Free Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana by Edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh

feeding information from the heavens and the earth. The oceans. The mountains. From below ground level a large executive chair came up. Ravana sat in it and pressed a button. Tiny precision devices calibrated his exact position and small but sturdy supports came out of thecontraptionso he could rest his chins on them. His minions put ten eyeglasses on his ten faces. Without these it was hard to keep the eyes from one head wandering to the zone of another and then his ten different brains went into overdrive.
    “I’m ready.”
    In minutes Ravana had what he needed. He pressed a button and turned the north face of the room into a large projecting screen and showed Surpanakhaa re-run of what she had been watching. Two thin fellows in costume were walking around as if they were leading a boy-scout expedition.
    “That’s them.”
    Ravana consulted some information and spoke from his third face, he had a habit of indicating which of his heads had done the thinking.
    “Let’s go back there and sweep the area with some satellites. I’m going to focus three sub-orbital satellitesin this area for a few minutes.”
    He pressed another button and a map lit up on the screen.
    “Check what these satellites are up to now,” he said.
    “Your Majesty, they are scanning looted ruins in Jordan to compute the extent of damage since last week.”
    “Three minutes won’t kill them. Let’s go. Everyone, watch for those two.”
    Ravana overrode the commands. Technically since the restof the world loaned these satellites from Lanka they were not supposed to be veered off course unless there was a global emergency. The satellites recalibrated as they swept the region.
    “Wait, there’s the hut,” Surpanakha said.
    Ravana pressed another button.
    “My lord, who is she?” he whispered under his breath.
    “I thought that was one of the characters in your game, she was there onthe screen last time but she wasn’t there when I got in,” his sister said.
    “I can tell the GPS data from what’s generated by the computer. She’s real. Get me that location.”
    “Yes, your Majesty,” his Chief of Staff said.
    “Brother, your new stuff is really good. One can’t tell the virtual simulations from the real inputs at all. Even when I got there sometimes I wasn’t sure if one of theitems on the scene was real or not.
    “That’s the beauty of constructing virtual reality from realistic real time data!”
    “We have it,” said a scientist.
    “I need you to generate virtual images of the forest. Make them the best holograms you ever made. Sound. Smell. I want the works. No one in the forest should be able to distinguish between their environment and the artifacts we place inthem from more than six inches away.”
    “Yes, your Majesty.”
    “Make some scenes with a cute cuddly little deer with small white spots. I think they are indigenous to the region. Can you check?”
    “Yes, Your Majesty, they are.”
    “Good.”
    Ravana focused. He was as deep inside as he had ever gone. Even Sita and his recent obsession for her had blown away like paper-thin peanut husks risingin a breeze.
    The fabric of space-time had more than one rip. And the rips created wormhole bridges. They were key to traveling across galaxies in short periods of time. Ravana had been sitting cross-legged for three days meditating on his great grandfather Brahma to acquire the power to cross these wormholes. Ravana had been across the galaxies before but he wanted hundreds of traversable wormholesnow for near instant travel. He also wanted knowledge of all the coordinates and energy states necessary for quantum tunneling. He wanted to mix new sciencewith old-fashioned magic so that he could seamlessly move from the internal to the external world, from Earth to outer space, from Sita’s brain to his. The only one out there who could make it possible was the Creator himself.
    The Creatorhad been miffed with Ravana. At first he’d looked on bemused as Ravana recruited