Guest post written by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Lavanya Lakshminarayan lives between Bangalore and Hyderabad, and grew up in the former. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award. Her work has also been longlisted for a BSFA Award. She spent ten years as a game designer, building worlds and crafting narratives for massive successes like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. She’s travelled across the world, but loves coming home to her two dogs and the legion of stray cats she cares for. She can be found on Instagram at @lavanya.ln and Twitter at @lavanya_ln. The Ten Percent Thief is out now.
The year was 2017 and I was living my best life as a workaholic game designer with an all-you-can-take high pressure job at a highly successful games studio that encouraged me to go above and beyond nonstop, something I was more than happy to do because I was obsessed with creating, designing, building the most fantastic experiences possible for players of the casual games I worked on. Here’s the thing about being a workaholic—no matter how much you love what you do, you eventually run out of fuel.
I should have seen burn out on the horizon. I didn’t. It slammed into me with all the velocity of a spaceship re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
The year was 2017 and I quit my job because my brain felt broken. I needed some air. I needed to recalibrate, to understand who I was and what made me tick. I had to rebuild. So, I turned to what I’d been dreaming of doing since I was eight years old, and started to write a fantasy novel. Reader, I never finished that fantasy novel. Instead, something else came along—a moment in time so desperate and horrifying, revealing and reality-shattering that I slammed the brakes on everything else and decided to chase it down the rabbit hole with no mind for where I might be headed. The result was my debut novel, The Ten Percent Thief.
The Ten Percent Thief is a mosaic novel set in near-future Bangalore. A series of interconnected stories featuring multiple protagonists examines life in Apex City—Bangalore rebranded and governed by a corporation. Here, productivity and social image are all-powerful. Civilization is mapped onto the mathematically perfect Bell Curve. High performing individuals skyrocket to the top twenty percent of society, and form the Virtual elite, with limitless access to privileges and the latest technology. Failure to succeed results in sliding down the curve to the bottom ten percent of society—routinely deported and branded Analogs, with no access to running water, electricity, or humanity.
The Ten Percent Thief was first published in South Asia as Analog/ Virtual, and it took its South Asian title from a story in the book that shares the same name. It was the first piece of the book I wrote. In this story, Anita, a member of the Virtual elite, is being penalized for her non-performance. She’s sliding down the Bell Curve and is in danger of being relegated to the bottom ten percent of society. To help her cope with potential deportation to the Analog world, she’s systematically being stripped of all her tech privileges and access to her apps, and must succeed at performing tasks in physical reality as part of a Performance Improvement Program. The first of her tasks involves purchasing groceries—at a real-world grocery store.
It sounds simple enough. It isn’t. I know exactly how she feels because her story is mine.
Let me take you back to the year 2017, when this all started. I was unemployed and writing my fantasy novel when I thought it would be a delightful idea to step out of my home—for the first time in weeks—and buy groceries to make myself a nice dinner. This felt like a luxury at the time. Remember how I was a workaholic? When you’re a workaholic at a games studio it means you’re available all the time. I’d spent years working 12-hour days, often working weekends, dialing into meetings with teams all over the world, playing games nonstop for research, playtesting my own game features… My phone, computer and console controller were effectively bonus appendages—you’d never catch me without at least one of them in my hands. To maximize on my efficiency, and to chase every single corporate goal laid out in front of me, I took to using every convenience app out there to get my errands done for me.
I had all my groceries delivered to my doorstep. I barely needed to cook because the company I worked at provided us with lunch and snacks all day long. I had courier service apps run my dry-cleaning for me, ordered everything from moisturizer to cushion covers online, and I successfully lived in a bubble built from impossible targets and technological tools enabling me to chase them down. I was a monster who hadn’t stepped into a real-world store in ages. Until I decided to buy my groceries IRL and make my own dinner.
I strolled down to the local grocery store with my reusable shopping bags in my backpack. The light and sound of the outside world was overwhelming, and I could feel a headache coming on. Fast-moving traffic whizzed past me, disorientating me each time I had to cross the street. It was the middle of the day; most of my friends were at work, my phone was eerily silent. I walked on, gaining confidence with each step, reveling in my newfound free time.
By the time I reached the local store, I was practically bouncing on the balls of my feet. This was a refreshing new adventure! The kind I hadn’t had in ages. I pushed through the glass doors, exuberant, and stopped dead in my tracks.
Towers of shelves loomed before me, aisles stretching unto the horizon in every direction. My heart skipped a beat. I looked up and there were so many signs, more than I could read all at once. My vision blurred over. Palms sweating, I grabbed a cart and pushed it down the nearest aisle. How was I going to find everything I’d need in this maze?
Perspiration trickled down my forehead, and the back of my t-shirt was damp. A shudder ran through me, followed by another one, and I blanked out. My breath came in rapid bursts, jagged and painful, and it felt as if my heart was going to pop right out of my chest. My knuckles went white on the handle of my shopping cart, and I leaned forward, putting all my weight on it. My head spun, the first twinges of a migraine pulsing in my temples.
I don’t know how long I stood there, gulping in long, deep breaths the way my therapist had taught me. I’d had panic attacks in the past, usually triggered by large crowds in public spaces, and we’d worked on coping mechanisms. The grocery store was empty that day.
I don’t remember much else other than an overwhelming sense of relief when I paid for my purchases—no idea what I bought—at the billing counter and caught the first auto rickshaw back home.
If this sounds abnormal, well, it is. It was also very real, no exaggeration.
I was completely unequipped to be out and about, navigating this grocery store, contending with the three-dimensional physicality of real objects in real spaces. I’d become so accustomed to 2D icons, to scrolling through menus sorted by endlessly customizable filters, personalized recommendations list, purchase histories that I just… could not function.
It was staggering to discover this. I felt like I’d stepped through a portal and seen another dimension of myself, and of the world—all my underlying assumptions that governed how it worked stripped bare, flipped upside down, inverted.
All this while, I’d believed technology was empowering me—and certainly, it was helpful. But I’d let it take control of the wheel, and grown so reliant on all is conveniences and offerings, that I was content to go wherever it led me. And it had led me deeper into my cocoon of productivity at the cost of being able to navigate physicality.
Anita’s story, Analog/ Virtual, sprawled across the blank page, tumbling out of me in a rush as I sought to reckon with what I’d just experienced. It was just a short story when it started, until while I was writing it, I realized it could be so much more. I was awake again. Obsessed. I couldn’t unsee or erase what I’d experienced in that grocery store. And as I unraveled and fragmented and analyzed the various kinds of relationships humans share with technology, I began to envision a fictional future and set it all down. And that’s how the The Ten Percent Thief came to be, inspired by a panic attack in an empty grocery store in Bangalore, India.
