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

Sri Lanka, pollution-free, prosperous, and peace-loving was also, still, home to the world’s most brilliant minds. That is, in addition, to his own ten. A king is only as good and happy as the lowest, dumbest, and poorest of his subjects. This he believed.
    His reverie was broken.
    “Your Majesty, we have the list. We can upload the datato your ear piece.”
    “Do that.”
    “Done!”
    “How many?”
    “Eighteen thousand planets of which at least seven hundred and nine teen should correspond to ours until at least four years into the future!” declared his Chief of Staff .
    “Good.”
    “No doubt we shall have more information to pass you in the future since the set of multiverses with planets corresponding to ours is not a finiteone.”
    In the small forest where Ravana arrived, one of the few sweeps of dense green foliage left in the sub-continent, everything went as planned. Sita fell for the very first virtual hologram with surround sound that he tried. A small dear. Cute doe eyes. Tush as cute as a baby’s bottom.
    Rama gave it chase, eager to please Sita. Ravana couldn’t blame him. He would have done the same. Aftersome hawing, that annoying younger brother who had cut off Surpanakha’snose drew a ridiculous magnetic field from an ancient physics textbook to keep Sita within the house and went looking for his older brother. What an idiot!
    Time is everything. If one can live longer than anyone else one can know more than anyone else. Ravana had lived and lived. He knew much. And with ten heads he knewa hundred million times more than he would have with one. He had engineered the new neural net himself, making sure that the emergent properties of the network far exceeded anything known to complexity theorists of the time.
    “Time is nothing, Sita, it doesn’t even exist. I’m going to still it and you won’t even know. We’re going to remain in these few minutes for an eternity. We will crossthe known universe, we will live other lives, we will be together, we will be apart. You will see me as a monster with ten heads, you will see me younger and more handsome than any other being on earth, you might even see me as that darling husband of yours. No one, not even me, has ever gone on this journey before. And I am choosing to take it with you.
    “Welcome to the multiverse, Sita, wherea million versions of a million universes exist. So enormous is the magnitude of these worlds that even with the lowest probabilities, our own earth with you and me and all that there is in it, exists some eighteen thousand times over and over as of today.
    “Welcome to a new physics of quantum entanglement that makes it possible for us to arrive in another place, however remote. And welcometo a taste of my charms. Without my maya even with all the science in the world you could never really live this experience from the inside out. Without maya you would be reduced to an outside observer observing a fake version of you,” Ravana thought to himself. The silent dialogue with Sita stoked him. His two brains devoted to emotion heated up his whole body in a way that nothing had in the recentpast.
    Ravana remained invisible and checked out the magnetic field. Obviously the little brother only knew about three dimensions. Ravana worked out the ten dimensions around Sita’s hut and computed a complicated path in and out of the hut that would leave the magnetic field undisturbed.
    “Devi, I’d like to speak to you for a minute,” he called from outside, visible now with one head anda simple garb.
    “Please come here, Sir, I am not allowed to cross this line,” she replied.
    In the time it took Sita to blink he had materialized on the inner side of the magnetic field.
    “I mean no harm, Devi,” he said politely.
    Sita opened her mouth to speak. The Broca’s area of her brain lit up, her motor cortex fired neurons so that she would take in air to speak, her tongue movedforward. Ravana performed his moment of maya. In that