Alif the Unseen Read online

  “Good little at’uta,” said Alif, using the Egyptian diminutive Dina had bestowed upon her long ago, “Pretty at’uta.” He flicked the end of his cigarette out the window and turned away, dusting his hands on his jeans. The cat settled down on the ledge with her feet tucked under her body. She regarded him through half-closed eyes.

  “You can stay there,” Alif said, sitting down at his desk, “but you can’t come in. The maid’s a Shafa’i and cat hair makes her ritually impure.”

  The cat blinked agreeably. Alif ran one finger across the wireless mouse pad next to his computer and watched the screen crackle to life. There were messages in his inbox: confirmation for a wire transfer of 200 dirhams from a client; an introduction to a Syrian activist who was interested in his services. A Russian grey hat with whom Alif played virtual chess had made a move against his remaining bishop. After blocking the Russian’s advance with one of his pawns, Alif opened a new project file. He deliberated for a few moments.

  “Intisar,” he said to the cat. “Rastini. Sar inti.”

  The cat opened and closed one eye.

  “Tin Sari,” said Alif, typing the words as he spoke, “Yes, that’s it. I was thinking in the wrong language. A veil of tin for a wayward princess.”

  It took him most of the night to modify his existing keystroke logger program with a set of genetic algorithms that might—he hoped—be used to identify basic elements of a typing pattern. He rose only to sneak into the kitchen and brew a kanaka of Turkish coffee, adding cardamom pods he’d crushed against the granite countertop with the back of a spoon. When he returned to his room, the cat had disappeared from the window ledge.

  “They all leave,” he muttered, “Even the feline ones.”

  He pulled up Intisar’s computer from a drop-down menu. The first time he worked on her machine he’d enabled remote access, allowing Hollywood, his custom-built hypervisor, to track her usage statistics. She never discovered him. Once in awhile he meddled benevolently, clearing the malware her commercial antivirus software had missed, running his own defrag programs, deleting old temp files; things the ordinary civilian would either forget to do or never learn properly at all. Whenever there was an increase in internet policing in one of his client’s countries, it was common for him to go without sleep and speech for days; during such periods Intisar often accused him of neglect. It hurt him, yet he never told her about these small acts of affection. She did not know that a copy of her incomplete thesis sat behind one of his firewalls, ensuring her words would survive any event short of the apocalypse. These were the only gestures that made sense to him. So much of what he felt did not translate.

  He slipped into her machine and created a node for Tin Sari v1.0, connecting it to a botnet of his clients’ computers. The botnet would process the incoming data remotely, sending results to Alif via Hollywood. Alif felt a small pang of guilt for using his clients’ machines without asking, and for such selfish reasons. But most of his clients wouldn’t notice an extra program running discretely in the background as they worked, and those who would had known Alif long enough not to ask questions. As soon as Tin Sari started transmitting data, he could begin to refine the algorithms, compensating for errors and adding new parameters. It would take time and patience, but if Abdullah was right, the end result would be a digital portrait of Intisar. Alif could instruct Hollywood to filter any internet user who fit her specs, making them invisible to each other. He would grant her request: she would never see his name again.

  “A hijab,” Alif said softly, “I am hanging a curtain between us. Dina would say it is not fitting for us to look at each other.” Dina would say it, but he would not—his own motives were ridiculous, and he could not speak them. By hiding from Intisar so completely, she could not return to him even if she wanted to, and he was spared the humiliation of knowing she would never try.

  Alif blinked as bright spots flickered at the edge of his vision— he had been staring at the computer for too long. His head hurt. Outside, the color of the sky was shifting; soon the muezzins would sound the call to dawn prayer. He shut off his monitor and pushed back from the desk. Without undressing he lay down in bed, overtaken by a sudden rush of fatigue.

