It was only a month before the two men touched down in Beijing airport in early March of 2024. Looking out from his window seat, Rajesh thought he couldn’t really tell the difference between Beijing and New Delhi, it had been a hazy March day when their plane took off in the evening from India, and it was hazy again when they landed in China just as the sun was just rising and casting an orange glow over the runways. The two biggest countries by population in the world seemed to also share the same air pollution issues, both cities seemed to just spread their orange glow as far as the eye could see.
When Raj and Vic stepped out of Beijing airport that is however where the similarity with New Delhi ended. The cold windy snap which had settled over the city caught the two men unaware in their flimsy Hindi ceremonial robes. They had been half asleep from not having properly rested on the overnight flight and the passage through customs had not been pleasant. The Chinese customs official was obviously not impressed by two curry munchers coming to try and spread Hindi propaganda in his beloved democracy. He had referred the matter up the hierarchy and it had taken a few stern looks at their paperwork and passports by an increasing number of officials with increasingly official looking hats, until they had their passports thrown back at them and they were eventually allowed into the People’s Republic of China.
Hari knew it wouldn’t be too hard to find his two envoys from India. They stood out outside the terminal arrivals gates like jumping beans, jerking and bending in half twisting motions, trying to find their bearings and sending great plumes of white fog from their mouths. They would have looked like comedians in an early silent movie if they had been in black and white rather than their colorful attire.
“Victor, Rajesh?”Hari called out as he walked quickly to within earshot of the two contorting men. Before they would catch the attention of the omnipresent state police who might mistake them for beggars putting on a show for money, Hari knew he had to get to his visitors quickly.
Turning around towards the source of the call, Victor quickly pulled out a hand and smiled to the fellow Indian who was just reaching them.
“Hari”, Vic replied, “Namaskaaraha! I’m Victor, and this is Rajesh! It’s a pleasure to meet you and I’m so glad to see you, I thought we’d fallen asleep on the plane had and landed at the North Pole!”
“Namaskaaraha Hari” added Rajesh in a clattering of teeth and whilst still executing his jumping and twisting dance on the same spot.
“Come quick, you’ll freeze in this weather; let’s get you to the temple” Have you got all your luggage?”
“Yes, all here, we’re following you, on the double!” Vic was indeed in a hurry to get some place where his teeth would stop acting like a sewing machine in a sweatshop.
Without another word they all hurried to Hari’s van stationed a little further in the carpark, fighting against the gusts pushing shards of cold air in every opening of Raj and Vic’s inadequate tunics, fingers by now almost frozen solid on the handles of the suitcases they were dragging along.
Settled out of the wind in the back of the minivan, the two men took a good minute to unclench their hands from their luggage and wipe away with their tunic sleeve the half frozen water in their eyes and other fluids dripping out of their noses.
“Here” said Hari, I thought these might be useful, not easy to find in New Delhi” as he handed each man a beanie and a pair of woolen gloves.
“We won’t say no to that! Thank you Hari! Another 10 minutes and I would have started to shed body parts I think!” said Vic “Is it often like that?”
“Could be worse, could be snowing! But hopefully this is one of the last of the winter blasts. It doesn’t look like it right now, but things are hotting up quite a bit here, like the rest of the world I guess” Replied Hari “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the weather in no time. And I’m guessing the pollution levels won’t be an issue. I have a few more warm clothes at the temple you can use whilst here. There aren’t too many volunteer Hindu priests in these parts of the woods so we try to make their stays as comfortable as possible. Anyway, let’s get you there and get you warmed up.”
The rest of the day was spent thawing out around the pot belly stove in the foyer of the small Hindu Temple, with full arctic gear on, getting familiar with their modest but neat quarters, and drinking lots of very hot tea. They made sure the radiators in the two small rooms were set on high, which felt like just above frozen to the two men accustomed to being able to fry eggs on the pavement for a large part of the year. Quite tired and jetlagged, they managed to stay awake and honor their host until about 10 pm when all lights went out.
It was another month of discreet searching and prodding before Rajesh would finally make contact with Xiao. It wasn’t as if he had had to hide from his previous life as one of the top mathematician in a big and now very extinct New Delhi think tank. To John Green from the Top 20 Hits company and to the many rungs in the chain of command leading to the Davos Boys, Rajesh had been dealt with, snuffed out, kaput. The surveillance of all the deceased employees’ families and morphometric scanning of the area had shown no cause for concern, and the operation had been wound up. There was no trace of a certain Rajesh from DNA testing with the various body parts that had been dug up; the phone from that employee had not either shown the characteristic burn marks of the others that had been recovered, and had also strangely seemed to stop working a minute or so before the blast. Nevertheless, despite this loose end, Top 20 Hits was now actively dealing with other matters; their books were always quite full these days.
Now busy with the rather boring task of waiting to run into his elusive Chinese friend, Rajesh had not even tried to change his identity beyond his surname and a clean shave of his beloved moustache whilst on the run. The shaving did actually help a bit with blending into the Chinese population. More importantly, on the last day that he was working on the Davos amendments, once he had decided he would not let himself be snuffed out, Rajesh had the good sense to access his own personnel file via a bit of clever internal hacking of the company server. Or rather he accessed the database containing his morphometrics and slightly altered one line of code, just adding one zero at the end of a number drowned in a sea of gobbledygook. Any facial recognition software using this altered information would now try to match him with someone who was a closer match to a heavily lying Pinocchio than to any normal human being.
As he was sitting on a park bench lost in his thoughts, Rajesh had a small chuckle, imagining himself with the tip of his nose located 30cm from its base. He also thought for half a second about who he was in this strange new world, seeing himself on the computer screen as simply a few lines of codes in a machine as if he had been looking in a mirror. When he had started out his working life, his previous employers had simply used a signaletic sheet with his name, address, next of kin, and a photo of him on which he had even been allowed to smile. He was of course even back then just a number, but how humane that seemed to him now.
He had done a quick mental check and was pretty confident that the file he hacked in New Delhi would be the only instance of his digital self in any system anywhere. Work had grown thinner as of recent times, and he was after all just another slum dweller in a country of 1.3 billion. It occurred to him that he did