Short Story: Dr Reddy and Angel’s Day at the Office

When Doctor Reddy is in his lab with his interns, he talks about the idea of dependence in a very specific way. By dependence, he often says to the new interns who get the rare visit to his lab, he does not mean the matter of two seemingly independent objects existing in a relation, such as an apple existing on—and thereby depending upon—a table. Rather, he always means an ‘essential dependence’ between a part and a whole, by which he means that, all else being equal, when one part changes, the whole changes just ‘by definition,’ by the simple fact that one of its parts has changed. 

After saying this to the interns, Dr Reddy likes to gaze out the window at the gray Bangalore sky that mirrors his hair’s glow, and raise a hand as if about to recite a line or two of his favorite classical philosophy and interrupt the hesitant thoughts of the new interns at all he has said already. The cloud blanket turns into a marker of finitude for him vividly, and an intern even so completely lost from his words can understand his idea of dependence by the way his eyes glaze to reflect the gray sky, and Dr Reddy sighs slowly and continues, “Ah, look at that finitude, and see the fact that all this below it, all the cosmos we have, is dependent on a Supreme, a creative principle, but that principle is not dependent on us, even in terms of essential dependence, which means that it is not to be considered a part, with us as the other part, but has to be considered a whole unto itself, and yet such a whole that has a bearing on us….And no wonder,” he says, his faltering voice taking in the far-reaching sky’s horizon, “no wonder, all manner of men come to find that that principle, being a whole unto itself but also the creativity of our world, is nothing but God…”

Angel is not the type of intern to rest on some thought or another, however, even if it comes from an authority like Dr Reddy himself. He always likes to take things a step further by his own thinking. That is one of the reasons why he came all the way to Bangalore, from his shed in the Taiga’s border, to work on what, by most counts in the world, was quite a hi-tech laboratory, where he could think freely and where the topics of thought were both more relevant and more interesting than in the Taiga. Although this laboratory was gated in and shrouded with old vines, like the hi-tech laboratories were these days, one could find a flock of kids milling about on any given day, kids from schools like St Paul who were invited to look at the marvels Dr Reddy had created, away, for a bit, from the usual boredom of their boarding schools and their mid-afternoon class sessions. 

Angel thought about what it meant that this Supreme, this creative principle, was absolutely independent of our usual world, as Dr Reddy had put it. What did it mean that it was not even essentially dependent on the usual world? First, he located this creative principle, now calling it God more freely, in all the things of this usual world itself. If God and the world were the same thing, completely identical, then there would be no sense in saying one was the part of the other, and there could be no dependence, even of the essential kind, between them. He gazed at the garden again, and tried to look into the opaque eyes of the AI bots bathing under the sun, their bodies still like mannequins but their minds processing up a storm as the kids from St Paul peered at them from behind a fence, and tried to get a sense of their thoughts, their inscrutable leaps of logic, or some weird glitch to exploit and then pull on as a senseless prank. And now, Angel found in all of them the presence of God, not as spirit or any kind of indirect and immaterial force, but as direct identity. He was now hard-pressed to really see the usual world as it was, for a new luster came to his mind just by this thought alone—a certain vibrancy, a virtual breeze, unsettled the leaves, the branches, upended the paper cups the children lined bottom up, and, in seeing all this, he felt satisfied that in his eyes the creative work of God was not being overlooked, though God, for him, was one with all things now, and not a distant creator. 

But was this it? Was this identity between the world and creative God, the wellspring of inspiration and devotion for so many others, to be his wellspring too? Something in an unlit cellar at the back of his mind, a usually marginalized voice, frail, told him to stop right there, knowing his propensity to go a step further. For this was as far as a man of science was supposed to go. And for once Angel agreed with a warning from that place. He got out of the lab, where he had begun to slightly perspire in the presence of others, and made his way towards the garden where the AI bots were basking, intending to get his mind off of things. 

He was stopped and asked for his pass by the receptionist. He said he did not have one yet. He was told that one needed a pass to interact with the AI bots in the garden, for a pass would demonstrate that he knew how to handle their delicacy. “Unfortunately, the age of permits is a sign of the times—” Dr Reddy had said before in the lab, as a small joke, but also referring to the serious corruption and the tendency for companies like his to compete rather than communicate with one another.

The receptionist had to check her files on her computer, saying “one moment please” twice, as Angel looked beyond her, through the thick glass that separated the building from nature, at the birds and trees, the sunshine, at the mystery of all these things, and he revisited his thinking on essential dependence and the Supreme, God, and he thought of how the other major choice for him was to believe that all this was illusion, an artificial play for the senses, and that it was not really anything identical with God, but that, if God was great enough to be thought of as the whole, and yet not essentially dependent on the change in its parts, all this had to be illusion, had to be some void itself that could not cause God to change, although all this itself changed ceaselessly.   

