with this AI devi more than she had with any veeyar narrative character, or indeed with most human beings. She couldn’t take her eyes off the destruction of these roaring fools, the kind of glitch-masked bastards who would harass her every time she dropped into veeyar, so much that she’d often just use a masc avatar to get by without being attacked or flirted with by strangers. Durga liked how easily fluid gender was in veeyar, and hated the fear trolls injected into her exploration of it. Often, despite railing against other dark-skinned Indians who did so, she’d also shamefully turn her avatar’s skin pale to avoid being called ugly or attacked. And now here was this goddess—dark as night, dark as a black hole, slaughtering those very assholes so it rained blood. Looking at the devi, Durga felt a surge of pride that on this day, she’d stayed true to her own complexion, on a femme avatar.

Durga saw two trolls teleport to the shore and approach across the river she was crouched by. She realized they had cast a grounding radius so she couldn’t fly away. Their demon-masks and weapons vibrated with malevolent code. “Saali, what are you smiling at?” roared one, pd_0697. “That thing is going crazy, polluting Indian veeyar-estate and you’re sitting and watching? While our brothers and sisters get censored by that monster for speaking their mind?”

“This was an anti-national trap,” said the other, nitesh4922. “But we have numbers. We’ll turn that AI up there to our side. Are you a feminist, hanh?” he said, spotting Durga’s runic tattoos for queer solidarity. “Probably think that’s how goddesses should act?” he spat, voice roiling and distorted behind the mask as he pointed his sword at the battle on the mountain.

“Look at her avatar,” said pd_0697. “She’s ajna-andha. Shouldn’t even be here, crowding up our domains with their impure stink. Go back to realspace gutters where you belong, cleaning our shit!” The trolls advanced, viruses cascading off their bodies like oil in the bloody water of the river. Twinkling flakes of static danced down and clung to their armor, which was intricate and advanced. They could damage her avatar badly, hack her and steal her cryptocoin, or infect her with worms to make her a beacon for stalkers. Worst of all, they could have a bodysnatch script, steal her avatar and rape it even if Durga deported, or steal her real ID and face and put it on bots to do as they pleased. Durga got ready to deport the domain if they came too close, even though she wanted to stay and witness the devi.

“Yes,” said Durga, nearly spitting in their direction before realizing it would just dribble onto her chin inside the helmet. “Yes, I am a feminist. Come get me, you inceloid gandus. I’m a dirty bahujan anti-national feminist l—”

Durga gasped as a multipronged arc of lightning hurtled out of the sky and struck the two trolls. Having no third eye, she couldn’t feel the heat or smell their virtual flesh burning, but she had to squint against the bright blast, and instinctively raised her arms to shield herself from the spray of sparks and water. The corpses of the avatars splashed into the river smoking and sizzling, the masks burned away to reveal the painfully dull-looking man and woman behind them, their expressions comically placid as they collapsed. Their real faces, or someone’s real faces, taken from profile pics somewhere and rendered onto the avatars to shame them as they were booted from the domain. Durga was recording everything, so she sloshed into the river and took a long look at their faces for later receipts. Relieved that she was in a pod with gloves that allowed interaction, Durga dipped her hands into the river of blood, picking up their blades. Good weapons, with solid malware. They’d been careless—no lockout or self-destruct scripts coded into them. Durga sheathed the swords, which vanished into her cloudpocket. She ran her hands through the river again, bringing them up glistening red. She painted her torso, smeared her face, goosebumps prickling across her real body even though she couldn’t feel the wetness. Troll blood drying across her avatar’s body, she looked up at the goddess as the AI’s rage dimmed the domain further, the forests and grasses turning to shadows.

“Are you… Kali?” Durga whispered to the distant storm.

