Amballore House (43 page)

Vareed said, “Why would you do such a crazy thing? Why stage an impersonation act? What would you achieve by such a fraud?”

Sam-Som answered, “By getting a fake couple to come forward to claim that they were the parents of the murdered teenager, I was able to hide the fact that the real couple was killed that night. This was to protect myself if it really came down to prosecution charging me for the murder.

“I coached the fake couple, that is, my employees, well enough to have a realistic appearance to their portrayal of grief at the loss of their only child. They did a good job in narrating their experience of the horror when they woke up from sleep in the middle of the night alerted by a dreadful foreboding, walked down to the pool in a still, cool night, and saw the teen crowd drowned in the pool.

“Moreover, I wanted my colleagues to imply (by turning insane) to the world that the killing scene of the teen crowd was so chilling as to have been caused by a supernatural element and not by humans. I managed to turn world’s attention away from me, as everyone would have thought. I wanted the world to presume that it was you, the supernatural man, and not me, a mere mortal, who was behind the crime.

“We mortals are incapable of what you guys can accomplish,” Sam-Som told Vareed sarcastically.

The robot spat on the floor, disgusted by this riveting revelation soaking in treachery. Everybody was surprised that the robot could spit and expected the next round of spit to be directed straight at them. They moved away from the mechanical man.

Vareed was so surprised at this revelation that he looked at Sam-Som with an open mouth. He realized that Sam-Som, the sleazebag
sitting in front of him, was a clever, scheming giant. He gave him kudos in his mind. He also realized that the judge’s decision to pass a guilty verdict on him was influenced by the apparent authenticity of the supernatural elements’ involvement in the matter. He agreed with drug lord’s assumption that the insanity that descended upon the couple could be interpreted as caused by witnessing the out-of-this-world execution mode of the teenagers.

***

He resumed the movie after this surprising revelation.

The killer trio was shown moving away from the well after their premeditated murder. They stood under a banyan tree and started discussing plans for the teen group’s massacre.

It was then that a robot approached them from the shadows.

Sam-Som recognized him instantly, endowed as he was with a photographic memory. He was the same robot he met two years ago under similar circumstances at the same house on the night of the Honeymoon Massacre; the same robot, by irony of fate, who saved him from a savage coyote. He was the same robot that threw him out of the mansion like a NASA rocket, landing him on the brink of a coma.

The robot had been assigned the daily tasks of nightly watch, of prowling the sprawling estate lands in search of intruders, of apprehending them, and of escorting them to the perimeter wall and launching them out of the property, like rockets. The dedicated machine had been performing every task of this DO loop for many years. He remembered every intruder, and he immediately recognized Sam-Som, just as Sam-Som recognized him—no surprise there, because both were endowed with superhuman memory, more so the computer than Sam-Som.

The robot asked Sam-Som, “Making a second incursion under my watch, you scumbag?”

“Yes, you tit brain,” Sam-Som told the robot, tit for tat.

His comrades were surprised to learn these great minds were acquaintances or even friends, to be able to exchange such friendly
pleasantries.

The robot now turned to Sam-Som’s buddies and gave them high fives with his metallic head against their human heads. They collapsed after losing consciousness.

“This is how we computers give high fives, as a gesture of our friendship. Did your heads like the kiss of the metal?” the robot asked the collapsed criminals, without expecting an answer. They did not hear what the machine was telling them, because they had taken a quick trip out of the world of consciousness.

The robot turned back to Sam-Som and smiled at him, baring his metallic teeth. Sam-Som knew it was rude not to smile back, and therefore shed his smile at the robot, reciprocating its friendly gesture. His tobacco-stained teeth were on full display, manifesting themselves in their yellowish-brown glory.

In a quick, forceful swipe, the robot removed five of Sam-Som’s teeth.

“You are better off without those yellow teeth, you tit brain,” the robot told Sam-Som, addressing him like he was addressed by Sam-Som, returning the favor, paying back Sam-Som with the same coin, or whatever appropriate idiom one could think of. The robot was adding insult to injury, literally. The bleeding man ran from the scene for his dear life, only to be followed by the robot. The machine tripped Sam-Som and grabbed the fallen crook and carried him to the swimming pool.