“Sir?” said the receptionist, holding out his pass for him to take. She was quite loud, seeing that he was in some thought, and wanting to make sure he heard her at once, so that no feeling of humiliation came within her. Angel did hear her at once, though not because she was loud. He was actively thinking about her, for he envied her position by the glass, that position where she did not have to touch the plants and hear the birds, where she was faced the other way by design from that enchantment, and so not captivated to the point where she bought in to the illusion, as the others did when they came to speak to her about some or other issue. No, she was in a position to recognize the truth here, and although the gray blankness of the walls of the company that she faced all day meant that there was only one world that really was attractive, which was the garden beyond the glass, that world was actually an illusion. 

Taking the pass that she handed him, looking in her eyes for the meaning of this understanding, thinking that she had it in her too, he left her for the garden where the AI bots were, where they were warming their black solar cells bit by bit under the sun. Change one screw, one atom, or even foment a single, transient glitch in one AI bot, that dormant and clueless machine, and the whole of reality —no matter where its limits are— has to be designated as changed. That was the beauty of essential dependence, that some central principle in usual reality need not be found if one was concerned only with changing it, if one’s idea of meaning was mere change that could originate anywhere and in any thing. But there was yet the Supreme, that thing beyond the sky, beyond reality, that which did not change no matter how large the change in this AI bot, no matter if he could someday originate the grand miracle of consciousness itself in there. And whatsoever could not change the Supreme, that had to be considered only ever an illusion. So…was working for this tech company, no matter the heights it would afford him, the right way, if it was just part of an illusion after all, if his accomplishments would be illusory, given the unchanging Supreme? 

And as he was walking his way through the garden, not carefully looking at the AI bots, those that were marvels for the others there, with the nuances in their expressions and their life-like hand movements, but thinking of God, far and above consciousness itself, beyond the sky, beyond reality, Angel encountered a small, almost hidden, gate there, and, beyond the gate he could make out a derelict shed, much like the one he had left at home back in the Taiga. Angel exited the company’s garden, swiftly waving goodbye to the AI bots and turning to the shed he had just found. That was the site where he would sit and think coolly for a bit, for he did not feel any more the urge to code. Why had Dr Reddy given him such a thought, one that did not motivate him to work but removed him from it, for work too turning out to be an illusion in his analysis now? After some form of temporary closure, or an accidental discovery by a security guard doing the nightly rounds, he would thank the company for the opportunity to visit and intern there, but then he would return home to think on all this.  

                                                    *

Dr Reddy was busy typing at his computer. It was the middle three hours of the afternoon where he liked to get his mind off of business and just code. He got up for a quick break and went by the window. A flock of kids from St Paul were milling about in their black and white uniforms. As their teacher entered the scene, they assembled quickly in a straight line and quieted down. In the storm of unassembled numbers in his head, a relatively clear thought came to Dr Reddy as he looked at the rigidity of the line of kids. It was on the computerization in reality itself, not simply within the domain of software. The presence of coding, but in the basic, bare bones of real life. 

He could feel a thought that needed verbalization coming to him, and as with these thoughts he liked to contextualize it in a reckoning with the very foundations of what he was doing, his very role and purpose. So he said: “A computer is largely composed, in its internal software domain, its algorithmic level, as a quantitative entity. This means that, when one part changes its numerical value, all other individual parts also change their numerical value. The dependence is almost essential, almost as if one part’s change is instantaneously the change in other parts, that one part does not exist but as a registry of change of other individual parts, that one part is, in all senses, in itself a void. This is true of all parts, and so all parts are void in it, their only significance being  registering the change in all the other parts. 

Now, this line of kids before me, it strikes me, is quite similar. There is an almost essential dependence between one kid and the next. One cannot say one of them leads the others to behave a certain way. They are, rather, empty, void, registers of change of each and every other individual kid that they see in that line. One could say they are destined, for a while, to assume the others as being a not-void plenitude, and themselves as being nothing but void, while later when the line can be broken they may resort to finding void in the others, like they do in themselves, and go off and play, be rebellious. So, this peculiar matter of essential dependence between part and part strikes me as something found in reality itself.”

And as the flock of kids from St Paul in their rigid line exited the company campus at dusk, Dr Reddy rubbed his hands over his eyes, and returned back to the computer code he was working on for the final hour. For a while, he found it difficult to concentrate, for a kind of vigor had come upon him when he realized that reality itself was almost exactly code like, and that perhaps a language was applicable to it to enact a swift coding of it, to change its design, to take charge of it. But after a deep breath or two, and more low-voiced, commonsensical reasoning with himself, he calmed down and resumed working on his code, for he saw that there was no point trading one set of voided things for another, no matter if one was supposedly in a computer, while the other was supposedly in reality.