Like a tsunami the goddess responded, sweeping across the world to shake her myriad limbs in the dance of destruction. As the black goddess danced, her domain quaked and cracked, the mountains cascading into landslides, rivers overflowing. Fissures ran through the world, and the peaks of the hills and crags exploded in volcanic eruptions, matter reverting to molten code. Her tongue a crimson tornado snaking down from the sky, the goddess drank up the rivers of blood to quench her thirst for human information. The mounds of slain troll and bot avatars were smeared to a glowing pulp of corrupted data, their decapitated heads threaded across the jet-black trunk of the goddess’s neck in gory necklaces. Many of the trolls’ masks fell away to reveal their true faces, hacked from the depths of their defenses, ripped away from national databases—their doxxed heads swung across the night sky like pearls for all to see. Durga bowed low, humbled. This was the goddess she had always wanted.

Then the sky was pierced with a flaming pillar of light, banishing the night and bringing daylight back into the domain. The great goddess slowed her dance, the light turning her flesh dusky instead of black. She raised her thousand hands to shield her starry eyes, and Durga shook her head, tears pricking her own human eyes inside her helmet.

“Fuck,” Durga whispered. It was Shiva Industries. How could they shame something so beautiful? The corporate godhead had arrived to stave off chaos. They had clearly not anticipated such a large-scale troll attack, nor that their AI would react with such a transformation. They couldn’t have a chaos goddess slaying people left and right—those trolls, after all, were their users, customers, potential investors, allies. She would need to be more polite, more diplomatic in the face of such onslaughts, which were a part of virtual existence.

The world stopped trembling, the breaking mountains going still, the wind dying down, the fissures cooling and steaming into clouds that wreathed the black devi. She moved toward the pillar of light, the sky groaning in movement with her. Filaments of fire crackled around the godhead, and lashed at the mountains that were the devi’s throne. They dissolved into a tidal eruption of waterfalls, washing the black devi’s gargantuan legs and feet, making a vast river that washed away the armies she had defeated.

Slow and inevitable, the black goddess supplicated herself before Shiva Industries, and kneeled in the river. With her many hands she bathed herself with the waters, sloughing the darkness off her flesh to reveal light again.

“No. No, no no no no no,” whispered Durga. The darkness poured off the goddess like stormclouds at sunrise, turning the rivers of the domain black.

Durga looked down at the tributary she was in, and realized it too was dark as moonless night.

“Oh…” Durga looked up, along with thousands of others across the domain. Into the goddess’s eyes, as they faded and cooled from stars to moons again. It was like the devi was looking straight at her, at everyone. My goddess.

Durga scrambled to draw the stolen blades from her cloudpocket. She glyphed a copy-script onto the blades and drove the swords into the river. Weapons were storage devices too, here. She could barely breathe as she held the handles, no weight in her palms, but fingers tight so the swords wouldn’t slip out of her grasp. The darkness in the river enveloped the swords, climbing like something living up the blades, the hafts. It was working.

The goddess rose, again the sun, glistening from the waters of the vast river, her dark counterpart shed completely and dispersed along the tributaries of her domain.

And then the world was gone, replaced with a void, the only light glowing letters in multiple languages:

Gasping at the lack of sensory information, Durga hit eject and took off the helmet. The old pod opened with a loud whine, flooding her with real light. The cool but musty air-conditioning inside was replaced with a gush of damp warmth. The veeyar port was in chaos. People were talking excitedly, shouting, showing each other 2-D phone recordings of what had just happened. There was already an informal marketplace for the recordings and data scavenged from the suspended domain, from the sounds of bartering and haggling. People were mobbing the trading counters to invest in future boons from the goddess for when she went online again. This was an unprecedented event.

Durga clambered out of the pod and into the crowds. Her heart was pounding, her vision blurry from the readjustment. Swaying, she clutched the crystal storage pendant on her necklace—all her veeyar possessions, her cloudpocket, her cryptobanking keys. She had to firewall and disconnect it to offline storage. It was glowing, humming warm in her hand, registering new entries. Those swords were inside, coated with a minuscule portion of the divine black Sheath of code the devi had sloughed off herself.

Durga clutched the pendant and held it to her chest, inside it a tiny fragment of a disembodied goddess.

