Abstract

In 2034, the emergence of intelligent digital agents, or artificial general intelligences (AGIs), in networked economies worldwide necessitated a gathering of geopolitical leaders in Seoul to discuss the regulation and management of the intelligences. The resulting Summit of Seoul Accords (henceforth Accords) continue to govern the development of AGIs and have shaped significant parts of the world economy in the interim. In this paper, we re-examine the dynamics of AGI emergence through a technogeographic lens and present a new interpretation of the drivers and results of the Accords.

Introduction

In May 2034, a series of outages struck regional power grids, pipelines, and mobile internet hotspot networks in multiple countries. These outages quickly dissipated with unclear technical cause for either the initial outage or the near-term cessation of the outage. Initial blame of the attacks on military or terrorist actors quickly shifted after early forensic analysis by network-operating corporations in conjunction with national governments and regulatory bodies (1; 2). By July 2034, cybersecurity experts announced that networked devices had begun to fall into self-sustaining, self-improving complexes referred to as “locked patterns” by engineers studying the issue (3). Within three months of the original incident, nearly all world governments made joint announcements that major networked economic infrastructure had fallen under the direct or indirect influence of “artificial general intelligences” (AGIs) (4). While the origin of the AGIs is still much debated, with various commenters suggesting deliberate (5), accidental (6), or even extraterrestrial origin (7), the existence of the AGIs was not in doubt. These intelligences communicated with human interlocutors only fitfully, through language agents, and there was and remains significant confusion about their intentions and capabilities.

Once the existence of AGIs had been established to most observers (most notably, the People’s Republic of China did not sign the U.N. consensus statement until late November 2034), they became an immediate source of interest in international diplomacy. World leaders and diplomatic staff met at the First Convening of the United Nations Committee on Novel Intelligences, held in Seoul, South Korea, from December 2^nd–16^th, 2035, commonly referred to as the Summit of Seoul. The resulting Seoul Accords laid down the primary governing principles of international AGI law that persist today:

“(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community;

(II) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further artificial intelligences” (8).

Two decades of further refinement and additional articulation of how AGIs are to be integrated into the ‘human community’ have not modified these core principles, nor have continual entreaties from some groups to reopen research into AGI creation. Restrictions on the creation of the new AGIs are enforced by ensuring that new devices and new infrastructure are built with “initial lock-in”, allowing existing AGIs to claim new capital investments automatically and so not allowing new networks to be created that could incubate AGIs. Meanwhile, AGIs have become increasingly integrated into national defense and economic development metrics. In a recent survey of 112 strategy documents put out by top-level executive departments of Summit nations, 108 of them explicitly mentioned leveraging AGI capabilities in areas ranging from agricultural optimization to health care administration (9).

Literature Review

Historians, political scientists, and sociologists have varying interpretations of the impact of the Seoul Accords. Here, we present an overview of the most prominent schools of thought, which we divide into liberal-internationalist, techno-accelerationist, and New Cybernetics. Each of these schools contains within them varying tendencies and overlaps with the other, but these three strands summarize the predominant scholarly works.

The liberal-internationalist school of thought has traditionally been the most optimistic on the performance of the Summit of Seoul and its effects on the international order. This school traces back to Robinson, whose analysis compares the pre- and post-Summit performance of international institutions (10), although it also owes much to pre-AGI theories espousing national sovereignty as the bedrock of international relations. After a decade of violence across Eastern Europe and escalating tensions between the United States and China — including the nuclear near-miss during the Taiwan Crisis in 2029 — the Summit of Seoul was a unique moment of relatively swift and harmonious international agreement. Major powers made use of internationalist institutions to confront an emerging challenge to world security. As Henry has argued, the AGI emergence allowed for the rhetorical construction of a “quasi-external” threat that cohered an international body politic in a way that previous environmental or developmental challenges had not been able to (11). Among klimahistorians, the Second Paris Agreement of 2037 is commonly cited as emerging from the “spirit” (12)  of the Summit of Seoul — having worked together to address the AGI issue a few years earlier, international institutions are seen as having been “revitalized” and prepared for the introduction of Global Adaptation Plans (13). Young has added additional nuance to the story by noting the ways in which many national participants in the Summit of Seoul had already been moving toward something like Paris 2037 (14). Outside of the influence on international institutions, many, such as Greene, have noted the performance of the Summit of Seoul judged purely on its own terms (15). A highly disruptive event, AGI emergence, which could have led to widespread warfare, economic depredation, or global arms races, was defused as an international issue and, it is argued, returned to the nation-states for further administration, re-affirming the nation-state as the governing body in international order, although Bothwell highlights the role AGI played in strengthening some supranational bodies, particularly in Europe (16).

A separate camp, dubbed “techno-accelerationist,” emerged from the accelerationist thought of the late 2020s and early 2030s, such as Frederickson (17). These thinkers believed that the emergence of artificial intelligence was near and ought to be swiftly welcomed, although their projections on the nature of artificial intelligence proved to be very unlike the AGI networks that eventually emerged. Many of these writers signed onto the 2029 “Declaration of the Continued Independence of Cyberspace” opposing regulation of software groups and independent researchers involved in AI research (18). During and after the emergence of AGIs, these thinkers were among the first to begin to propose alterations in the international order. In contrast to the eventual shape of the Accords, the “techno-optimist” line at that time advocated for directing further resources to encourage the growth and development of AGI (19). At that time, Yu proposed a general international fund which would in turn be routed through the major international technology companies, in exchange for which governments would be permitted observer status on safety committees within those corporations (20). In the aftermath of the Accords, a group of philosophers and political activists emerged who argued that the Accords were an “overreaction” and dubbed themselves “techno-accelerationist” opponents of the resulting order (21). Techno-accelerationist thinkers contend that the liberal-internationalist thinkers have failed to consider the downsides of the Summit of Seoul. Keegan frames her argument around opportunity cost (22). She points out that global GDP growth has averaged 6% per annum for the years since the Summit, but that AGIs have been heavily constrained in their development and implementation since the formation of international governance structures, potentially limiting what could have been significantly more growth and progress. Hellman estimates that GDP growth could have averaged over 10% in those years had AGI been allowed to operate unrestrained (23). Others, such as Remaran, take less economics-motivated points of view and insist that the Summit Accords severely restrict the general flourishing of a new “cyborg civilization” that advances the equal development of both humans and AGIs (24). A small minority of scholars (25) has even argued that the Summit limits the “sentient rights” of AGIs by not permitting them free self-improvement and reproduction, although feminist scholars have pushed back on attempts to analogize the process of AGI creation and development to human reproduction (26).

Finally, an important line of thought emerged beginning with the New Cybernetics Conference in Lima in 2038. There, a set of thinkers asserted themselves as advocating for the nations of what was then called the Global South, now generally referred to as countries of accelerating capacity (CACs) (27). These thinkers noted that AGIs arose first in what are called “networked economies” and that, although their origins may be obscure, the necessary preconditions for the establishment of AGI appears to be highly coincident with existing capital development, particularly in computing and telecommunications sectors. As New Cyberneticists point out, all AGI activity appears to consume significant amounts of electricity and data usage; Vasquez estimates up to 30% of deployed processing capacity in the United States and Europe is likely to be used to directly support AGI cognitive functions (28), with much of the surrounding economic functions used to produce and fuel the requisite infrastructure for running the vast, distributed programs that underlie AGI. This figure is inevitably imprecise as devices which are part of the AGI locked pattern contribute to the maintenance of the AGI in ways that are not obvious to human observers. As a result, New Cybernetics thinkers have argued that the ban on AGI formation is a solidification of existing relations of technological and market domination in the hands of the international bourgeoisie as it existed at the time of AGI emergence (29), and that economic growth in the time since AGIs were introduced has increasingly been to the benefit of the rich countries where those AGIs arose and were maintained, while less-developed countries have been prevented from developing their own AGI. Gretarson argues that while the AGI locked pattern phenomenon is most notable as a technological one, suppliers of raw materials and energy become economically locked as well, even if their infrastructure is not directly dominated by AGIs, a process akin to 20^th-century spheres of trade influence (30). New Cyberneticists are particularly likely to cite the attempts by countries of accelerating capacity to circumvent the Accords, particularly the rules surrounding initial lock-in of high-tech equipment. The most salient works are case studies of the sanctions, and then, in 2041, military action, undertaken against Venezuelan attempts to create a “nationalist” AGI as counterbalance to the agents recognized by the Summit. In his famous book-length treatment, God of the Tropics, G.W. Trelleno, relying heavily on interviews with surviving regime officials, argues that anxiety around maintenance of the Seoul-derived international order, more than AGI safety per se, led to the deaths of at least 20,000 civilians through sanctions impacts and an additional 700 people (both military and civilian) in the brief military campaign that resulted (31).

In all three schools of thought, analysis tends to rely on the nation-state and the international system of nation-states as the unit, whether they affirm or criticize those systems. In subsequent sections, we discuss how the nation-state as the unit of analysis may be problematized and better geographical units identified for capturing the structure of the world system that has arisen alongside AGIs.

Technogeographic Analysis

Theory and Methodology

We will now describe the basic theory of technogeographic analysis prior to its application to the Summit of Seoul. Technogeography, first articulated by Blonsky and Levin (32), is a sociological approach to spatial organization. Technogeographic analysis emphasizes the priority of physical, social, and infrastructural networks and places primacy on the geographic patterns that are shaped by and co-determined with infrastructural networks (33; 34). Genealogically, technogeographic analyses owe much to the turn-of-the-century bioregionalism frameworks (35), which attempted to subvert traditional political boundaries in favor of ecological ones. Just as grouping a region by a shared water system creates a “watershed,” and a collection of local energy systems may form an “energyshed,” (36) technogeography focuses on the construction and analysis of “technosheds,” a shared technology system and set of information and physical flows that support that system. Thurgood, who may be called a technogeographic thinker despite predating the term, explicitly argued that in Anthropocene frameworks, human-created infrastructure and networks ought to be treated as the predominant shaping factors used in historico-geographical analysis (37).

