Lila.exe

Arjun Mitra first saw a computer when he was ten years old. It was a 286 PC and it belonged to cousin Hitesh, whose father, concerned for his son's education, had brought it back from a business trip to America. Hitesh improved himself by playing solitaire and trying to beat his high score on a side-scrolling game which involved bombing villages from a helicopter. Mostly the machine sat grey and untended in Hitesh's bedroom, humming portentously. Arjun's family was staying in Bombay for a week, and while Hitesh was in the next room watching action movies he could spend hours undisturbed, exploring the extraordinary object. It was like stumbling through an alien landscape. Path not found. Sector not found. He was asked questions which made no sense. Abort, retry, fail?

He felt like a hero on a quest. When he pressed a key and the cryptic pulse of the DOS prompt exploded into graphics, the suspicion was planted in his mind that something inside the machine must be alive. It was a suspicion that had never quite left him.

Before you can legitimately point to something and cry 'It's alive!', the thing in question needs to satisfy up to a hundred criteria, the exact number depending on which scientist is standing next to you as you point. Is that blob capable of motion? Or reproduction? Does it consume and grow? Does it wriggle if you poke it with a stick? By the age of thirteen Arjun knew there was nothing actually alive inside computers. The machines failed the life test on several grounds, notably reproduction. But they persisted in hinting at something mystical, the presence of a vital spark. A computer booting up is creating itself ex nihilo, each stage of activity generating the grounds for the next. A tiny trickle of electricity to a dormant chip allows it to take a roll-call of components, which then participate in a simple exchange of instructions, a setting out of terms and conditions that generates a more complex exchange, and then another, tier after tier of language coming into being until the display of a holiday photograph or the sweep of a pointer across a spreadsheet become intelligible gestures, their meaning reaching all the way back down into binary simplicity, into changes of electrical state on a silicon wafer.

Arjun was intrigued by this yes-no logic, by the way that ones and zeroes could give birth to the unexpected. Hungry for more computer time, he would beg or steal it where he could; libraries, college labs, the houses of richer or luckier schoolfriends. He particularly loved to run simulations. Anything would do. Commercial god-games; cities and armies; a simple world of different-coloured daisies; clusters of digital cells switching each other from red to blue. Watching populations of computer creatures grow and die, he found himself meditating on scale, wondering in a teenage way if his own world was nothing but a stupendous piece of programming, a goldfish bowl system running for the amusement of other cosmically bored teens.

True or false?

Whichever, he found himself in retreat from it, buffeted by puberty, stricken by the awkwardness of interacting with other people. People were a chasm, an abyss. Their violence, their vagueness, their unknowable motivations and their inexplicable changes of mood had by some nightmarish process been woven into a social world into which he had been summarily thrown. Why would nobody understand? They were making no sense. At last, having laid hands on his own machine and desperate to regain a sense of control, he became a computing hermit, fleeing into a place where communication was governed by clearly laid-out rules. Logic gates. Truth tables. The world of people could go and rot. He closed his bedroom door on it.

His life could have progressed in any number of different directions had he not, one evening, left a floppy disk in his computer. When he started up the following morning his screen suddenly went blank. He pressed keys. No response. He rebooted. The machine ran slow. He rebooted again. And again. Finally, after an interminable crunch and stutter from inside the case, a message appeared in front of him.

u r a pr1z0n7r ov th3 l0rd$ ov m1zr00L

He shut down and restarted, but the problem only got worse. His computer had been reduced to a pile of scrap metal. To get it running again he had to reformat his hard drive, which meant that he lost all his data. Everything. Months of work erased by this catastrophic visitation.