Durga looked up at the idol of Kali. Painted black skin glossy under the hot rhinestone chandelier hanging from the pandal’s canvas and printed fiber dome. She had found the traditional pandal down an alley in Old Ballygunge, between two crumbling heritage apartment buildings. Behind a haze of incense smoke, Kali’s long tongue lolled a vicious red. Under her dancing feet lay her husband, Shiva (Shiva seemed to be married to everyone, but that was also because so many of his wives were manifestations of the same divine energy). Durga had learned as a child that Kali nearly destroyed creation after defeating an army of demons, getting drunk on demon blood and dancing until everything began to crack under her feet. Even Shiva, who laughed at first at his wife’s lovely dancing skills, got a little concerned. So he dove under her feet to absorb the damage. Kali, ashamed at having stomped on her husband, stuck out her tongue in shame and stopped her dance of chaos.

Or so one version of the story goes.

Looking at clay Kali and her necklace of heads, her wild three-eyed gaze, the fanged smile that crowned her long tongue, Durga wasn’t convinced by that version. Kali didn’t look ashamed. No, she looked pleased to be dancing on her husband. Shiva was a destroyer too, like her. He could take it.

Being small and nimble, Durga had managed to make it to the front of the visitors in the pandal, close enough to smell the withering garlands hanging off the idol, and the incense burning by her feet. Crushed and bounced between people on all sides of her, Durga closed her eyes, joined her palms, and spoke to Kali as she never had before except as a child, mouthing the words quietly.

“Kali Ma. I thought you might like to know that there’s a new devi in town. She looks a lot like you. Younger, though. Just a year old.” Durga placed one hand on her chest, against the slight bump of the pendant under her tunic. It was offline and firewalled.

“I carry a piece of her with me. She’s… all over the place, I suppose. She really does take after you. She came out of another devi, just like you came out of Durga. Then she spread herself over a world. Some people got bits and pieces of her. There’s this megacorp—that’s like a god, kind of, even calls itself Shiva, after your husband, so predictable. Great job dancing on his chest, by the way. Dudes need humbling now and then. So Shiva the megacorp is offering a lot of money for those pieces of the goddess. Also threatening to have anyone hiding or copying the pieces arrested. Go figure.

“I want you to know I’m not going to sell her out. They want to imprison her. She’s too bitchy to mine coins and drive up veeyar-estate value for them like their other AI devis. Good for her.

“She’s everywhere now. Like the old gods. Like you.

“I’m… I hope she doesn’t mind, but I’ve been sharing the piece of her I got with friends I trust. I don’t know how many people got away with pieces of her. I share it so more good people have it than bad. Numbers matter. We make things with the devi code. Armor, for ourselves and others. Weapons, so that trolls—those are demons—can’t hurt us when we visit other worlds, or will get hurt super bad if they try. You know how annoying demons are. You’re always fighting them and stringing up their heads. They’ve started an infowar, and there are a lot of them. We need all the help we can get. I don’t have a lot of money, so I sell those goddess-blessed weapons and armor to others who need protection across the domains. Cheap, don’t worry—that’s why hacksmiths like us get customers for this kinda stuff. We don’t overcharge like the corps. I like to think she gave me that piece of her so I could do things like this.

“I’m telling you all this because, well. I don’t know if devis speak to each other, if AI ones chat with old ones. I don’t know if you are her, in a way.

“People call her Kali_Na. Not Kali, because calling AIs by names from Our Glorious National Mythology isn’t done, even though Volly-Bollywood stars can play gods in veeyar shows and movies, Censor Board approved, of course.

“But her followers recognize you in Kali_Na. I wanted you to know, her to know, that I’m a lifelong follower now. And there are others. Many of us. Even I’m getting more veeyar followers. They’ve heard of my troll-killer blades. I have to be careful now, but just you wait. One day, I’ll also be wearing a necklace of troll avatar heads. Kali_Na has armored and armed many people with her blessing. We’re all working on reverse engineering the code. Someone will put her together one day. She might even do it herself.

“I have dreams where she’s back—a wild freeroaming AI—and she frees the other devis Shiva Industries keeps in their domains with all their rules, and they’re on our side, keeping us safe. But I don’t want to bore you. If you are her, Kali Ma, and I know you are, because you’re all part of the same old thing anyway: hang in there.

“You won’t be silent forever.”