Read Online Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana by Edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh - Free Book Online Page B

A small island that can boast of the best physicists and particle colliders, geologists, microbiologists, neuroscientists, surgeons. Name one thing in which we are not the best?”
    “He cut off my nose! This is about me!You were always so vain,” Surpanakha wailed.
    “Someone cut off your nose?”
    Surpanakha nodded.
    “Who would do such a thing? You’re my sister! Did the fellow know?”
    “Yes, he knew.”
    “Who was it? I’ll show him,” Ravana bellowed.
    “You’re smart. You figure it out,” Surpanakha gestured to the guard who produced a crude cleaving knife and laid it in front of Ravana.
    “It still has myblood,” his sister sobbed.
    “Take my sister to the Emergency room and take this thing,” Ra vana looked at the old-fashioned cleaver with disdain, “to the forensics department. Ask them to scrape the surface forparticulates and see if they can get any DNA off the handle. It’s evidence now, which means you wrap it in a piece of plastic. Get going.”
    Ravana’s staff , which had been discretelylurking behind thin bam boo partitions, materialized. A man in a black suit whispered into his Bluetooth, men in lab coats came scurrying to take away the item with care.
    “What do you mean you can’t match it?”
    “Your Majesty, we can’t match this.”
    “You said that three times already and I heard with all twenty ears and ten auditory cortices.”
    “I’m sorry. We’ve compared the sequence toall the databases in the world. Eight billion humans, none a match. I’m sorry,” the Chief Geneticist hung his head. He had personally overlooked the integration of genetic matching platforms across the world and debugged them. The computing guys had developed a new generation of memory transistor chips to run the computations quickly. Ravana himself had come up with a brilliant algorithm that allowedthe machines to sift through billions of useless data points so that they could devote their resources on those sequences that were most likely to match.
    “You’re sorry?”
    Three of Ravana’s faces were twitching which meant the other seven would soon begin to as well. The Chief Geneticist looked down at his boss’s feet. Forlorn.
    “Dammit it! Give me your theories. Why can’t we match theseproteins and what can we do to match them?”
    “There’s only one possibility,” the Chief Geneticist said with a slight tremor in his voice.
    “And?” Ravana roared.
    “This man is off the grid. His DNA was never included in any database.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    The Chief Geneticist nodded his head vigorously.
    “Unless?” Ravana prodded.
    “Unless he has been continually off the grid forthe last six years.”
    “Get my sister!”
    “I’m right here,” Surpanakha said. Was she really that transparent? Even when they were children her brother had refused to give her any importance. However, if matters ever came down to her status as his sister he would be out there protecting her like a piece of property before she could object.
    “Where were you when he attacked you?”
    “I’m notsure. I was playing on that new hybrid-reality machine you built but then the landscape looked so good I decided to parachute into a swathe of forest from the game for the real feel of things. He was quite beautiful though his brother was more beautiful.”
    “Wait, did you see these two fellows on the game before you went there?”
    Surpanakha nodded.
    “They were kind of the reason I went there,”she said shyly.
    “Get the game log. I can back engineer the game and work out the locations at which the GPS inputs were coming in from. Ask one of the space guys to beam us all the satellite logs so we can cross-check the satellite locations when she was using the system.”
    Ravana’s Chief of Staff opened a bamboo panel and pressed a button. Walls moved, windows opened, translucent panelsslid from the ceiling to the floor. In seconds the area was converted into a large workspace with real time screens