Cyberabad Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

And that's why we're all here, because it's families that make us strong and hopeful. And that's how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don't think we should be doing that. They think it's their nation so they should build it. Some people think we're part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.
         Or, as Clinton in class said: the Ranas' control is still weak and there are a lot of underrepresented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of leftover weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad, who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Alliance.
         The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and half of Uttar Pradesh on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.
         When there weren't cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim's planet.
         Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-11. Really he shouldn't have been playing at all because he didn't actually live within the compound. His father was the Bharati government's man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.
         At first they had been enemies. In his second game, Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia, and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the new boy had got all the best balls because he was a Westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in center: three-three-four. Cantonment beat US Army two-one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.
         Salim's planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman's Coffee Bar, Kyle's e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full-proprioception so-new-it's-scary lighthoek (trademark) that you could put behind your ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons, too. The safety instructions said you weren't supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime, or terror, but it was safe enough in the Guy's Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.
         Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim's lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken awhile to work out the sweet spot but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech; Mom's line was that it hadn't been proved safe yet, but Kyle suspected it was his father who had the more serious reservations: it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim's world there in front of him—Alterre, as it was properly called—and feel himself falling towards it