Transmission

It was a simple message.Hi. I saw this and thought of you.Maybe you got a copy in your in-box, sent from an address you didn't recognize; an innocuous two-line e- mail with an attachment. leela.exe Maybe you obeyed the instruction to check it out! and there she was; Leela Zahir, dancing in jerky QuickTime in a pop-up window on your screen. Even at that size you could see she was beautiful, this little pixelated dancer, smiling as the subject line promised, a radiant twenty-one-year-old smile just for you. That smile. The start of all your problems. It was not as if you asked for Leela to come and break your heart. There you were, doing whatever you normally do online: filling in form fields, downloading porn, interacting, when suddenly up she flounced and everything went to pieces. For a moment, even in the midst of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Leela's talent. Making you believe it was all just for you.But there were others. How many did she infect? Thousands? Tens, hundreds of thousands? Impossible to count. Experts have estimated her damage to global business at almost $50 billion, mostly in human and machine downtime, but financial calculation doesn't capture the chaos of those days. During Leela's brief period of misrule, normality was completely overturned. Lines of idle brokers chewed their nails in front of frozen screens. Network nodes winked out of existence like so many extinguished stars. For a few weeks she danced her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step. Of course the whole thing made her famous, beyond even her mother's wildest imaginings. Leela was already a rising star, India's new dream girl, shinning up the greasy lingam of the Mumbai film world like the child in the conjurer's rope trick. But while Leela's mother had thought through most eventualities, she hadn't factored the march of technology into her daughter's career plan. Mrs. Zahir was decidedly not a technical person. And so Leela found herself bewitched, the girl with the red shoes, cursed to dance on until her feet bled or the screen froze in messy blooms of ASCII text. Yet despite what her mother may have thought, she was a surface effect. The real action was taking place in the guts of the code: a cascade of operations, of iterations and deletions, an invisible contagion of ones and zeroes. Leela played holi, and her clinging sari diverted attention from the machinery at work under her skin. A chain of cause and effect? Nothing so simple in Leela's summer. It was a time of topological curiosities, loops and knots, never-ending strips of action and inside-out bottles of reaction so thoroughly confused that identifying a point of origin becomes almost impossible. Morning through venetian blinds. A cinema crowd watches a tear roll down a giant face. The beep of an alarm. Groans and slow disengagement of limbs. She shuts down her machine and They sit together in a taxi A curvature. A stoop. She swivels her chair toward the window and Someone in the stalls makes loud kissing noises poor posture between the two of them a five-inch gap she takes another bite of her sandwich. laughter the posture of a young man standing outside a New Delhi office tower. An arbitrary leap into the system. Round-shouldered, he stands for a moment and pokes a finger inside the collar of his new polycotton shirt. It is too tight. Around him Connaught Place seethed with life. Office workers, foreign backpackers, messengers and lunching ladies all elbowed past the beggars, dodging traffic and running in and out of Palika Bazaar like contestants in a demented game. For a moment Arjun Mehta, consumed by hesiKunzru, Hari is the author of 'Transmission', published 2004 under ISBN 9780525947608 and ISBN 0525947604.