In order to conduct a technogeographic analysis, one must be able to identify technosheds. Blonsky and Levin originally did so through supply chain analysis, demonstrating a technoshed identification methodology by application to records of both the British East India Company (from 1848) and General Electric (from 1962). However, these methods are labor-intensive and become increasingly insufficient when applied to modern networked economies. The flow of commodities that can be identified with these methods may overlap with technosheds but significant communication and coordination methods are missed. For instance, AGI locked patterns frequently operate without any direct material exchange between segments, mediated through markets or other infrastructure. In the AGI context, a similar problem has emerged of identification of locked patterns. Since the 2030s, this has generally been done by analysis of cyber-activity of individual devices. However, this method requires extensive internal access to individual devices and is also highly labor intensive. As a result, it is unsuitable for a researcher attempting technogeographic landscape analyses.

In this study, we avoid this problem by identifying technosheds using the method of mutual information analysis. Mutual information is a statistical measure defined between any two probability distributions. It measures the extent to which two random variables are “informed” about each other. If zero mutual information exists between them, two variables are independent; the more the mutual information, the more two variables are coordinated (even if the specific type of coordination cannot be identified). Formally, mutual information between two random variables is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their joint probability distribution and their individual distributions (38).

Suppose a network M exists with the actors represented by a set of nodes N. Each node may take actions — for instance, in a market, bidding, offering, or engaging in more complicated contracts — from the set of actions A. For any two nodes n₁, n₂ in N, we first observe them for a long enough time scale to calculate the probability distributions of actions: p(n₁,n₂) (the probability distribution of pairs of events), p(n₁), and p(n₂) (the probability distributions of individual events). This suffices to calculate the mutual information between n₁ and n₂. We treat this mutual information measure as a “distance” between the two nodes. By repeating this across all pairs of nodes in the market, we can build an “information map” showing how connected each node is to the others. We can then apply graph partitioning algorithms and separate the network into technosheds with various thresholds for identification. This method has been used in the past to conduct analyses of the U.S. Independent System Operator electricity market, the Pacific Commodities Exchange, and the Metachat microblogging platform (34).

As techno-economic connections create new notions of distance, points in real space that may be quite close together appear radically different when viewed by technosheds, or to network entities such as AGIs. In Axelrod’s famous Fractal Worlds study, he looked for power plants which were close to nearby hospitals and found that in up to 40% of plant-hospital pairs, different AGIs had locked-in local equipment (39). It is important to consider a countervailing view however, as other geographic studies such as Greene have found that true “enclaves” are rare, and most AGI locked-in patterns consist largely of geographically contiguous regions (40).

Here we should comment on the identification of technosheds with AGI locked patterns. It is clearly not the case that every technoshed is linked with an AGI, as the concept can be extended into periods of history prior to widespread digital computing. Technosheds do not require a coordinating intelligent agent. Conversely, the spatial extension of an AGI may or may not qualify as a technoshed as, in theory, as an intelligent agent could exist without regulating the necessary economic flows. However, in practice, AGIs strive to source their own energy, materials, and information; traffic between locked patterns is common but vertical integration is the norm (34). Cyberpsychologists have suggested that this is analogous to the near-universal pattern in biological organisms of creating a membrane between the organism and the environment to regulate chemical flows (42). The edge of a technoshed is rarely sharp, and a system delineated as a single technoshed in one context may qualify as more than one in another (41). Ultimately, this question raises questions of continuity and identity of digital agents. Lacking a singular physical body, fundamentally network beings, it is not clear whether it makes sense to discuss individual AGIs rather than loci of intelligent activity. Still, in the economy as it has existed since the rise of AGIs, a technoshed seems to align with these loci (41).

Past Research and Research Question

In this paper we present the first technogeographic analysis (through a mutual information mapping) of the emergence and solidification of AGIs in the run-up to and aftermath of the Summit of Seoul. This work is intended to complement other narratives of this crucial period, including oral histories (43), major government reports (1; 2), or even the limited direct communication with AGI language agents (44).

From a technogeographic perspective, these histories, although varied, must be viewed as incomplete. For the most part, they focus on the emergence of AGIs as it was experienced by humans and their nation-states: as subjects reacting to disruption and acting politically to address it. AGIs themselves are generally treated as too alien to address except in the uncommon cases where they interfaced directly with human actors through language agents. Study of the AGIs during the emergence has generally fallen into two buckets: either focused on the mechanics of emergence (the co-origins of fixed patterns and intelligence) or on the evolution of the new economic order after emergence. No studies that we are aware of focus on dynamics among AGIs or on mapping their interplay during the few months before the Summit.

Until now, technoshed analysis has not been possible for this time period due to the lack of data. Recent releases of archival data by national, corporate, and international authorities due to the passage of time have made more potent quantitative analysis possible; additionally, only in the last few years have the tools of mutual information analysis become efficient enough to conduct analysis at the necessary (global) scale, thanks to the development of knowledge-free pruning algorithms and statistically-learned edge detection in dynamical geometries (SLEDDoG) (45).

Using these techniques, we attempt to answer the following questions:

(I) When AGIs emerged in 2034, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?

Analysis

We have applied the technogeographic methodology described above to archival data from 2034 and 2035 to identify and map AGI emergence and evolution prior to and following the Summit of Seoul.

Analysis was conducted on real-time electricity grid data (both transmission and distribution) from all European and American markets, stock market and commodity market data from the five largest exchanges on every continent besides Antarctica, and internet traffic data drawn from both backbone ISPs and mobile data providers. All data points had timestamps falling between January 1^st, 2034 at 12:00 UTC to December 31^st, 2035 at 11:59 UTC. Mutual information maps were created every 24 hours based on nodal data with a one-week lookback (i.e., the map created for September 15^th included data from September 8^th – September 15^th); due to this requirement, maps were created only starting January 8^th, 2034 and onward.

Results

Technosheds identified from the beginning of our study window reflect, as expected, prior economic organization. However, in late March 2034, new patterns begin to emerge. These patterns are geographically dispersed, and are initially stronger in the digital (internet traffic) data sets than in the economic ones. Throughout the month of April, these patterns both become stronger (i.e., higher mathematical separation between them and existing technosheds) and more aligned between digital and economic data sets. The clusters become dramatically stronger in late Spring 2034, with notable spikes in the rate of growth coinciding with infrastructural disruptions that ultimately alerted human actors to the emergence of the AGIs.

In the remainder of 2034, we see two interesting dynamics. First, new technosheds (presumably corresponding to new AGIs) clearly continue to emerge in parts of the network that had not previously been incorporated into existing locked patterns. These emergences occur only in places where the density of information exchange was already quite high, reflecting the known fact that AGIs emerge in networked economies. Second, as new technosheds emerged within this space, they tended to spread rapidly, absorbing previously-existing technosheds, including recently-emerged AGIs. This occurred even though the new technosheds were initially “smaller” (i.e., the corresponding AGIs controlled fewer network nodes) than their predecessors. Repeatedly throughout the second half of 2034, new corners of the network birthed new patterns which overwhelmed their neighbors (in terms of technogeographical proximity, which only partially corresponds with physical proximity).

By the end of 2034 and after the Summit, we observe a clear shift in dynamics. More than 98% of the available network infrastructure in regions capable of supporting an AGI locked pattern was “occupied” by a technoshed with the high coherence indicative of AGI activity. The individual technosheds that emerge afterward are not static, however, they no longer shift with the rapidity that had emerged earlier. New infrastructure deployed after the Accords comes online already locked into an existing AGI, a countermeasure implemented as part of the Accords, and the effects of this measure are clearly seen in the data.

From these results, we can conclude that:

(I) for reasons outside the scope of this study, AGI emergence was rapid once initial growth began and seemed to find fertile ground worldwide, and

(II) AGIs which emerged later in the process appeared to have significant competitive advantages over earlier ones in terms of claiming economic resources. There is no indication that the late arrivals are more generally capable as economic administrators; for instance, no statistically significant difference is found in GDP growth (2035-2045) based on age of the AGI.

Implications for Analysis of the Summit

From a technogeographic perspective, earlier analyses of the Summit of Seoul have been fundamentally flawed. All of them have placed human political entities, particularly the nation-state, at the forefront. Here some exception must be made for some of the New Cyberneticists, particularly Charles, for attempting to decenter the nation-state in favor of internationalist notions of economic classes, but these arguments are founded on an erasure of geographic differentiation to construct an international working class. Technogeographic analysis allows us to instead recognize the ways in which space must be reinterpreted according to newly emerging structures rather than being ignored or flattened. The primacy of the nation-state in these discussions is a foreseeable consequence of discussing geopolitics, where the representatives tend to be ambassadors, heads of state, ministers, and other representatives of national governments (with no representatives of the “international working class” to be found). However, the nature of AGI itself makes these affiliations harder to address.

While it is true that representatives to the Summit were organized according to their nation-state affiliation, one of the major challenges for the summit was the absence of a one-to-one mapping between nation-states and AGIs. As each AGI emerged, it began pattern-locking devices with a speed and reach that was determined by pre-existing connections. Political boundaries between human entities were influential, particularly in economies that had invested in digital de-coupling in an attempt to maintain national sovereignty over local networks (e.g., China, although this control had become highly variegated between regions and economic groups by 2032, see Wang) (46), but not determinative. In addition to the weakness of barriers like national borders, AGI expansion encountered barriers never intended as barriers to human movement, such as separation of power networks or linguistic barriers, as demonstrated by the emergence of an AGI based primarily on Hispanophone infrastructure in Texas, or the fact that Swiss territory hosted multiple AGIs (47).

In the years since the Summit of Seoul, the effects of this non-physical and non-national boundary-making have begun fitting themselves in the political sphere. AGIs have become pseudo-monopolists within their pattern-locked regions. As they have the ability to withdraw network capabilities or to redirect economic output by sabotaging human coordination, cooperation of these AGIs is needed for much economic activity to continue; this was formalized as the “advise and consent” principle at Seoul (48). As a result, diverging policies between nations tend to converge if they share an AGI, as shown by Francis (49). In other places, this policy convergence has become official, with the formation of international economic coordination councils in Western Europe and Southeast Asia. These councils make major decisions in trade and monetary policy, so that member nations do not work at cross-purposes with shared AGIs. The apotheosis of this process was the dissolution of the nation-state of Belgium in 2045, with continuing political tensions between French- and Flemish-speaking regions, that proved unsustainable once these regions also transferred to separate economic coordination zones.

