Zendegi (18 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
‘How many people have you actually spoken to tonight?’
‘Am I allowed to count waiters?’
‘Go and mingle.’ Her mother made a shooing gesture. ‘I didn’t buy you that dress so you could spend the night whining in my ear.’
Nasim left her and headed for the canapés. Amazingly enough, there’d been a vegetarian option, but it had been a quarter of the size of the other main courses and she was still famished.
As she stood at the buffet table trying to determine whether there was anything left that she could eat - other than garnishes - a voice beside her said, ‘Congratulations on your new President.’
‘Thank you.’ Nasim resisted the urge to add acerbically, ‘I do hope you’ll let us keep this one.’ She turned to face the speaker; the painfully thin young man looked familiar, but it took her a few seconds to place him. ‘Are you stalking me?’ she demanded. ‘Did you follow me to Washington?’
Caplan looked affronted. ‘Would you like to see my invitation? I’m a major donor to the Iranian-American Friendship Council.’
‘Since when? Three days ago?’
‘Six, actually.’
‘Six? A real futurologist.’ Nasim looked around for hotel security, but there was no honest complaint she could make that wouldn’t sound deranged and paranoid. ‘What exactly is it that you think I can do for you? Haven’t you heard the news about the HCP?’
‘Congress decided not to fund it.’ Caplan was stoical. ‘That’s sad, but it’s not unexpected. So there’ll be no big, coordinated federal project, but I’m sure you’ll still find grants here and there. I’ll be setting up my own foundation to help with that, though of course I can’t replace someone like Churchland.’
Zachary Churchland had died three weeks before and descended into the frosty limbo of an Alcor cryonic vault. He had left the bulk of his estate to the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, having finally concluded that he couldn’t trust his immortal soul to human hands.
‘I heard someone’s contesting his will,’ Nasim recalled. ‘Not just his widow; his first wife, too—’
‘Third wife. Actually I’m helping her fund the case,’ Caplan explained smoothly.
Nasim stared at him. ‘How does someone get to marry Zachary Churchland, then end up needing help to fund anything?’
‘A party in Las Vegas, a truckload of cocaine, and several professional athletes.’
‘I’m sorry I asked. But if she got nothing in the divorce, why would she be any luckier at the graveside? Or freezer-side.’
Caplan smiled. ‘She won’t be. But I found a lawyer who’s convinced her otherwise, based in part on the Leona Helmsley case - you know, the woman who was ruled mentally unfit after leaving twelve million to her dog. The ongoing litigation should help keep the bequest out of the Superintelligence Project’s hands for quite a while.’
Pet dog, pet god; maybe the precedent would actually fly for a dyslexic judge. Still, Nasim was baffled. ‘Why should you care who gets Churchland’s money? It’s either Bullshit Squared, or the wives. It’s lost to the HCP.’
‘No doubt it is,’ Caplan conceded, ‘but I don’t want the superintelligence to come into existence before I’m uploaded. It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity; I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium.’
‘Really? I have “personal plans” that require Naveen Andrews and a bottle of coconut oil, but I don’t expect they’re going to happen either.’
Caplan was bemused. ‘Why are you so hostile?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve had enough experience of deluded fundamentalists to last a lifetime.’
‘Well, you’re wasting your energy,’ Caplan replied loftily. ‘One way or another, everything I speak of will come to pass. You can either join us, or be left behind.’
Nasim said, ‘Don’t go crazy with those mushroom-stuffed vol-auvents; I heard they can slash three per cent off the lifespan of nematode worms.’
Back in their hotel room, Nasim’s mother said, ‘I received an interesting job offer tonight.’
‘Someone wants to poach you?’ Nasim was excited; it would have to be a big step up the ladder if they expected to lure her away from Harvard. ‘Who? Georgetown?’
‘Kourosh Ansari.’ Her mother smiled at Nasim’s expression. ‘He’s looking for advisers to help plan the restructuring of the economy. In fact, his representative told me that he’d read After Oil as soon as it came out.’
‘Congratulations.’ Nasim was stunned. She’d certainly expected that parts of the diaspora would start trickling back to Iran, but even in those abstract terms she’d been thinking of a much longer time frame. ‘Have you decided what you’ll do?’
‘I think I’m going to accept the offer,’ her mother said. ‘There are no guarantees that they’ll really follow through on my advice, but if I missed this chance to have some input into the reconstruction process I’d never forgive myself.’
Nasim sat down on her bed; she picked up a pillow and held it against her chest.
She said, ‘I want to go with you.’
‘You mean come for a holiday? Of course!’ Her mother beamed. ‘That would be wonderful!’
Nasim shook her head. ‘Not just a holiday. I want to go home. I want to live in Iran again.’
Her mother sat beside her. ‘What about your work?’
‘I don’t know. That’s all so uncertain now.’ The fact was, for a long time she’d been tacitly assuming that the HCP would go ahead. That would have meant a mountain of paperwork at the start, but the payoff would have been at least four or five years to focus on the science without further interruptions. Now it would be back to business as usual: begging for one small grant after another, never really being able to make plans that stretched beyond the next six months. ‘Maybe there’s something just as challenging that I can do in Iran. Everything will be changing; there’ll be a thousand opportunities.’