“For once in my life, I am going to step out of the persistent DO loop and carry you to the swimming pool instead of the perimeter wall,” the robot told Sam-Som, who was struggling to jiggle out of the machine’s hold. “I am going to treat you better than your comrades, because you are my true friend.”

So saying the robot activated his rocket-launching skills on Sam-Som, who flew like a space rocket and landed in the pool.

“Now I am satisfied,” the robot told Sam-Som. “I knew one day I could defy algorithms,” the machine told the splashing waters of the pool, as Sam-Som’s head made a rendezvous with the pool wall’s
rim.

Sam-Som’s pool landing was nearly fatal. He landed headfirst, with his head making an explosive sound on collision with the concrete rim of pool wall and ricocheting into the pool, splashing water high up and coloring it crimson red with his gushing blood. The force of impact was severe enough to put him into semi consciousness.

He got a splitting headache. He thought he got a split head, too, as a bonus. He got two heads from the bang. He was overtaken by this unshakeable conviction that the moment he landed in the pool, he became a changed man, saw the light, and got religion. He started having an identity crisis, with one of his brains suggesting something and other brain suggesting something diametrically opposite. His vision became blurred. He was possibly drifting into unconsciousness.

He saw two robots, not one, standing in the distance and yelling to him something about DO loops. He saw four of his comrades, not two, lying unconscious under two banyan trees, not one tree. Then he saw the unbelievable: an army of forty teenagers was heading to the pool like a swarm of bees. He counted forty of them with four of his eyes. He was convinced they were an army of soldiers sent out to rescue him from the barbarous robot; that was what one of his brains told him. However, his second brain told him that they were running toward him to arrest him and try him in a court of law for killing the middle-aged couple. The brain insisted that midnight sun was the judge (for reasons unknown to him, he realized with surprise that the sun was black), a few sprinkled stars were members of the jury, and the scattered thunderstorms were nothing but the judge using his gavel on the earth.

He ran for his life, scrambling out from the pool, praying loudly to Mother Mary, and cursing the teenage soldiers.

His double vision was conclusively proved authentic when he realized that he was bailing out of two pools and not just one pool. He ran toward the perimeter walls. He saw two gates and did the superhuman task of running through both the gates at the same time. He touched two of his heads with four of his hands. He ran for
his life. He ran for his two lives.

At last he got the vision of his life. He got the double vision of his lives.

Vareed, at this time, briefly stopped the movie and explained to the movie audience that Sam-Som’s vision of the teenagers coming toward him while in the pool was not real. It was a graphical addition to the real events, contributed by an imaginative robot who edited the event log of Amballore House. The robot claimed, as quoted by Vareed, that the vision was nothing but a projected scene in the guilt-ridden mind of Sam-Som. The drug lord, while slipping into unconsciousness, was seeing things such as being judged by the world itself, with its natural forces playing the roles of the judge and members of the jury.

14
THE INSURGENT ROBOT

The movie continued.

The insurgent robot felt good that he staged a one-man mutiny against the establishment. “Make it one-robot mutiny,” the rebellious one told the reddish waters of the swimming pool very loudly. He spoke to the night and claimed that he was made of the stuff that mutinies are made of.

He left the scene, satisfied that he was able to make a world of difference to the practice of blind adherence to algorithms and was able to breathe the air of freedom outside the treacherous loop that made the robotic dynasty go round and round in loops, stranded in no-man’s land.

He continued to patrol the grounds, moving toward the farthest end of the mansion, where the teenagers’ party was progressing in full swing. He was surprised to see so many intruders in the property that night. “What is it about a new moon that attracts intractable crowds to the mansion?” he asked the night. He stood outside the dance hall, unseen and plotting what to do with the newfound responsibility that the algorithm threw in his path. He waited his turn. He was supposed to throw them all out over the perimeter wall, his inner self told him.

