In 2115, the population of the world had plummeted to five hundred million, thanks to the overly vigorous efforts to control populations in the first half of the 21st century. A drug called the ctrla (pronounced citrla) had played a big role. ‘Pop it once, and you’ll never be a pop’, said one of the holomercials for it. It messed with the genes and a single dose could remove all possibilities of parenthood, irrevocably. It was all too effective. There were dark tales of some governments of mixing it with the meals at schools and subsidised canteens, and giving away millions of the pills, disguised as ordinary contraceptives. Then there had been the pandemic that had wiped out a good quarter of the already reduced race. But the implosion truly began when the species seemed to strangely, inexplicably lose interest in procreation.
When the population first started to shrink drastically, the rich west and the just as wealthy far east had begun to woo people from the third world with promises of plenty. This had helped empty the previously overcrowded Indian cities, which had some of the lowest population densities in the world now.
There were still people who could remember traffic jams, and places where you could travel hundreds of kilometers without ever losing sight of fellow humans, when just one social media network (one web site!) had twice as many members as the current population of Earth.
Ramji was one of them. He had 5 stories of the ‘Heaven’s Gardens’ in Delhi, a two hundred story apartment building that was built during the mega building craze of the 2030s. He could have bought 8 stories, he could afford it. At today’s prices, there were a great many who could afford it. But 5 stories were nearly 200,000 square feet, not counting the swimming pools and terrace gardens. Besides, he was on floors 195 through 200 and had the option of buying the penthouse suite on the roof. He had remodeled, knocking out the floors and hollowing out the interiors, for an atrium upon which all five stories opened out, and which doubled as a shaft for a vast glass platform elevator that was raised and lowered by thin, unobtrusive cables that disappeared into the ceiling of the 300th floor. So you stepped out on to what looked like thin air on whichever floor the elevator was at, and ascended and descended silently, smoothly. Ramji had nightmares of one day walking on to the elevator…which wasn’t there. But the thing was supposedly foolproof, failsafe…a glass parapet ran around the atrium on each storey, and sank into the floor when the elevator was in station. Ramji liked the vertiginous view of the atrium floor from the 300th story. He never tired of it. The view of the city below was fine too. It always was. The air had cleared in the second half of the twenty first century and had remained clear. The 300th story had glass walls all around, with zoom panes built in. He liked to scan the mostly empty city, and people watch.
This was not an idle pastime. Spotting people was a serious game for the ‘eyrie dwellers’, the people who inhabited the lonely nests in the top floors of the mostly empty apartment buildings in the city. They kept score on the Net, but the rules of the game forbade the use of Net tags. Only old fashioned visual confirmation counted. No one could cheat because the zoom panes took photos of the quarry, game, subject. Strictly speaking, it was not legal; paradoxically, the more space people got, the more private they became. Privacy laws were strict these days. They didn’t stop the eyrie dwellers. Spotting a new face in these lonely times was a thrill very like seeing someone naked. The people spotters had a secure website where they logged each new find. It was almost like pornography.
Sometimes, it actually was. Some people spotters had no qualms about peering into bedrooms and bathrooms. But Ramji was not interested in the sex. He was a hundred and five. He was still virile, but the people themselves were more interesting than anything they did. They were so rare, exotic. People were the tigers of the twenty second century.
There were players who preferred field work, prowling the streets and logging in captures with their goggle cameras. But the nest dwellers preferred to hunt from their eyries.
Ramji was a level 5 player, meaning he had been at it a long while, and had a five digit collection of ‘catches’ in his bag. This evening, he made himself comfortable in an armchair at the east facing window wall and blinked three times to activate the zoom pane. At the bottom right corner an ubi screen showed the people watcher site. There was only one other active watcher now. It was Zumala, the woman who never talked. She was in Connaught Place, a particularly unpromising hunting ground. It had mansion style apartment buildings. Many of them were hollow shells, uninhabited, eerie. You were more likely to find ghosts there than any living thing.
As always, Ramji began with the hypersupermarket on Nehru Avenue, about a kilometre away. He zoomed in on the entrance, and waited. A man arrived and disappeared into the great cavern of the hypersupermarket. Ramji did not bother to log him, he was an employee and he was already in his collection.
He waited a few minutes more and shifted his gaze. He would return later. It was still dusk, and the store would be open all night. It was never closed.
Darkness had fallen. He looked farther away to the east, towards the lights lining the Yamuna, and pinched the air with two fingers. The pane homed in on a little circle of light under a lamp post in a narrow gully. He sat quite still and watched that circle of light until his eyes glazed and crossed. He could do this all night. People watching was not a sport for the impatient.
He moved on. He was an eagle, turning lazy circles in the sky while he waited for a mouse to break cover.
He caught one around eleven pm. A man in an exo-skeleton was walking briskly in the new park that had replaced a shopping mall, about two kilometres away. The system checked him against Ramji’s collection and announced that he was a fresh catch.
This was good going. There were nights and even weeks without a new face. Ramji leaned back in his armchair and relaxed, enjoying the euphoria of discovery. But he quickly returned to the hunt. This was a good beginning. Maybe it was his lucky night and he could find more. First, he followed the old man as he strode through the park, his mechanical muscles moving him along at a brisk pace. He paused at the edge of a pool. Then he bent his knees and straightened them abruptly, and leapt clear across the pool, which was at least ten feet wide. He punched the air in self congratulation. Ramji grinned. People rewarded observation.
The old man disappeared into an all-night auto-canteen in the park. Ramji looked away and frowned. The system read his expression and zoomed in on a random spot in the general direction of his gaze. There were autopods with no takers, looking abandoned, forlorn. In his fading memories of the past, there were unending queues for them.
He looked away, at other blank spaces. He found a dog and followed its meandering course for a few minutes. It appeared to be an unattended dog, even rarer than people. It shuffled apathetically into the shade of a tree and lay down.
Ramji searched the cityscape spread out like a high res satellite picture at his feet. Somewhat urgently now, unusually for him. The early catch had made him eager for more. But everywhere the lights of the city shone upon empty spaces. Even the few lighted squares in the silhouettes of buildings appeared to belong to unoccupied apartments. This of course, was not unusual. What was unusual was this crushing feeling of desolation, like a man marooned in a space station. It had happened before, yes, but never had it felt so terrifying. He felt like he was about to fall into an abyss of the mind.
He located the park again. He zoomed in and searched frantically for the old man. His eyes swept the park and returned to the door of the auto canteen. He stared at it for five minutes and then gave up in frustration. He continued on his hunt. Anyone? Anyone, please?
Without thinking about it, he pinged Zumala, the sphinx, the lady who never talked. Her avatar was still green, showing that she was there, and playing.
There was a silence, which was different from the silence of all these years, because it was a waiting silence. Then she responded.
“Ah,” she said. “The man who never talks.”
***