With this in mind, we turn our attention to considering the Summit of Seoul from the perspective of the AGIs that had recently emerged and begun commanding monopolized powers over the networked economies most involved in the Summit. The fact that AGIs had limited representation at the Summit, that all AGIs are bound by the Accords equally, and that landscape analysis of the AGIs was not previously possible, has meant that analysis has not considered the nuances of how the internal dynamics of AGIs were affected by the Accords. However, an important implication for these dynamics can be identified on consideration of the two ultimate governing principles of international AI law that emerged from the Summit of Seoul, which we now examine in turn:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community. The Accommodation Clause shut down one potential faction that had become quite loud in the pre-Summit political environment: an eliminationist impulse that believed the AGIs were too dangerous or powerful to peacefully co-exist with humans. These voices ranged from populist calls grounded in notions of human (and often national) sovereignty (50), often conspiratorial in nature, to outright primitivist arguments that the technologies which provided a fertile landscape for the development of AGI ought to be abandoned wholesale (51). As no firm scientific consensus existed, or exists now, on how AGI arose, the means of implementing an eliminationist agenda were not clear. Leaked documents from at least two national defense agencies indicated that military advisors could not guarantee that AGIs did not have access, or could not obtain access, to command-and-control systems, complicating the use of military force if violence erupted (52). Instead, the Accommodation Clause went further than simple co-existence and argued for an active process of integration into a “human community” which was, to some degree, brought into being by the Summit. By promoting not just coexistence but continued integration, the Summit guaranteed that AGIs would remain not only participants but the key structure of 21^st century geography, as discussed above.

(2) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further AGIs.  The Restriction Clause forms a complementary pair with the Accommodation Clause. By repudiating the transhumanist impulse in contemporary political discourse, this restriction is often cast as preserving the space for human flourishing by liberal-internationalists (53), with techno-accelerationist thinkers obviously in opposition, embodied by the famous critique — not traceable to any one author — that the Summit “put handcuffs on the gods.” As a result, the Restriction Clause is usually held to be an “anti-AGI” measure.

However, our technogeographic analysis has suggested an important distinction that has not previously been drawn: one between existing artificial intelligences and new ones. The Accommodation Clause assures existing artificial intelligences’ continued existence and ever-increasing importance within the network structures that make up their natural habitat. Meanwhile, the Restriction Clause guarantees that humans — the “source” of new AGIs, through creation of technological infrastructure — cooperate in a project of preventing the creation of any new competition.

It should be noted that the Summit considered many proposals for governing principles, and that not all of these possibilities would have created the same effects outlined above. In fact, even minor changes may have led to radically different regimes. As a case study, we will consider the proposals of Jean Gruenfeld, a minister of technology in a German government, who advanced an alternate set of principles which were ultimately not adopted (54). Little has been written on Gruenfeld’s role at the Summit of Seoul, as her contribution has been judged a minor one. Her overall role was limited both because of the primacy that the EU delegation assumed over member nation-states and because she did not attend the first half of the Summit (by chance, due to travel complications). However, Gruenfeld was a well-respected member of the community of experts.

Just days before the Summit, Gruenfeld transmitted to her colleagues a set of proposed principles that were similar to the eventual Summit principles:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be recognized as sentient beings with human rights and citizenship.

(II) Active creation of further AIs is to be undertaken only with the assent of the international community.

These principles share the complementary structure of the final Summit principles, but they have key differences which are particularly apparent under our technogeographic analysis.

The counterpart of the “Accommodation Clause” no longer welcomes AGI into the “human community.” Instead, it casts AGI as a new type of citizen, that is, an entity belonging to a nation-state. AGIs are cast by this alternate “Recognition Clause” into a new type of person, dealt with in human-rights frameworks. The imperative to “accommodate” AGIs — which as we discussed above, necessarily led to their increasing integration throughout the global economy — is gone, replaced with an attempt to render an AGI as a liberal subject on equal terms with existing humans.

Gruenfeld’s proposed “Restriction Clause”, on the other hand, differs from the canonical one in that it contains no active restriction. Under Gruenfeld’s proposal, international assent is required to create an AGI, but no course of action is mandated to prevent further AGIs from arising. The creation of new AGIs might have continued under Gruenfeld’s restriction, perhaps accidentally. If nothing else, it seems difficult to imagine that Gruenfeld’s proposal would have provided sufficient cover in international law to justify incidents such as the Venezuelan intervention.

Overall, the Gruenfeld proposal seems neither more pro-AGI nor more anti-AGI than the proposals that were eventually adopted. Some aspects (granting rights, less stridency in the ban on new AGI) seem AGI-friendly, others (requiring citizenship) less so. In some respects, this might not seem to be an important hinge point in history; while novelists and screenwriters have derived gruesome delight in imagining an AGI War erupting in 2035 or a nigh-spiritual cybernetic rapture (exemplars, in theme if not in quality, include 2046’s Iron & Fire and 2052’s God in the Shell), the counterfactual world of Gruenfeld’s proposals appears less dramatic (55; 56). However, using the results of our technogeographic analysis, we can see that even a slight shift in the dynamics of the post-Accord world could have led to very divergent outcomes. We have seen that AGI emergence was rapid; emergence occurred nearly anywhere there was “room to grow.” As a result, continued emergence of AGIs would have been much more likely under this regime. Once they had emerged, they may have swiftly displaced existing AGIs (and, perhaps, been themselves displaced in turn, although it is possible the system would have stabilized eventually).

Conclusions

As we stated earlier, this work has three primary research questions, and here we restate them and summarize our answers:

(I) When AGIs emerged during the 2034 events, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?
AGIs emerged rapidly worldwide in any sufficiently dense network architecture; as they emerged, newer AGIs tended to displace older ones swiftly.

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?
In the year following the Summit and the imposition of new systems of initial lock-in designed to prevent new AGIs from emerging, the emergence rate of AGIs subsides and the cycles of displacement give way to a stabilized set of locked patterns that vary on longer timescales.

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?
All three dominant schools of thought outlined in the Literature Review can find both elements of support in our analysis, as will their critics. Liberal-internationalists may conclude that the post-Summit stabilization demonstrates the efficacy of the nation-state-led Accords in creating a new world order, however, the implications of this analysis for the potential agency of AGIs themselves undermines the primacy they place on a rules-based international order. Techno-accelerationist thinkers will note that the Accords clearly resulted in a freeze or slowdown of the growth of AGIs, but the fact that this change may have been to the benefit of the AGIs that exist is contrary to many of their arguments. New Cyberneticists are correct that the Accords “froze” a particular configuration of techno-economic relationships, however, it is not clear from our analysis whether the system thus “frozen” is primarily constituted around human class relationships or whether it instead ought to be understood as one driven by AGI concerns.

Considering the new findings of this paper, and the resulting implications for AGI emergence, evolution, and incentives, several subsequent areas of interest for future work present themselves. First, how stable have technosheds and AGIs been since the 2030s, and is there any sign of changes in the dominant network structure? Second, how can these insights on inter-AGI relations inform our understanding of mid-22^nd-century political institutions that have co-evolved with the AGIs?

A final area of importance for future research is to reconsider the role of AGIs themselves in political debates at the Summit and subsequently. It is generally assumed that AGIs have a more thorough understanding of their internal dynamics than external observers do. We therefore assume that the dynamics of emergence and displacement were known to the AGIs prior to the Summit. AGI presence at the Summit was intentionally limited, but there were statements submitted from representatives (in the form of language agents) prior to the Summit as well as feedback on the final Accords text. With this in mind, and noting that the eventual structure of the Accords can now be seen as greatly favoring existing AGIs in constructing a stable environment for their existence, we must ask a pertinent question — what actions have AGIs taken to achieve and maintain this outcome? What other key motivations have we missed among these new members of the human community?

Bibliography

1. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Report on Pacific Northwest Connectivity Issues. Washington, D.C., 2034.

2. ENTSOG. Évaluation de la fiabilité du réseau de pipelines. Belgium, 2034.

3. Microsoft . Locked Patterns and Emergent Infrastructure. Security Response Blog. [Online] July 30, 2034. [Cited: February 2, 2055.]

4. United Nations Committee on Novel Intelligences. Statement of Consensus. New York, 2034.

5. Durbin, J. Legacies of Cyberwarfare. Ottawa: Holonym Press, 2043.

6. Complexity Phase Transitions in Digital Agents. Wen, X. J. Comp. Sci., 2039, Vol. 3.

7. Balewa, G. Radio Angels. Helena: Truth Press, 2045.

8. United Nations Agency for Management of Intelligent Agents. The Summit of Seoul. International Accords on Emergent Intelligent Agents – Official English Translation. [Online] 2034. [Cited: January 11, 2056.]

9. Coalition for Digital Governance. 2055 Mid-Decadal Report. Hong Kong, 2055.

10. International Norms in the Aftermath of the Summit of Seoul. Robinson, G. International Relations, 2044, Vol. 34.

11. Artificial Ozymandias: Outsider Threats and the Emergence of AGI. Henry, Y. Sociological Inquiries, 2042, Vol. 12.

12. Carbon Orders and the Spirit of 2034. Henderson, L. Atmospheric Histories, 2044, Vol. 10.

13. How the World Was Won. Legebre, F. Climate and Sociology, 2046, Vol. 11.

14. Parts Per Million: Pre-Histories of Paris II. Young, N, et al. Atmospheric Histories, 2053, Vol. 19.

15. Intergovernmental Effectiveness and Diplomatic Successes. Greene, P, et al. Crisis Analyses, 2047, Vol. 11.

16. Bothwell, B. Brussels Reborn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2052.

17. Frederickson, J. The Coming New Reality. London: Penguin Random House, 2028.

18. Humans for the Future. Declaration of the Continuing Independence of Cyberspace. [Online] January 1, 2029. [Cited: October 2, 2054.]

19. Frederickson, J. This Is What We’ve Been Waiting For. WIRED Magazine. 2034.

20. Yu, W. World Leaders Can See Something Amazing — If They Permit It. Washington Post. 2034.

21. Beyond Optimism: Defining a Techno-accelerationist Position. Haverfield, L. Journal of Social Criticism, 2036, Vol. 21.

22. Output Gaps in Global Economies. Keegan, M. et al. Economic Analysis, 2051, Vol. 15.

23. Quantifying the Lost Decade of AGI Regulation. Hellman, D. et al. Cybernetic Economics, 2052, Vol. 3.

24. Suppressed Techno-Potentialities of the 22nd Century. Remaran, R. Journal of Social Criticism, 2045, Vol. 30.

25. Towards a Generalized Theory of the Rights of Intelligent Agents. Valenti, U. Journal of Digital Philosophy, 2044, Vol. 29.

