The Calcutta Chromosome

“Anything she didn’t recognize she’d take apart on screen, producing microscopic structural analyses, spinning the images around and around, tumbling them over, resting them on their side, producing ever greater refinements of detail.” 

In the opening scene, we find Antar sitting at a computer using the Ava global search system. The setting is New York in the near future, indicating that the type of computer systems being used are complex. The above quote refers to how Ava undertakes to identify the ID card that she has brought to the attention of Antar.

“For years he’d been dreaming of leaving New York and going back to Egypt: of getting out of this musty apartment where all he could see when he looked down the street were boarded-up windows stretching across the fronts of buildings that were almost as empty as his own.” 

This quote depicts aspects of New York in the near future. The building that Antar lives in his mostly empty, suggesting that Antar is one of the few tenants. Desolation appears to mark the surrounding neighborhood, which Antar has grown weary of, and is the reason he longs to return to Egypt.

“It was a relief to escape from those voices in the evenings; to step out of that bleak, cold building, encaged in its scaffolding of rusty steel fire escapes; to get away from the metallic echo of it stairways and corridors. There was something enlivening, magical almost, about walking from that wind-blown street into the brilliantly lit passageways of Penn Station, about the surging crowds around the ticket counters, the rumble of trains under one’s feet, the deep, bass hum of a busker’s didgeridoo throbbing in the concrete like an amplified heartbeat.” 

Again we get a sense of the bleakness permeating Antar’s home. Yet there is more to Antar’s life a short walk from where he lives. Penn Station is thriving and upbeat, a place where things still happen, where people still congregate to listen to music and engage with one another. In contrast to the dreary surroundings Antar lives in, Penn Station overwhelms him with an ambience that somehow still flourishes in New York.