“Five years ago, I was but one of the few people in this entire city of 20 million who had it. now, as I walked the city, rode on its trains, visited its shops, I could sense others. The new law about cybernetics by Lahore’s City Council had done much good in that regard.”
That is how the Green Man finds you, a sprite like himself with petals in your hair, weeping to the rose bush about an older sister married and sent off to a distant land where there are no trees for miles around.
“All those lives, my love above all, weigh infinitely more. I want to close my eyes for a second but my eyelids barely flicker. The solution is doing its silent work. Only a little of the path remains now and my greying mind is starting to shutter. Remember, if you meet the Buddha on a road, make sure to kill him. No one ever needed the man, only the idea of him and his unfathomable smile.”
“..word of my infamy had reached all ears among the Scholars, as had my frustrated vociferations when asked by kindly, wispy-haired professors why my work could not keep to the standards of my peers. (‘My work is wholly original and inventive, far superior to the derivative schlock or regurgitated waste those you applaud produce.’)”
“Then what do I do, huh?” Raja slammed the table, sending a confused groan through the drunken crowd. “Give up? And then what? Run away? Go join the army? Die fighting Kilav?” He turned back to Dhondo, waving a glimmering gold coin before his nose. “You see this. This is while I’m sneaking around with her. Imagine when we’re married.”
Whether we are in a simulation or not should have no effect on our sense of selfhood. We are who we are, or who we are simulated to be: in either case we have no option but to be ourselves.
The common thread we find through all those discussions is Chandrasekera’s own attitude towards craft. Primarily, he has none. He is practical and straight-forward in his approach, there are no airs put on of what a writer should and shouldn’t do, generous in understanding the sensibilities of writers.