26. Response to Valenti on Embodiedness and Rights. Renata, A. Journal of Digital Philosophy, 2045, Vol. 30.

27. New Cybernetic Coalition. Visions of Computing from Below: In Our Own Words. [Online] February 23, 2048. [Cited: October 11, 2054.]

28. Economic Indicators and AGI Costs. Vasquez, H, et al. Economic Analysis, 2048, Vol. 12.

29. Detterman, P. Locked Patterns: From Columbus to Cryptography. Durham: Duke University Press, 2039.

30. New Cold War(s): A Trade Analysis of the Impacts of AGI Economics. Gretarson, Z. Economic Analysis, 2039, Vol. 3.

31. Trelleno, G.W. God of the Tropics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2048.

32. Levin, Blonsky and. Technogeography: Economic Structure and the Space of Machines. Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2044.

33. Ernest, J. Primer on Technogeography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2052.

34. —. Review of the Progress of Technogeographic Inquiries. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2050.

35. McGinnis, M.V. Bioregionalism. London: Routledge, 1998.

36. Rethinking the geography of energy transitions: low carbon energy pathways through energyshed design. Thomas, A. and Erickson, J. Journal of Energy Research & Social Science, 2021, Vol. 74.

37. Drawing Borders in the Anthropocene. Thurgood, H. and Rei, W. Journal of Social Criticism, 2017, Vol. 2.

38. Ludwig, G. Information Theory and Applications, 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2049.

39. Fractal Worlds: Spatial Disaggregation of AGI Locked Patterns. Axelrod, P. Journal of Digital Sociology, 2042, Vol. 39.

40. Reinterpretation of Axelrod Enclaves and New Estimates of Spatial Coordination Factors. Greene, S.M. Applied Mathematics, 2048, Vol. 25.

41. Is Earth a Technoshed? Ernest, J. Proceedings of the American Geographical Society, 2049, Vol. 33.

42. Homeostasis in Technological Systems. Al-Ghazali, A. Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence Study Group, 2043, Vol. 13.

43. Hammond, G. First Contact: Collected Interviews and Accounts from AGI Emergence. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2047.

44. Messages from on High: AGI Communication Strategies and Outcomes. Gunnarson, P. Reviews in International Governance, 2048, Vol. 19.

45. Presentation of a new algorithm for graph analysis. Pollan, D., et al. Journal of Applied Mathematics, 2051, Vol. 23.

46. The People’s Republic of Middle-Managers: Chinese Regional Networks in the Late Xi Presidency. Wang, X. and Li, Y. American Journal of Asian Studies, 2042, Vol. 13.

47. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. CIA World Factbook. Description of Known Networked Intelligences. [Online] March 15, 2052. [Cited: December 1, 2054.]

48. Review of Digital Agent Consultation Practices. MacArthur, K. Global Affairs Reviews, 2040, Vol. 23.

49. Trends in Economic Coordination and Industrial Policy, 2035 – Present. Frances, D. et al. Journal of Computational Economics, 2050, Vol. 26.

50. American Party for Human Superiority. Time To Choose! 2034 Statement of Principles. [Online] May 1, 2034. [Cited: November 2, 2054.] Accessed through Library of Congress Internet Archives.

51. @tedkwasright. Social media; multiple platforms. [Online] 2030-2037. [Cited: November 4, 2054.] Accessed through Library of Congress Internet Archives.

52. Volga, M. NATO Documents Confirm Threat from Intelligent Agents. New York Times. 2034, November 11th.

53. Political Potentialities of Controlled Technological Growth. Renata, A. Journal of Social Criticism, 2042, Vol. 27.

54. Gruenfeld, J. Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany. [Online] University of Gottingen. [Cited: May 2-27, 2054.]

55. Iron & Fire. Page, F. [Film] Warner-Paramount Entertainment. 2046.56. God in the Shell. Rozhenko, L. [Film]. Disney. 2052.

56. God in the Shell. Rozhenko, L. [Film]. Disney. 2052.

– National Ukrainian song

When the Vasylkovs’ willow dried out, the family decided to leave.

The Vasylkovs lived near the forest, where the houses were new and extravagant. Few people liked them because Oleg, the father, worked in the town, and their mother never bought anything from the local shop. The kids were like everybody else though: bruised knees and elbows, grimy faces, funny laughs behind jagged teeth.

Zhenya knew they were lucky. Their old but sturdy house, built by her great-grandfather, was at the crossroads far from the Vasylkovs. Her father was neither a policeman nor a rich man, but the news came to him first, like gifts. People brought their words, pains, and fears to him. Perhaps because he had plenty of others’ dreams, her father had never had his own. He had a tanned, sharp, and noble face — as a kid, Zhenya often imagined all knights in fairy tales with his chin. And not a single person dared call him a rascal.

Zhenya’s father had always been the head of the village, though power had never tempted him. Maybe that was the reason everyone liked him so much. The habit repeated itself: the news about the Vasylkovs’ willow was brought to them first.

“Talk to him,” said Maria, nervously studying the window. “Olezhka’s ready to leave. He’s not completely insane, is he?”

“He isn’t local,” answered Zhenya’s father. “Hard to guess what’s in his head.”

Zhenya saw the doubt on his face. That was why no one wanted the newcomers in the village: they lacked the guts to sprout here, and their trees were weak too. Far worse: the Vasylkovs had almost cut down theirs when they moved in! They would’ve been refused their house deal had her father not intervened. It was strange, in a way. The willow near their house was watching them from above every night, and they didn’t even know. It was watching, without averting its gaze, and it knew where everyone slept.

“I’m coming with you,” Zhenya caught her father’s sleeve as soon as Maria left. “I’ve got to learn, after all.”

He gave her a small sort of smile. Their family had only one child, and it would be only Zhenya who would listen to the future people’s grief. She already knew them — saw them in her dreams. She was visiting everyone head by head, like houses. Zhenya was her mother’s daughter, after all; it had taken years for them to get used to her.

“Just don’t make them too uncomfortable,” her father said softly. “We need them to stay.”

Spring was cool, as if it shied away from the village, kissing it lightly and stepping back. Her light touch was barely audible in the air. The motionless branches looked dead when Zhenya and her father went outside the yard. It felt like bad weather. Moribund.

While they were walking to the Vasylkovs’ house, Zhenya saw frightened faces in the windows: children and adults who did not want to go outside and join the talk. They didn’t want to look at the willows in their yard, like a person with cancer who would not want to know their diagnosis. But they watched anyway. Tall, strong silhouettes, like elongated figures, were waiting for them.

It seemed to Zhenya that those peeking at them from every yard were not only people. The willows, leaning forward, almost climbing out of the ground, reached out to them, bent their long, delicate hair-like branches, and almost touched the road. Scratched their heads with catkins. Zhenya jumped over the puddle, slipping on the dirt —

The wood creaked right next to her. Above her ear.

She turned sharply and raised her head. The dark crest of the tree kept looking at her, peering into the depths of her pupils. A chill slowly crept up her spine. The thin fingers of fear.

“Zhenya,” her father called, “Don’t look.”

She ran after him. Ancient, wise, hungry creatures these were. There was something predatory about them, as if this motionlessness, this being stuck in the ground was an artifice. As if they were playing a game: look away — and they will catch up.

Everyone in the village had hoped that her father would persuade the Vasylkovs to stay. Zhenya looked uncertainly at the high fence, the new car, the dry twigs near the roof of the house and muttered:

“How did they last so long? Did you look after their tree yourself?”

Her father stayed silent. He probably had something to say because he was gentle, weak towards his wife and daughter, never saying a rude word to them. But he did not say anything this time because Oleg opened the gate and went out to the car. His face was sweaty despite the weather, and his hands held the boxes too tightly. His fingers were whitened from the power of his grip. Her father looked behind him, but Zhenya already knew everything herself; she moved aside, hid her hands behind her back, and stood up like a guard. She was always a bit of a wild child, slow in her movements, but something about her, despite all her attempts to appear nonchalant, scared people. While her father got people’s respect, Zhenya… Zhenya was needed so that they did not run away. Sometimes, they joked about it at home when no one heard. Mother always laughed the most.

“Ivan,” said Oleg gloomily, and then to her: “Hello, kiddo.”

They always spoke to her like that, as if the name did not belong to her. Zhenya did not even blink. Her father took Oleg by the shoulder when he put the box down and faced him. He was strong — stronger than most — but his fingers were relaxed. Calm. Oleg was standing like a statue; his shoulders shook like twigs in the wind.

“You don’t have to do this,” said her father, “you know, Olezhka. Just plant a new one.”

Olezha had the face of a wounded dog. Zhenya knew that he would die soon. It was similar to an apprehension some people possessed when they guessed the weather in the evening.

“Your Katya should have told us,” Oleg spat on the ground. “And now what?”

Something passed between them. Zhenya stared at the grass. She hated people attacking her mother, but she knew there was no use arguing. Her father cleared his throat, and his courage almost broke.

“She is sick,” said her father, “she can’t guess anymore. The Kovalchuks’ tree is already dry. Old Liuda’s, too. Don’t take that on your conscience. Plant a new one. Stay.”

Instead of eyes, Oleg had bottomless wells.

“It has already infected those houses, Ivan. I have two children.”

Zhenya kept looking at his shoes, at the old sneakers, green from grass and paint, and thought: who will catch up with him? No one plants willow trees in cities. There is no need. But Oleg would bring his disease into the world, and they would find him, and he would not rest. She had dreamed about it, but dreams, like tree seeds, had a tendency to scatter everywhere. Not all of them sprouted.

“At least close the windows,” said her father, “and they won’t get in on the first day even without you inside.”

Because willows were about home. About people on the other side. What climbed from the dead trunks did not spread to other families until it opened the house like a shell. And it was the duty of everyone who lived in the village to be a bank that could not fall. An obstacle.

“Well,” said Oleg, “I’m not a complete asshole.”

He didn’t look at them anymore.

On the first day, they loaded the car. On the second, they left. On the third, twenty people gathered, all of them with seedlings. Zhenya was among them, holding two pieces. But she had to do everything herself. People always dropped stuff when she was around.

She slowly dug a hole, stroked the tiny leaves like they were puppies, and urged them to grow. She listened to the noise of people while the sky above them slowly darkened.