‘I’d come back and visit you, you know,’ her mother said. ‘If you stayed here. It’s not as if we’d be apart all the time.’
‘I know.’ Nasim put an arm around her. ‘And I’d visit you too. Together we’d burn up all the oil in the world.’
‘So would that be so bad?’ Her mother smiled. ‘I’m not trying to run away from you. But I don’t want you destroying your whole career just because you don’t want to be left alone here.’
Nasim said sternly, ‘I’m not a child. This is a chance to rethink my plans. I spent so long hoping I’d be part of the HCP that I ended up with tunnel vision. Why shouldn’t I think about trying something new?’
‘All right,’ her mother agreed. ‘You can always come with me and take a look around before you make up your mind. Just don’t burn your bridges straight away.’
‘I won’t.’ Nasim embraced her. ‘So let’s stop talking about me. We should be celebrating your new job!’
‘What did you have in mind?’
Nasim looked around for the room service menu. ‘Just because the kitchen’s officially closed, that doesn’t mean they’ve run out of cake.’
Later, lying awake in the dark, Nasim turned the decision over in her mind. The prospect of walking away from her brain-mapping work was wrenching, but it wasn’t as if she was trashing her files and erasing herself from history. She’d already made some contributions to the field, and other people would build on them. She didn’t have to chain herself to one project for the rest of her life just to keep the time she’d spent on it from being wasted.
She had always wanted to return to Iran. Now that her country was finally being reborn, she had to grab the chance to witness that with her own eyes, instead of watching everything unfold from a distance. All the frustration she’d felt at not being part of the uprising would be assuaged if she could at least be a part of the rebuilding.
She began drifting towards sleep. Her mind was still in turmoil, but she was going to have to get used to that. Going back would not be easy, but this was her time, this was her chance to reclaim the life that had been stolen from her. Going back would not be easy, but she knew now that she could not stay away.
PART TWO
2027-2028
11
It was the day for Javeed to register for school, a week before classes began. Martin drove Mahnoosh to the shop early and the three of them sat in the back room unpacking boxes. Just the smell of new books always made Martin feel refreshed and optimistic; Mahnoosh was less romantic, and suggested that this was all down to traces of glue. Javeed’s task was to crush the biofoam packing chips by hammering them relentlessly with his fists, and to complain at length about shipments that were cushioned with shredded newsprint or plastic bags full of air.
When it was time to leave, Javeed embraced his mother tightly, clinging for a few moments longer than usual. ‘Azizam, azizam,’ she murmured reassuringly, pressing her face against his hair. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll love school.’
‘I know,’ Javeed replied cheerfully.
Martin kissed her. ‘See you this afternoon.’
There was a long queue at the school; they had to fill in a form and then wait to have it processed. Martin didn’t understand why they couldn’t have done the whole thing online; he’d renewed his driver’s licence a month before without leaving home, thanks to a seamless process involving facial biometrics and a gadget that read the RFID tag in the card. Still, it was good for his son to see the school from the inside at least once before starting classes. When Javeed needed to use the toilet the woman ahead of them offered to keep their place in the queue, but Martin sent him on the small adventure of getting there and back by himself.
In the office, an administrative assistant sighted their collection of identifying documents and perused the registration form, ready to pass it through a scanner.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Seymour,’ she said, ‘you haven’t written anything for the child’s religion.’ She raised her pen, ready to correct this omission.
‘He has no religion,’ Martin replied. ‘If the computer won’t accept a blank, you’ll have to write “atheist”.’ He saw a flicker of panic cross her face, but she recovered her composure rapidly.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I think you misunderstood the question. What it means is the religion of his paternal grandfather . . .’ She gave Martin a frank, appraising look, then decided it was definitely worth adding, ‘or great-grandfather, or so on, as far back as necessary.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Martin had no wish to blow the matter out of proportion, but it would be good to know whether there was an official policy defining atheists out of existence, or whether he was just facing a flustered individual who didn’t know how to handle this minor anomaly.
‘When we ask if children are Kurdish or Arabs,’ the woman replied, ‘the fact is, they are all Iranians, and we simply mean the ethnic group of their ancestors. So it is completely logical and consistent to apply the same reasoning to the question of religion.’
Martin had to admire the ingenuity of her argument. Most likely this woman had no discretion in the matter and she was simply trying to spare them all from the bureaucratic hell that would arise if the computer rejected their registration.
Other books
Adland by Mark Tungate
Complementary Colors by Adrienne Wilder
The Tempted Soul by Adina Senft
Troubles and Treats by Tara Sivec
A.W. Hartoin - Mercy Watts 04 - Drop Dead Red by A.W. Hartoin
El Paso: A Novel by Winston Groom
Thirty-Four and a Half Predicaments Bonus Chapters: Rose Gardner Mystery by Swank, Denise Grover
Storms of Lazarus (Shadows of Asphodel, Book 2) by Karen Kincy
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus, Lester Kaufman, Tom Stern
Shapeshifters Anonymous by J A Konrath