  Chapter Three

  Alif woke the next morning to the sound of a music video streaming from the speakers wired to his flatscreen monitor. As he opened his eyes, the newest Lebanese pop starlet, Dania or Rania or Hania, appeared onscreen bottom-first, lolling on a bed of roses, mouthing autotuned lyrics about the intense longing of the peach for the banana. Alif tugged at the waistband of his boxers. A knock on the door stopped him, and he slouched to answer it, opening up just enough to accept a breakfast tray from the maid.

  He ate at his desk. Through the floor he could hear his mother moving about the kitchen downstairs, pulling pans out of cupboards, preparing for the second meal of the day before she’d had a chance to properly digest the first. Squinting, Alif attempted to calculate the number of weeks since his father’s last visit. He couldn’t remember. As a child he had eagerly anticipated the appearance of his father’s leather slippers by the front door, laid out in preparation by his mother, signaling the advent of a long stay.They had been more frequent in those days. Now when his father was in the City he called from the opulent New Quarter flat where his first wife lived, a flat to which he had referred on several occasions as ‘home’. Years ago, when it still mattered, Alif had interrogated him about this, asking why their little duplex in Baqara District was not ‘home’ as well. There was a dissatisfied pause. It’s your home, his father had answered diplomatically.

  Having finished his breakfast and tea, Alif flopped down on his bed again, succumbing to lethargy. Through the wall he could hear Dina talking on the phone, her voice traveling up and down its familiar scale. He put one hand up to the flaking plaster beneath his Robert Smith poster. Dina too was an only child—the survivor of a string of false hopes; miscarriages Alif ’s mother had gossiped about to his father in a sad, insinuating voice in the days when she was still pressuring him for another child of her own. But Alif, like Dina, was to have no sibling—his father already had Fatima and Hazim and Ahmed, the light-skinned progeny of his first wife, and neither his family nor his wallet would tolerate more mottled interlopers. Alif wondered whether Dina had become a reproach to her mother the way he had to his; a single sign of fruitfulness to remind her of barren years.

  Dina’s voice had ceased; her door opened and closed. Alif took his hand away from the wall. Getting up, he woke his computer and settled down to work.

  * * *

  The first version of Tin Sari failed to tell him anything of substance. Intisar consistently wrote emails in Arabic and chatted and microblogged in English, but that could be true of almost anyone in the City. Her keystroke rate varied too much to track. She probably sat for long minutes over certain emails and dashed through others depending on the urgency and nature of the message. For weeks she remained elusive, proving, he thought bitterly, that Intisar was made of finer subtler substance than his programming languages could recognize, or had ever recognized.

  As the data streamed in, Alif imagined her sitting at her desk, dark hair pulled off her face in a sloppy bun, wearing only a teeshirt and a pair of jogging pants as she emailed her friends to make plans or worked on her thesis. She had been researching and writing it as long as he had known her, and would leave Al Basheera University with the highest honors available to an undergraduate. Thus well-educated and well-bred, she would make a perfect wife for the man whose name Alif hated with an intensity that frightened him.

  Without her, he drifted. His life was again reduced to an uncomfortable circle of women inside the house and men outside it; to the chatter of his mother and the maid or the dirty jokes Abdullah and his friends told, all of which seemed insignificant compared to the memory of Intisar’s voice going high and soft as he discovered some new latitude of her body. The work he did became like a reproach, a reminder that he was mottle-bloo
ded, unwanted, unfit for any higher or more visible profession. He ran diagnostics and patched firewalls with absent efficiency, wondering if this numbing grief was permanent.

  He took out their marriage contract and looked at it almost every day, feeling foolish each time he did so: how ridiculous to think that it meant anything. He had seen too many Egyptian movies and read too many books. The idea of a secret urfi marriage filled him with a romantic zeal that seemed naive now. He had imagined a fairytale chain of events: Intisar would be thrown out of her father’s house with only the clothes on her back, and Alif would manfully assume responsibility, leaving her in his mother’s tender care as he prepared their marital household. As the weeks passed the vision atrophied until it was painful to him to remember.