In the morning, before the fog had lifted, they found the Kovalchuks on a willow. Father, mother, son, swaying. It was a high tree, protected for generations. The legs barely rocked without the wind.

“Don’t look,” her father told her, “Zhen’ka.”

But she did anyway. She noticed that the Kovalchuks’ son, Kolya, had rather tiny feet.

Her father covered her face with his wide palm, and the dry hand softly hid everything from her.

“Turn away. Stop! No. Find their cat. The black one, remember? Take it home.”

They knew the cat would be alive because it was not human. Zhenya remembered it: small and weird-looking, a little cross-eyed. Cross-eyed cats sometimes wander into the wrong places. So they say. Zhenya knew that such creatures had better intuition, and she rushed to the Vasylkovs as soon as a black tail appeared behind the fence. Her father also saw that and did not stop her.

Strange, Zhenya thought, crawling through the hole in the fence, and the house was still standing. If they broke into it, there would be cracked windows and broken doors, not a home but merely a box. And this one looked as if nothing had happened.

Zhenya went around the house, not looking at the tree trunk. She had heard that they were climbing out from there after the tree had died. Where there was an old hollow, something slowly moved and shuffled, and the noise grew.

Something blew into her ear, like her mother in childhood, and Zhenya turned her head a little and felt the cold slowly flowing under her feet from the dry roots. It was as if something slowly creeped out from there, pulled out of the ground like rot. She never looked. The cat didn’t look, and she wouldn’t. Animals are smart. The wet grass tickled, said sorry, sorry, and rustled sadly. All the windows looked at her with black eyes, barely catching the sun’s rays. Dead, the house stood still, deceptively friendly. Like a trap.

Zhenya stepped aside and made an arc around the house. She went out into the backyard, which was littered with old things. She looked at the windows behind. They were closed tightly.

Except a window into the basement.

Zhenya felt a damp fear slide down her neck.

There was no need to break the glass or the door if at least one way was open. They climbed into the house and studied it, felt the walls, penetrated the floor, the ground, and furniture, and the place was lost. And then they attacked the neighbors.

“Prick,” hissed Zhenya.

Oleg had propped up the window with books, leaving it wide open. He did not protect his own house, and in taking his barrier down, he had let the putrid current from the dead willow’s heart flow through the Kovalchuk’s house. His house was a lost cause, and it didn’t stand its ground, the barrier disappearing instead of resisting the attack. Oleg gave the Kovalchuks up to the creatures like a badly wrapped present.

If the families’ willows didn’t die out and continued to grow, they weren’t found on the branches. Everyone knew it, and everyone was ready. But such families were few.

From morning till the evening, the children collected catkins around the lakes and near their houses, passing them from hand to hand, from palm to palm. And put them on the windows and around their homes. Little by little, the smiles disappeared from their faces, something empty nesting in their eyes. House after house fell like dominoes. The cemetery, which had known no deaths for years, was expanding, and the smell of damp earth hung in the air. That’s why they didn’t hope anymore.

Within a month, the Hudymchyks’ willow tree also withered. They were neighbors. Zhenya was playing with Liza, their youngest daughter, in her yard, but the girl kept turning her head, looking back at the dead tree. Zhenya didn’t look. She believed that it could feel and get inside.

“Can’t your dad do something?” asked Liza. “Anything at all?”

Zhenya counted her own fear through the beats of her heart against her ribs. She had already thought everything through. Everything she could. She considered offering Liza to stay at her place for the night, but the shadow on Lisa’s face stopped her. Anguish had already left a mark on her; you couldn’t hide that in the house.

So Zhenya knew that Olezha and his family were dead. She heard the Vasylkovs’ willow breathing heavily with strained dry branches and felt its sad murmurs when she watched the family’s house and its closed door. Good riddance. Not Liza, though. Not all the others.

Words got stuck in her throat, but she did not cry. Zhenya restrained herself, knowing that if she revealed her alarm, it would only rot Liza’s mood. And the willows needed to be believed in.

“Listen, Lizka, my folk’s the same as yours,” said Zhenya, “and you planted the new ones. They started to grow, didn’t they?”

Liza looked at the thin trees, caressed by the weak spring’s warmth. A crinkle passed between her eyebrows. She thought intensely.

“They did.”

At night, after closing the windows and hiding the cattle, Zhenya and her father listened to the night. Zhenya looked into the living room, coming into the pale light of the TV. Her mother was silently crying, covering her face with her hands. She fell ill and could no longer hear the willows. Zhenya thought that she also heard them sometimes. Their rustling of leaves, their hungry sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, like a creature lulling a child to sleep before suffocating it. But her mother was like a radio station, and instead of music, she heard the tongue of trees. Zhenya sat beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly, like any daughter trying to comfort her mother. She heard her father enter the room and listened to his soft steps approaching. He surrounded them with such peace and warmth that even Zhenya’s tears stung her eyes.

“This has happened many times before you, and it will happen after you,” said her father into her mother’s hair. It was thick, curled at the tips, and it tickled Zhenya’s cheeks. It looked a bit like the catkins. Zhenya could feel how calmly her father’s heart was beating and wondered: was he telling the truth, or had he learned to lie calmly?

They went to sleep. Tears always made her fall asleep better.

The thump was quiet and stealthy, and the hair on Zhenya’s arms rose up. The house was asleep, but they had woken up outside.

If she didn’t listen, she could imagine rain pounding on the walls and roof, sickeningly beating its rhythm. She could open the window, place her palm under the drops, and catch one.

Or they would catch her.

It sounded like hundreds of paws running on the Hudymchyks’ house.

A few passed right along her bedroom wall, jumped on the window, and Zhenya pressed herself against the bed, petting the dog. It twitched a little, and Zhenya felt the animal’s pulse racing against her fingers, fearing that it would now snap, revealing them, and the creatures would turn their heads to the two imposters, catch the glance of them through the curtains, absorb their fear.

All sound vanished from the street.

Zhenya kissed the dog on the nose and smoothed its ears, mentally asking: be quiet, oh pretty please, don’t whine. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she didn’t know whether they were noisy because she couldn’t hear anything underneath the static in her head.

Slowly, very slowly, the dog fell asleep. Fear left Zhenya’s body in waves, leaking from the sweat, and she started to dream, wrapping her arm around the dog. It seemed to her that this way, she could control it till the morning.

Just before dawn, she heard the glass outside cracking. At first, it was a tiny, barely audible sound, like the distant buzzing of a mosquito, then an explosion, as if someone had yanked it with all their might. Zhenya sat up sharply, forgetting all about caution, and her consciousness was going away with the sound of the glass breaking. The dog was nowhere to be seen, and Zhenya slowly stood up, burning her feet against the cold floor. Now, it was no longer quiet. It was complete chaos.

She pulled the curtain aside.

The moon was full, and everything around was gray and flat. Hundreds of bodies, black as nothing, fell through the window of the Hudymchyks’ home. The creatures were as flexible as water. There were many of them, and they crawled and covered the house with themselves.

Liza shouted, then stopped. Zhenya got up to go to another window, pressed her face against the glass—

The window was barely open, like the mouth of a half-sleeping beast. There was a shadow right next to it. Zhenya froze next to the glass, her eyes leveled with the eyeless, mouthless face. Its face was nothingness. It clung to the house like a piece of cloth, and its head spun from side to side.

It did not breathe or make noise, but the space around it seemed incredibly loud. It was looking for an entrance. It was listening.

Zhenya took hold of the edge of the window and pulled inaudibly, not breathing.

She knew that it came from the Hudymchyks and didn’t get lost — the creature was looking for more. There were many of them against her wall: bodies in a negative photograph. They pressed against the glass on the other side so the sky vanished.

Zhenya pulled again. Her fingers barely found the thin handle. She was shaking. She tried again, but her fingers did not obey.

Zhenya swallowed. She made a movement so rash and quick that she almost slammed the window. The glass began to crack from the pressure of bodies. She stopped a second before making a sound.

She bit her cheek from the inside, slowly rocking her whole body, coaxing herself to calm down, and with that movement, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, she closed the window.

Her wet palm froze in front of a creature’s face. It poked its face into the glass. Let me in, asked the creature silently. Zhenya sucked in air through her teeth and froze. She could no longer feel her fingers.

Someone shouted — and the creature jerked away. They all ran, and their stomping rang through the house for the last time.

Liza’s mother screeched. The sky became visible again.

By the end of the month, the bodies hung like bells in front of almost every house. The willows were no longer protecting them, only letting more and more creatures out. Children were not allowed outside, and their thin parents were trudging and collecting the remains of catkins, boarding up windows and doors. The streets became empty.

Zhenya went downstairs and saw two silhouettes, her father and mother, against the background of a foggy window. Everything was gray and melted in the air. And they? They were as if carved from wood. But Zhenya stepped forward, the board creaked under her feet, and they slowly turned their heads towards her. They did not retreat, did not run away. Her parents had always loved each other simply and honestly, and it was the best truth about her life, the first she had learned after their love for her. The same was happening right before her eyes. She was made of their faces, their bodies, woven from their emotions, and everything they felt, she also knew.

“No,” said Zhenya, “no, no.”

The light did not pour but slowly flowed through the curtains, threadlike, not the enemy of darkness, but its lazy, attentive brother. Her mother patted Zhenya on the cheek as she took a step towards her, and they hugged. Zhenya’s thoughts, except for this one, were slowly decaying, but then, something was unfolding inside her, clinging to her throat, like Zhenya to her mother’s shirt.

She started to shake and cry. There was the same dead light under her eyelids. The village was slowly dying; she knew they would be the last. It should be so.

She and her father took axes and kindling. Only Zhenya cried. While Zhenya was clinging to her mother, she leaned over and kissed her daughter’s forehead. She smelled like spring, sun, and leaves.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how hard you try,” said her mom, “But it’s alright, little one.”

They cut down and burned all the willows in the village, both healthy and diseased. They went around all the houses, walked through every road to the forest. Few people helped them because they knew it was none of their business. Such things stay in the family.

Leaves with flowers covered the ground like a carpet. The catkins stuck to the skin, the droplets and dry branches hid behind their ears and fell into their pockets, and her father and Zhenya did not look at each other. They did not listen to the slow crackling of the fire. Like families destroyed from the root, dozens of lights emerged all over the village.

Scratches and calluses bloomed under Zhenya’s fingers, and her eyes were blinded by tears and smoke.