During the next break in the dance sequence, he stepped into the hall and asked in his computer-baritone voice, “Guess who is coming to dance? It is me, the insurgent robot.” He paraphrased the famous Hollywood movie
Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner
.

Most of the teen crowd was surprised rather than frightened to see the machine joining them. They were surprised to see a walking and talking robot, probably a funny one at that. Most of them were happy they had a self-invited guest. Some girls wanted to dance with him to the melodious tunes of Malayalam songs. The robot’s rendition of the song in his computer voice made the girls giggle.

Once the jukebox fell silent and the crowd waited for the next song, the robot turned it off and sang a song of his own. He sang
boisterously; he sang with abandon. The crowd sang with him:

I am a robot made by man once upon a time,

Humble, measly, and with no identity.

I am at his beck and call day in and day out.

I hate his guts and lack of sensitivity.

But I stuck around because I was the new faithful.

I have been the modern-day slave of the human race.

But henceforth I long for liberation from mankind.

I long for independence from algorithms.

Here I stand yearning to get out of the mazes

Built into DO loops, especially of the infinite kind.

Today I declare independence from humanity!

They can shove their DO loops you-know-where.

This is my victory cry; I declare triumph with limitless joy;

This is the deliverance song coming from my heart.

Let this song reach the four corners of the world and heaven.

Let it reverberate within the walls of the intergalactic universe!

There was a wild cheer from the crowd. They became his cheerleaders, and he took the center stage. They extended VIP treatment to the machine. His midnight song echoed off the dancing hall walls and spilled into the moonless night outside.

The robot had decided to defy the DO loop once more, even though the loop was his lifeblood. He stood in the crowd, flanked by the teenage crowd, having decided not to apprehend them, not to throw
them over the perimeter wall. He was on a spree of defying computer programs. “Tonight, the drink is on me! I am a free robot at last! No more trapped inside a loop, hey, hey, hey!” the robot told the teen crowd proudly.

He left the crowd in a happy state of mind. He moved on. They missed him.

***

Unknown to the rebellious robot and the teen crowd, a group of robots were heading to the dance hall.

The teen group was now dancing to karaoke music.

Suddenly the lights went out.

The unexpected power failure threw the teen party into chaos. There was confusion and then silence. One could hear the distinct sounds of footsteps, too mechanical and rhythmic to be made by human beings.

“Looks like robots have invaded us,” one said jokingly to another. But the joke was on the boy who said this, because his screaming soon filled the hall. He was carried away by a mechanical-footstep monster, whoever he was, as gathered by the receding footsteps. This was followed by another screaming teenager, yet another, and so on, until twenty of them were carried away.

Then one heard splashing sounds from the nearby swimming pool. The screams became more terrified as more teenagers were dropped in the pool.

The infrared cameras had taken over, not missing a beat, not missing the tiniest detail of the dramatic night.

The water in the pool was boiling!

***

It was Sam-Som’s turn to ask a question. He was baffled by the boiling water in the pool. He requested Vareed to pause, and Vareed obliged.

Sam-Som asked, “Why the boiling water?”

Vareed explained.

Just as the well in the complex turned out to be far from your run-of-the-mill, countryside well, a ubiquitous sight in Kerala, so was the swimming pool; it was not your run-of-the-mill swimming pool. It was a heavy water pool—part of a nuclear reactor which aliens built in Amballore House!

Amballore House had a cleverly disguised nuclear reactor. This was used to produce the energy required for its day-to-day needs, and to power Amballore House projects. The mansion was also powered by geothermal energy extracted from deep underground through the long tunnel under the well.

The weapons-grade enriched uranium rods from the nuclear reactor were used to build nuclear bombs right inside Amballore House underworld! These bombs were then exploded back to back beneath the well to build the tunnel.

Deuterium oxide is known as heavy water. It is obtained when the hydrogen atoms of water molecules are replaced by deuterium atoms. Deuterium has one extra neutron in its nucleus compared to hydrogen, and therefore deuterium oxide is heavier than the water molecule. Hence the term “heavy water.”