  Then Tin Sari returned something he did not expect. On a dusty afternoon, just over a month since he had installed a working version of the program on Intisar’s machine, a text box popped up on his desktop as he was reworking a few lines of bugged code.

  “What do you want?” Alif muttered at it, clicking on a dropdown arrow. It informed him that a pattern had been identified on HP Etherion 700 Notebook and its orbital devices. Would Alif like to assign a file name to this pattern?

  Alif ’s eyes lingered on the blinking cursor in disbelief. Intisar, he typed.

  Create filter for “Intisar” in Hollywood diagnostic software?

  Enter.

  His CPU tower emitted a prolonged series of buzzes and clicks. Alif quit all open programs to free up more processing power.

  “Holy God,” he breathed, “Holy God.” He clicked another dropdown arrow on the text box to reveal a detailed report of Tin Sari’s findings. Having watched Intisar for five weeks, it determined that she used Arabic and English at a ratio of 2.21165 to 1, avoided contractions, and most curiously of all, had in her native language a peculiar preference for words in which the letter alif occurred in a medial position. Alif wondered what to make of this subconscious love poem. Mesmerized, he fed Tin Sari emails from his cousins in Thiruvananthapuram, text from the sports section of Al Khalij, anything he could think of to try and prompt a false positive. Without fail, it sorted Intisar’s words from all the rest.

  Alif struggled to understand what his algorithms were telling him. Perhaps somewhere deep in the mind was a sort of linguistic DNA, roped helixes of symbols that belonged to no one else. For days Alif wrote nothing—no code, no email—and instead wondered how much of the soul resided in the fingertips. He was faced with the possibility that every word he typed spoke his name, no matter what other superficial information it might contain. Perhaps it was impossible to become someone else, no matter what avatar or handle one hid behind.

  The program behaved in a way that made him uneasy. He had written it using a certain amount of fuzzy logic; the commands that acted as grey go-betweens in the black-and-white world of binary computing. Alif knew how to talk to black and white and make them see themselves in each other; this was what made him good at his job. But Tin Sari, full of exceptions and shortcuts though it was, should not have been able to detect a pattern so esoteric—a pattern that remained unclear to Alif no matter how much math he threw at it. For the first time in his life he was using a program without understanding how it worked.

  When Tin Sari correctly identified Intisar based on a single sentence—a one-line instant message sent on a day of low computer activity—Alif called Abdullah.

  “Bhai,” he said, “You have to come take a look at this.”

  “Which?” Abdullah was chewing noisily on something.

  “Do you remember that botnet I told you about? The language filter?”

  “The girl trouble botnet?”

  Alif made a face. “Yes.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s causing my balls to retreat into my chest cavity. I must have done something wrong. I want you to check my algorithms and tell me I’m not insane.”

  “Not working out?” There was a vegetable crack followed by rapid chewing.

  “No, it’s—what the hell are you eating?”

  “Carrot sticks. I’ve started a regime.”

  “Congratulations. Come over.”

  Abdullah arrived half an hour later, wearing an old army jacket and carrying a messenger bag over one shoulder. This he threw on Alif ’s bed without ceremony. Overturning an empty wastebasket, he sat down next to Alif in front of the computer.

  “Let me see this beast. What’s it written in?”

  Alif opened the Tin Sari v5.2 program files.

  “C++. But the type system is sort of—new. I’ve made a lot of modifications.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, but whatever.” Abdullah scrolled through lines of code, eyes flickering in the light of the monitor. His expression changed.

  “Alif,” he said slowly, “What is this?”

  Alif got up and began to pace the room.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. The first version was a mess. So I kept tinkering with it—by the end I wasn’t sure what I was writing anymore. I was just finding ways to solve problems as they came up. Parameters and exceptions became the same thing. I stopped telling it ‘this but not that’ and started telling it ‘this, this, this’. And it listened.”