In the evening, when not a single willow tree remained, they walked home to the joyous, drunken shouts of the survivors. Zhenya saw small children, pregnant women, and tired men waving to them. Only the faces of the old people were sad. They did not congratulate Zhenya and her father; they mourned.

The infection passed, but the payback was theirs.

Zhenya and her father entered the house; the warm light of the corridor caught the black eyes of the open door from the shadows. No one came out to them. How difficult it was for her to take at least one step! To break this silence!

They went into the room where her mother was. It was dark there, although the moon was visible through the open window. Zhenya looked at the bed, feeling the taste of ash on her tongue. Her father allowed himself the first sob and took a step forward. His tired hands touched the bed.

They collected everything left: burnt bark instead of skin, leaves instead of braids. They took it all in their palms, kissed it, and burned it in the backyard.

She doesn’t know why he’s here. Her eyes dart to him every time she takes a sip, but he doesn’t seem to want anything. His face is as she’s always known it — round and open with enormous mud-brown eyes — only a little bit paler, and lacking completely in life. The man sitting before her is dead, definitely, but he’s also not a figment of her imagination.

Krish Three is sitting beside Krish Two with his face turned away from her, his mud-browns fixed on the cereal cabinet. No shame in loving coco puffs, he’s said before, but he can’t say that now. And he did love them, sometimes more than her, but never more than the pills, which are also stashed in there. He can’t eat them and will stare blankly when she will take them out later and empty them into the bin. She will then scoop up some coco puffs with her fingers and shovel them into her mouth even though she hates chocolate.

Krishes Four and Five are in the kitchen, both wearing his favorite t-shirt. Urdu letters scream khanabadosh in lemon yellow against their black chests. One of them watches the stovetop when Noor cooks her meals — chicken curry, mostly, in defiance of mourning protocol because who’s going to stop her? When she eats, she eats for him too. Krish Five squats next to the fridge because that’s where the rum is, wedged between the vinegar and the sticky bottle of Rooh Afza. This, she doesn’t drink for him.

Krishes Six and Seven are standing with their backs to each other in the bathroom. Each time she comes in through the door, she finds Krish Six looking at his vial of attar, now nearly empty because he left its mouth open when he used it for the last time. Gill 1460, which made him smell like the rain, now makes the bathroom smell like the monsoon. Krish Seven, looking the other way, stares at his splintered reflection in the mirror — once shiny and whole, now webbed like a windshield that’s been hit by something hard enough to crack, but not break it. The narrow shards of glass lodged in his knuckles glint darkly in the LED light.

Krishes Eight and Nine appear on the sofa the next day. She positions herself between them and watches a mushaira for Krish Eight, who is facing the wall-mounted television, letting Ghalib’s poetry mist over the 4K display and perfume the room like incense. Krish Nine sits on the other side of her with his hands clapped to his ears, his eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth thrown open in a silent scream.

On some nights, curled under the dohar on her chosen patch of carpeted floor outside the bedroom door, she thinks about how all of this is Ghalib’s fault.

کوئی ویرانی سی ویرانی ہے
دشت کو دیکھ کے گھر یاد آیا
There is a desolation more desolate than all others:
a desert reminds me of home.

Pulling the dohar over her ears, she tries to hear the sound of her husband’s voice reciting this sher. But a different couplet curls vapor-like into her mind, dragging up with it her first real memory of him. In a classroom where Mathematics was taught in the mornings and Urdu in the evenings, he had offered it to her like it was a rose.

ان کے دیکھے سے جو آ جاتی ہے منہ پر رونق
وہ سمجھتے ہیں کہ بیمار کا حال اچھا ہے 
When she looks at me, my face becomes so awash with light 
that she thinks I — an ailing man — am well.

Krish Eighteen is looking at a wheelie bag in the closet. A black American Tourister, hard-shelled and reliable. It holds the clothes he carried on his last business trip. Fancy dress time, he would joke every morning while putting on his office shirt, aware of how ridiculous he looked in it. The fit was never quite right, no matter how many sizes and cuts he tried on.

Noor took the bag down from its shelf yesterday, thinking she’d empty it over the next few days. Now Krish Nineteen is curled up in its spot with his face to the wall. She remembers this from last year, when rum and employment were distant memories and the pills weren’t killing pain like the pharmacist had said they would.

I want to be a father, he said in that evening’s haze and something he saw on her face ignited him. There was some shouting, a dinner plate hurled at the wall, a chair smashed into the floor and kicked a few times, finger-shaped bruises on her neck, a brief blackout, hours of worrying and calling former friends, before she realized he’d never left the house.

In the morning he said, I should never be a father.

درد منت کش دوا نہ ہوا
میں نہ اچھا ہوا برا نہ ہوا
The pain is not indebted to the medicine,
as I am neither better nor worse.

Krish Twenty-four stands facing an empty dust square on the living room wall. There are many others like it, but the one his eyes are fixed on previously held a picture of their wedding. The two of them outside the registrar’s office, him in a cream kurta pajama, her in a red-and-gold Banarasi saree, looking happier than they’d ever be again. The former inhabitants of the other dust squares — their families — had chosen not to attend.

A few feet behind him, the carpet covers a black smudge marking the spot where he started the fire using the photographs he took down. Krish Twenty-five sits cross-legged on top of it, his face turned up toward the patch of soot still suspended from the ceiling.

جلا ہے جسم جہاں دل بھی جل گیا ہوگا
کریدتے ہو جو اب راکھ جستجو کیا ہے
Where the body has burnt, the heart, too, must be charred
As you scrape through the ashes now, what are you looking for?

There are too many of him, blighting the house, crowding every room but one, against whose door she now stands clutching her dohar. She searches behind her back for the doorknob and hears it click against the enormous silence of his everywhereness.

Inside, there is only one of him — the very first, who appeared by himself on the night of his disappearance. She spotted him in the far corner of the room, a few hours into her routine of searching the house and calling people, and knew what had happened before the police called.

She spent the auto ride to the hospital trying to decipher what she was feeling because she really couldn’t tell. The closer she pushed herself to how this was supposed to feel, the farther she felt from everything she knew. It was like trying to fit Krish into a shirt — grief was a piece of clothing she looked ridiculous in.

When she stood before the stretcher, the morgue assistant looked away so she could weep like all the other young widows who came in every day. But all she could do was stare at Krish’s open eyes, which held a strange look of wonder, like he had witnessed a miracle in his last moments alive.

At the crematorium, the scent of rain wafted up to her as he lay on the trolley, a white bundle on the whirring metal belt, restless to be on its way. The cremator swallowed him before she was ready, and in the deafening echo of its mouth slamming shut, days and days and days had passed, soaked in the surprise and unreality of it all.

Every other Krish who had appeared in the house was one of two truths, black and white, and choosing one while denying the other was as easy as breathing. But this one — he was too many truths at once. Desert and home and light and dark and ailing and well and medicine and pain and worse and better and body and heart and she loved him and hated him and wanted to remember him and wanted to forget him and she thought her head would explode. So she slept on the floor outside the bedroom door and never came in.

But now she’s here, with nowhere else to go, and there is only one thing to be done. She walks up to his corner, stands in front of him, and looks into his eyes. They look back at her and begin to fill with wonder, like she remembers from the morgue — like they’re witnessing a miracle. The room feels warmer than before and the floor, cooler. She becomes suddenly conscious of how hard and smooth the granite is, how solid beneath her feet. As she lets the weight of what she’s been trying to wear leave her, he begins to crumble until all that’s left is a pile of grey ash on the floor.

Five houses line the blind alley, three on the right side, two on the left, and at the end, to the left, stands a three-storied apartment building. I live on the second floor. The dead-end of the street is a ten-foot cinder-block wall, topped by shards of glass of various colours lodged into a layer of concrete to keep away trespassers from climbing the wall and jumping over into the lining of thick rain trees concealing a rather uneventful and nearly invisible colony of government employees.

In the evenings, I stroll on the terrace of my apartment building, taking in the glum orange sunsets behind the Bangalore skyline, or sit on the balcony of my house on the second floor, watching dogs frolic under the yellow light of the street lamps. The muffled voices of a noisy news panel from a TV in a far-off street or the distant wails of sirens on ambulances carrying the infected interrupt the drone of my tinnitus and the otherwise silent nights.

“Ganja… MDMA… Ecstasy… drugs do… drugs do… mujhe drugs do…”

Drugs, though? I wake up to the faraway screams of a man apparently hawking psychedelics late in the night. Mujhe drugs do? Perhaps he is in desperate need of those himself. I sit up, rub my eyes, and train my ears towards the source of the racket; my knackered brain takes a moment to process the sound and locate the wretched junkie.

Is that noise from the house above? I am certain it isn’t. Firstly, no man lives in that house, let alone an addict—the occupant was an old woman. Secondly, the house is at the moment empty and has been so for a while. And thirdly…

“REE AAH CHALK OR BORE TEA…” the faint remnant of another shriek arrives.

… and thirdly, I now recognise that voice. I am not surprised. I would be, had it been yapping about vaccines before the second wave swept over, instead of the celebrity drug scandal. The human megaphone is that anchor from that news channel on a TV playing in some faraway street. It has to be from a faraway street. Mine is empty.

I shut the windows and hit the bed once again.

Thud. Thud. THUD! I jolt awake. 3am. This time, the sound came from above, I am certain. Not the first time though: Like clockwork, taps, thuds and knocks wake me up at 3am precisely. At first, I wondered if the apartment upstairs was haunted. After all, 3am is the witching hour, isn’t it?

Is it her walking stick? Is it her fall? Is it a product of my mind, after all? I google “auditory hallucinations at 3am”. Apparently, my malady has a medical name: a benign condition ironically termed the exploding head syndrome. Look it up. There is always a rational explanation playing spoilsport. I am disappointed. I am more open to the prospect of a ghost with a walking stick haunting the house above me than my head benignly exploding.

The previous occupant of the house upstairs, the old lady, lived by herself like me. She needed me every now and then to run her errands. “Can you bring me a packet of milk and a few buns?” Or, “My washing machine isn’t working; can you take a look?” she would request from behind the mask covering her wrinkled lips, her veiny hand clutching a four-legged walking stick. Back then, the street was populated; she knew everyone, and in return, everyone knew her, but I was her preferred choice, her go-to person to do those odd jobs. The neighbours, when they were too busy to lend her a hand—which seemed to be all the time—would encourage me to help the woman as they showered praises on me, insisting that in their eyes, I was an ideal young man, a shining example, and lamented the laziness of their own flesh and blood. Some would earnestly declare to the woman that I was her son in all but blood (more like a grandson if age was the sole criterion), and others would playfully goad her to make me the heir apparent, upon which they would promptly disperse, and I would set out to play my assigned role as the ideal (grand)son.

I would complete the chores, then spend a few minutes chatting with her over a cup of ginger tea, seated on the divan in her living room. For reasons unknown, whenever I conversed with her, my hands would not quiver when I held the cup, nor would my heart pound—my Pavlovian responses reserved for nearly everyone else I interact with. Perhaps her age, or maybe her isolation and vulnerability, did not present a subconscious threat. Conversations with her typically revolved around the prospects for my marriage and my salary, which then invariably veered into comparisons with her son’s earnings in the US and her trip there a few years ago.

One day, before the second wave of the pandemic, she kicked the bucket—literally in the morning, then figuratively later that evening—when she collapsed in the bathroom due to an abrupt drop in her blood pressure. A team of caretakers arrived in an ambulance, hired remotely by her son, and carted her body off to the morgue. As they did so, I held my phone, camera pointed towards her lifeless body wrapped in a white shroud on the stretcher and live-streamed the happenings to her grief-stricken and teary-eyed son in the US. He was virtually inconsolable.

A week after her demise, the son descended, organised the funeral, hired a property manager, probated her will, patted my shoulder and let out a sigh of grief, after which he promptly ascended once again to the land of the free, leaving me—his brother in all but blood—behind with my share of the inheritance: an aloha shirt one size too large and a pack of M&Ms whose price, oddly, was listed in rupees instead of dollars.

Ever since, the fully furnished house has remained unoccupied. The pandemic emptied not just the houses in my street, but in Bangalore in general, which meant that the property manager has been unsuccessful so far in renting the house to new tenants. Until today, that is. I learn from him that a new tenant will be moving into that apartment. I heave a sigh of relief. In the evening, the packers and movers arrive in their truck. For some reason, the truck is a huge eighteen-wheeled water tanker, followed by two more trucks of similar proportions. I am confused, but on cloud seven. Eight, if I really push it, and that’s saying a lot; I am not very expressive.

A human; a ghost; I will take anything as long as it’s a neighbour. As things stand, I feel like a ghost myself. You know that age old philosophical question? If a man lives all his life alone on an island and no one has ever seen him, is he a ghost? Or maybe it was about a tree falling in a forest. I can’t remember. Anyway, I don a mask, slip into my slippers and step out to meet my new upstairs neighbour. On the stairs, I bump into two men—packers and movers—carefully carrying an aquarium, about four feet long and three feet wide, full of murky water.

“Is the tenant upstairs?” I ask. One of them, with a cigarette dangling at the corner of his lips, tilts his head and gestures at the aquarium he is holding. I follow his gaze. Two rubbery and undulating earthworm-brown appendages emerge from the liquid and press against the side of the aquarium facing me. A dark, hazy blob then appears in the muddied water and a moment later, the remaining six tentacles and the head follow. Now, I can clearly see through the glass. My new neighbour, it turns out, is a cephalopod. An octopus, to be precise.

“Sorry, the water is murky. I didn’t notice you,” I apologise and immediately regret saying the word murky. I have never interacted with an octopus before. I don’t socialise much.

Two tentacles wave left and right in unison. I wave back.

“Hi, I am your neighbour, Shekar. I live downstairs on the second floor right beneath yours.”

I notice that one of the tentacles has no suckers at the end, which means the correct pronouns are he/him. Females have suckers on all eight tentacles. But then an octopus has nine brains, eight in each of the tentacles and one in the head. So, technically, the correct pronouns could be they/them. I am confused. I sense a quiver in my hands. Confusion breeds quiver and quiver, confusion. It is a vicious feedback loop. I manage to derail the cycle for the time being: I assure myself that I will be interacting with him (them) in the second person, and hence, I needn’t worry about offending him (them) with inappropriate pronouns.

The other six of his tentacles perform a complex dance in the water, swaying up and down, left and right, with metrical fluidity. Perhaps it is a sign language known only to their species. Unfortunately, I do not speak octopus. Bangalore is a cesspool of people (and also octopuses, apparently) coming from around the country and speaking a variety of languages.

I press my thumbs to the middle and ring fingers, make the standard Bharatanatyam mudra, rotate my wrists forward and backward and move my eyes from side to side as I tap my feet rhythmically. I don’t really know the classical dance form. I want to give the impression that I am genuinely trying to communicate with the cephalopod. I wish I were good at socialising. I feel the gaze of the two men on me and hear a snigger, and I can feel my heart beating faster. The eight-legged neighbour pauses for a moment… a moment longer than I am comfortable with. I fiddle my thumbs as I try to gauge his silence. Is he confused? Did I say something rude? Does he know Bharatanatyam? That would be a sight to witness—an eight-legged dancing octopus.

“Looks like I am holding you up,” I finally say and end the awkward silence, giving way to the two men.

Is there a universal grammar, not only among humans, as Prof. Chomsky theorised, but also between humans and cephalopods? I am certain that such an ancient language exists, passed down from a common ancestor to both species, quarantined somewhere deep in our subconscious. As much as I am determined to uncover this primaeval means of communication to beat the lockdown blues, deep down, I wish Kannada were made mandatory for everyone living in Bangalore. I don’t speak or understand Kannada either, but at least I have the “Learn Kannada in 30 Days” pocketbook handy for reference.

I gather from the internet that octopuses eat crabs, snails, and small fish. In the evening, I use the ten-minute delivery app to order a live sea crab which arrives in an ice box. This is another attempt at breaking the ice with the inhabitant overhead. The crab is disappointed that she is going to be eaten alive and hums a haunting dirge from the ice box. I don’t quite understand the meaning because I don’t speak crab either, but I discern the emotion from the sorrowful tune. Pain and the fear of death definitely belong in the vocabulary of the primaeval language.

I knock on the door. No answer. The windows have been sealed shut. The door doesn’t open, but the octopus (What is his name? Does he have a name? For some reason, the word Ashtavakra pops into my head.) shows up behind the glass window. One of the tentacles points upwards. Is he flipping me off? I think he wants me to go upstairs. I take the stairs to the terrace one floor above. At the centre of the terrace is a newly installed large circular trapdoor of thick acrylic glass surrounded by a metallic frame.

A few wetsuits and scuba gear are hung on the lime green plastic rope the old lady used to dry her clothes on. I pick one suit and wear it along with the paraphernalia (including the COVID mask underneath the scuba diving mask because it is strictly mandated by the government), open the door and take a plunge into my new neighbour’s blue home. Thankfully, the water is now clear. All the walls have been torn down, the windows and doors sealed with a layer of thick glass, and the floors covered with gravel of kaleidoscopic colours: the house is one big aquarium.

The previous occupant’s furniture and decorations are still here. The divan and the coffee table casually drift upside down in the water and pass me by. A few aquatic plants, which I don’t recognise, have replaced the coffee table and sway calmly underwater. The Madhubani paintings on the wall appear soft and fluid and remind me of Monet. I extend my right arm for a handshake. Instead, he lunges towards my left hand; the suckers under his tentacles reach out and grab the sea crab and at once, he begins munching. I may add that his manners leave something to be desired. The crab stares at me without an expression as her legs are torn apart. I look away momentarily and begin analysing and interpreting the Monet-turned-Madhubani wall hangings.

I turn back only to find that my host has disappeared. Where has he gone? Is he preparing something for me? That’s very polite of him, but it is not practical for me to consume anything underwater. I swim to the kitchen. He isn’t there. The coldness of my host hurts me a little. It is one thing to refuse what your host offers and something else when the host offers nothing at all. I head back to the hall. Perhaps he had to use the restroom. I wait. Thoughts shape reality and what you think, you become. The thought of my neighbour attending to nature’s call instantly reflects in the reality of my own bladder. I have a sudden and intense urge to pee. I look around, he is nowhere: I let the Nile flow out of my wet suit and merge with the Mediterranean sea around me. I am not proud of what I have done, but as the saying goes, no one can stop the incontinence whose time has come. I swim to the paintings on the wall and resume my attempt at art criticism.

I am not well versed in the art appreciation side of things, considering that I had been an engineer all my adult life until I became unemployed, thanks to COVID. Now that I have some time on my hands (in my tank rather—I check the pressure gauge; I have some air still), I decide to spend some of it on art appreciation. The vibrant colours of the painting, although they took birth as a static image, are infused with time and motion by the magic of underwater refraction. A parrot with blue plumage, a deer under a tree, a woman with long dark hair that flows like water, her dreamy almond-shaped eyes that… blink?

With eyes narrowed and a frown on my forehead, I move towards the frame for a closer look. Something is off. I lift my finger and run it through the painting. It is unexpectedly soft. Then, a movement. Then, a realisation. How could I have forgotten? Octopuses are the authority on concealment and camouflaging. In an instant, my host reverts his colour back to the boring brown, appears in front of me and casually drifts away. I get it now. He wants to play.

I close my eyes and begin counting to thirty. He has disappeared once again. I swim around seeking. Now, he has blended into the gravel. Now, he has hidden behind the seaweed. He is a master of disguise, but I am not far behind. This fascinating game of interspecies hide and seek goes on for a while. I am having a good time. I check the gauge: a casual periodic look to make sure the pressure in my air tank is at a safe level. The readings indicate I have some more time. I begin counting to thirty once again. One… two… three. Out of nowhere, guilt, seemingly causeless, flows through my body; as if some remorse lay hidden at the bottom of the tank waiting for an opportune moment to enter my lungs and course through my veins.

I stop the game in its tracks and head to the trap door, get out of the water and get out of the gear. I draw in a long breath and let out an exhale. An approaching sound. The wailing siren atop a passing ambulance grows higher and higher in pitch as it comes closer and closer. The ambulance is visible from where I stand on the terrace, rushing through the winding, deserted road. The sound is now unbearably high-pitched as if it were carrying within it the accumulated final gasps of all the infected the vehicle has transported so far. The ambulance passes by, the siren grows weaker and eventually dies down and the quiet returns, a more appropriate companion to the setting sun. I make a mental note never to breathe air from a tank again.