  “We are still talking about code, yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Abdullah tapped his foot in frustration.

  “Well does it work?”

  Alif shivered.

  “It doesn’t just work, bhai. It frightens me. Today it correctly identified that girl I told you about based on one sentence, Abdullah, one sentence. It shouldn’t be possible. No amount of math can identify something as complex as an individual behavior pattern based on so little input.”

  “It would seem you are incorrect, since you just did.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  Abdullah swiveled toward him on the overturned wastepaper basket.

  “Is this an elaborate way of asking for a compliment? Do you want me to tell you you’re a genius? If I had known you asked me over here to rub your ego, I would have brought some lubricant.”

  Alif collapsed on his bed with a groan, massaging his closed eyes.

  “I don’t care about that,” he said, “I just want to understand what’s happened. I need an outside perspective.”

  Abdullah pursed his lips over his buck teeth.

  “What you are talking about—recognizing a complete, individual personality—is something we do automatically. I recognize your voice on the phone. I could probably recognize your emails and texts even without seeing your address or phone number. This is a basic function for anybody who isn’t suffering from some kind of mental disorder. But machines can’t do it. They need an IP address or an email address or a handle to identify someone. Change those identifiers and that person becomes invisible to them. If what you’re saying is true, you have discovered an entirely new way of getting computers to think. One might even say that with this botnet, you have endowed your little desktop machine with intuition.”

  Alif glanced at Abdullah out of the corner of his eye. He sat with a pronounced slouch, his large feet bent at the toe where the rim of the wastepaper basket met the floor.

  “You say that so calmly,” Alif said.

  Abdullah got up.

  “Yes, because I’m not convinced it’s actually true. It’s impossible, as you yourself said. There must be some other explanation for your botnet’s unusual rate of accuracy. Regardless, it’s a very, very clever trick, and I salute you.” He grabbed his messenger bag off the bed. “You need to get out of the house more often, Alif. You’re looking very peaky.”

  * * *

  He kept his promise: he made himself invisible to her. Using the profile of Intisar that Tin Sari had created, he instructed Hollywood to mask his digital presence. If she tried to visit his website—if she even got that far; he hid it in the dark web where it was safe from prying search engines—her browser would tell her it did not
exist. She could create a thousand new email addresses and send him messages from each one: they would all bounce. A search for his names, given and professional, would yield nothing. It would be as if he had vanished from the electronic world.

  He did not have the heart to turn his weapon on himself. The very thought of making her invisible to him was too much to bear. He left Hollywood connected to Intisar’s machine, reasoning that the additional data from Tin Sari might provide an even completer picture of her digital self, and that this in turn would help him understand these somnambulant patterns, this language-beyond-language he had discovered through her. It was not spying. He didn’t read her email, after all, or check her chat logs: he merely studied the patterns Tin Sari detected in her words. He told himself he had moved beyond mourning into pure science. Sometimes he was even convinced.

  Midway through October, a sandstorm blew in from the interior. All morning Alif lay in bed listening to a cacophony of female distress on the roof: the maid, Dina and Dina’s family’s maid rushed back and forth to bring in the laundry before it was stained by the rich mineral silt choking the air. He ground his teeth and heard microscopic grains of dust pop between them. No matter how well one taped the windows, it inevitably seeped inside, propelled by some unknown and perverse force of nature. Soon he would get up and go over the inner recesses of his computer tower with his mother’s hairdryer on a no-heat setting, a trick he’d learned from sandstorms past. He closed his eyes against the grey half-light. It could wait a few more minutes.

  A thud against his window pane made him jump. He scrambled out of bed: on the ledge outside sat the black-and-orange cat. She looked at him entreatingly, ears flattened, coated in yellowish dust.

  “Oh lord.” Alif peeled his homemade perimeter of duct tape off the glass, opening the window a few inches. The cat squeezed through and flung herself into the room. She landed near the foot of his bed, sneezing.