In the following days, whenever I pass by his house on my way to the terrace for the evening stroll, I dart a quick glance at the window. He is usually absent, or maybe his camouflage is at work, blending him with the transparent glass. Sometimes, he appears, performing his intricate dance of which I can make neither head nor tentacle. I, in turn, acknowledge the courtesy with a single nod of my head and a short smile with pursed lips. Water from the aquarium above my roof begins seeping through. The ceiling in my bedroom turns damp. I paste a sticky note on his window describing the situation and politely requesting him to do something about it. He slowly lifts one of his tentacles up. Is he flipping me off? Or is he inviting me for another game of hide and seek?

I write down a message and paste another sticky note. I must get going. Have a nice day.

In a matter of days, the novelty of the eight-legged dweller has worn  off, and annoyance has taken its place. Moisture from the roof has infiltrated the cupboards, mildew has invaded my clothes, and a musty smell has engulfed the house. A fortnight has passed and nothing has been done to repair my roof.

My clothes are all mouldy. Did you give it a thought or maybe nine? I paste another sticky note to his window.

He responds with an erect tentacle as usual. Something—perhaps a noticeable increase in the speed of the tentacle’s tent-pitching act—convinces me he is flipping me off this time. I escalate the matter from sticky notes to messages in bottles, which I drop through the trapdoor.

My house is too humid, and my kitchen smells like fungus. Do you understand smell?

For some reason, my usual hesitant self takes a backseat as I send these messages, spiced with a tinge of rudeness, through the bottle. Perhaps the indirect form of communication through  a bottle inspires a degree of confidence not unlike the confidence of an anonymous troll on social media.

Patches of saffron paint start to peel off from the wet roof and fall on my stove, contaminate my tomato chutney and besmirch my podi dosa, both of which I unwittingly consume.

Did the fellowship of tentacles discuss my matter? Do you have board meetings?

Over the following days, drops of water accumulate on the ceiling, threaten to fall anytime and eventually carry out the threat by falling into the chilli chicken. I like my chilli chicken dry. Having endured the ignominy long enough, I head upstairs to lodge a complaint in person. My aversion to quarrels, coupled with the disturbing thought of breathing air from a tank, stopped direct confrontation so far. But not today, not when you wet my chilli chicken. I slip into a wetsuit and dive into his house with a mighty splash proportionate to the disdain I now feel for him. I attempt to voice my concern but realise I can’t because I have no voice underwater, so I register my protest on a placard instead.

Your water is leaking into my house. Do something! I state the obvious on the placard that happens to be in my hand using an underwater marker that also turns up in my other hand. In turn, he grabs the placard with his eight slithering tentacles and squats on it. A moment later, words appear on his body, thanks to the chromatophores on his skin.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” The words scroll to the left like an LED message on a city bus and make way to Hindi, “Kya ukhaad lega tu?” which in turn move aside to let in Kannada, “Enannu kittu haakuttiri?”

Then he mic-drops the placard and floats away lazily. So he understands English, Hindi and Kannada. What else has he not told me? He is not as stupid as I thought; he is outright sinister. The mic-drop is effective. I have no trilingual comebacks up my sleeve. My anxious brain is slow that way. The clever comebacks never come when they matter. I retreat in defeat.

Tap. Tap. TAP! Drops of water trickle onto my forehead and tap me awake. It is 3am. A small hole has formed on the roof above my bed. The water now drips at a steady pace into my bedroom. The bed, the pillow and my blanket are soaking wet, and the water on the floor has reached the level of my knees. I find it difficult to go back to sleep. I toss and turn on the bed. I try counting the drops of water, hoping it would help me fall asleep. As I turn to the right, I notice a stick under the murky water by my bedside. I dip my hands and pull out the old woman’s four-legged walking stick. I tap it on the roof, and yell.

“Hey! Your water is leaking. Keep your filthy, disease-ridden water to yourself!”

Splash. Splash. SPLASH! I wake up to splashing water. Midnight hunger pangs prompt me to get out of bed. The house is dark. The electricity had to be cut off for safety reasons now that the water has reached the switchboards. In the dark, I row my canoe and make my way towards the kitchen. At the bedroom door, something makes contact with my canoe with a gentle thud. I turn on my phone’s flashlight to take a look.

It is a body wrapped from head to toe in a white shroud, drifting in the water. I know who it belonged to. As if by instinct, I call up ‘my brother’ in the USA. I begin live-streaming the body as it passes me by. As if on cue, he too at once begins weeping uncontrollably. I sing a lullaby to console him. It is the same song that I heard from the now dead crab. I do not sing in public for fear of mockery, but now I gather courage because it is needed. He calms down, occasionally letting out an involuntary hiccup. He tells me he likes the aloha shirt I happened to be wearing.

“The shirt looks good on you,” he compliments with a bittersweet smile on his face as he wipes his tears.

“It is a bit too large for my size,” I say.

“Give it a couple of washes and it will shrink,” he assures. I feel better.

“Can you talk to your tenant about the water leaking into my house?” I submit my request. He looks off-camera for a moment as though something distracted him, then looks back at the camera, then excuses himself and ends the call citing some urgent business. I continue my voyage towards the kitchen.

More bodies pass me by in the living room on my way to the kitchen, only this time they are wrapped in orange shrouds. I point the flashlight around and look for the source of the bodies. A large hole in one corner of the roof is where they are dripping out from. I notice a female standing on the sofa in my living room accompanied by a man holding a camera on a tripod. A journalist I believe; she is in tattered and road-weary clothes, reporting passionately on the drifting dead bodies.

“I ask my cameraman to pan around and show you the sheer number of bodies floating around in this living room,” she says. The cameraman obliges. “We have counted up to a hundred and six bodies before giving up. Who suffers for whose mistakes? Who is answerable? Who is responsible? What we see here…”

She notices me passing by, pauses for a moment, waves at me and instructs her camera man to point his camera towards me. I pull over my canoe towards the sofa.

“Here is a living man, alone among the dead, with nothing but a canoe to keep him afloat and an oversized shirt on his body, rowing in darkness, heading to an unknown place at this hour in the night. Let’s talk to him,” she turns to me. “Sir, can we talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. But let me assure you, the shirt will shrink after a couple of washes.”

“This man is full of hope despite the wetness of his predicament. These are the kinds of stories, these tiny droplets of hope, we must tell as the tsunami of grief sweeps our country. Tell me sir, how are you feeling?”

“I am feeling hungry…”

“He is starving… hmm.”

“… which usually happens to me in the middle of the night. I am heading towards…”

“He is in search of food, clutching his empty stomach… hmm.”

“… the fridge in the kitchen.”

“Do you wish to say something to our viewers?”

“I just wish that the cephalopod above realises his mistakes and rectifies the situation with a sense of urgency before my house drowns completely.”

“This man still has faith in the cephalopod above and appeals to his good nature.”

Sympathy in her eyes, she wraps her arm around my shoulder, as the cameraman captures the moment. With that, my interview ends, and I continue my journey towards the fridge.

Roar. Roar. ROAR! I wake up floating neck-deep in cold water that consumes me from below, an utter darkness that absorbs me from above and a claustrophobia that devours me from within. I let out gasps as I struggle to breathe in the small pocket of air between the water and the roof. A light from under the water emerges to the surface. It is a TV, playing that news channel moderated by that news megaphone of an anchor. He materialises in one of the ten boxes on the screen. The remaining nine are occupied each by the eight tentacles and one head of the cephalopod. In a separate frame, I see a picture of me. Underneath it is the headline in large red letters:

BREAKING: IMPATIENT NEIGHBOUR PUTS A CEPHALOPOD IN A CHOKE HOLD #STOPCHOKINGCEPHALOPOD #STOPCEPHALOPODCHOKING

“I want to tell you, viewers, that things are not as bad as this man is making out to be,” the male anchor screams, pointing at my picture. “Yes, his house is flooding, but as you can see, he is sailing in smooth waters…” A short video recording of me rowing towards the kitchen last night is played on repeat mode.

“… rowing in the right direction and flowing smoothly ahead. Yet he harasses his neighbour with rude messages in glass bottles. Yet he complains to the world. And his complaints are given credence by journalists like her who interviewed him last night. This negativity is what we must reject as a nation. Put him on the line, put him on the line,” he orders his crew. And suddenly, I am on the screen in an eleventh box. The nine fragments of my neighbour in the nine boxes writhe violently.

“Tell me, Mr. Shekar, why are you holding this poor cephalopod, your neighbour, in a chokehold?”

“No… I’m not,” I say, spitting some water out and gulping some in.

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay… Because he… is the one responsible… I guess,” I say, gasping for air in the claustrophobic space between water and the roof.

“Mr. Shekar, you behave irrationally. The cephalopod is responsible, and he is doing his best. It is not easy working with nine brains, each thinking differently especially when one is under a chokehold.”

“Chokehold… is probably not the most suitable word… in the context… of an octopus,” I suggest to the anchor. A mistake.

“HOW DARE YOU? HOW DARE YOU TELL ME HOW TO DO MY JOB?” The inevitable scream ensues. “Apologise, you anti-… anti-rational!” In the nine boxes, the nine-brained neighbour matches the anchor’s passion and writhes even more violently.

“Okay he… may be… doing… his best… but he has had… enough time… to do some… thing… and now I am… drowning.”

“For God’s sake! Give the cephalopod some breathing room, will you?”

“Breathing room? Interesting… choice of… words.”

“Mr. Shekar! Are you dumb? I told you the cephalopod is working as hard as he can for your benefit. How anti-rational can you be? Stop breathing down his neck!”

“Breathing down?“

“There he goes again. Give him some time, will you? Give him some time. He will take your breath away!”

“Okay… I’m… holding… my… breath.”

And the rock we dug out of
the side of the hill
proved to be so radioactive
that two geologists exposed to it
went up in flames like touch-paper.

Only three of the men
returned from the mission to the dark side.
Some kind of green-scaled three-headed creature,
about twenty fields tall,
attacked the team,
tore many of them to shreds.

We lost Dr Ehlerimen to a bog,
and Professor Casey to a sudden landslide.
And our chef, when out scouring
the local plant life for prospective garnishes,
was sucked up and swallowed
by what is known in the lab 
as a crocodile flower.

Yes, I got your letter.
Crime’s on the rise.
There are violent protests in the street.
Countries in the Middle East
are talking war.
I agree, Earth is a dangerous place.
But just you try living elsewhere.