Zendegi (25 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
Martin said, ‘She mentioned you fondly, just a few days ago.’
‘Oh.’ Saba grew distraught; her daughter put an arm across her shoulders comfortingly. Nasim said, ‘I was ten when we left, and I have to admit that I didn’t get on with her parents even then. If I’d realised that she was fighting with them too I would have tried harder to stay in touch with her.’
Javeed looked up at her. ‘Are you fighting with my grandfather?’ He sounded more intrigued than affronted.
Nasim looked at Martin guiltily. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have—’
‘It’s okay.’
Nasim addressed Javeed. ‘Not really fighting, but we weren’t good friends.’
‘What brought you back from America?’ Martin asked.
Nasim said, ‘My mother had a job with the Ansari government. I came back thinking I was riding the same wave, though I’m afraid I ended up with less lofty ambitions.’
Martin had heard that story before. ‘I expect everyone who returned has helped the country in some way. So long as you’re not sending out spam.’
‘Actually I work for Zendegi.’
Javeed had lapsed back into shyness, so Martin spoke on his behalf. ‘My son’s a big fan.’
‘Really?’ Nasim turned to Javeed. ‘What games do you like?’
‘I only went once,’ he said. ‘Mama was going to take me.’
Martin said, ‘I’ll take you again, as soon as I can.’
Nasim dug her notepad out of her handbag and did something in a blur of thumb movements. Martin’s own notepad chimed softly in response. ‘Use this certificate,’ she said. ‘Unlimited access; it won’t cost you anything.’
‘I can’t accept that,’ he protested.
‘I insist,’ Nasim replied firmly. ‘It’s done.’
‘Thank you.’ Martin looked down at Javeed. ‘Say thank you to Aunty Nasim.’
‘Thank you, Aunty,’ he said.
At dusk, Martin lay down beside Javeed in Omar’s guest room. ‘I want to tell you something, but you have to promise you won’t get upset.’
‘What?’
‘Promise me first.’
‘I promise.’
‘I need to go back to the hospital tomorrow, so they can make sure I’m completely better.’
Javeed did not look happy, but he struggled to keep his word. ‘I want to go with you.’
‘No, pesaram, you stay here with Aunty Rana. Or you can go to the shop with Farshid and Uncle Omar.’
‘But you won’t come back!’ Javeed was crying now, snot running down his face. Martin fished out a tissue and wiped it away. ‘Shh. Of course I’ll come back.’
‘Everyone wants to leave me alone,’ Javeed sobbed.
‘Don’t say that.’ Martin forced himself to keep his voice steady. ‘You know Mama didn’t want to leave you. She would have done anything to stay. And this is just . . . the doctors put some Band-Aids inside me for my cuts, and now they have to check that they’re okay.’
‘They put something inside you?’ Javeed sniffed, his curiosity piqued.
‘Absolutely.’ Martin hesitated; would it frighten him more, or would it help him to understand? ‘They had to open me up to put them in.’ He lifted up his shirt and twisted to show the stitches along his side.
Javeed gazed at them unflinchingly. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘No, I was sleeping. And now they need to make sure everything’s okay. Like when you cut yourself: we always change the Band-Aid a few times, to make sure it’s clean and the cut’s getting better, don’t we?’
Javeed pondered this explanation. ‘I want you to get better,’ he conceded.
‘So I can go and see the doctor?’
Javeed said, ‘You can go.’
In the darkness, Martin felt Mahnoosh beside them, close enough to touch. If he’d been alone with her he would have lost himself to grief, dancing with her memory halfway to madness.
But she wasn’t a wild spirit, begging him to dash himself on the rocks beside her. He heard her voice calmly, in their child’s slow exhalations. And she asked nothing else of him but to do what she could not.
Martin woke before dawn and managed to extricate himself without disturbing Javeed. Omar insisted on driving him to the hospital. As they parted at reception Martin tried to thank him for everything he’d done since the accident.
Omar cut him off. ‘What do you expect? You think I forgot who broke me out of prison?’ Martin wasn’t at his sharpest; he almost opened his mouth to protest that he’d done nothing of the kind before he caught the self-deprecating joke. Omar wanted no praise for what he perceived as ordinary decency.
Martin spent an hour sitting by his bed before a doctor appeared. His stitches were examined and the area palpitated; it was all over in a matter of minutes.
The doctor addressed him in Farsi. ‘There’s something more we need to discuss.’ He’d told Martin his name, but Martin had forgotten it immediately.
‘All right.’ Martin prepared himself for a lecture on post-operative wound care.
‘After the accident you were bleeding. We did a scan in order to locate the source, and I’m afraid we also found a problem with your spine.’
Martin laughed. ‘That? I’ve had that for years.’ He had never entirely recovered from being landed on when that man had jumped out of the tree during the siege of Evin Prison. ‘It’s been treated as much as it can be, but I’ve been told it’s not worth an operation on the discs.’
The doctor glared at him reprovingly. ‘I’m not talking about a minor disc problem. I’m talking about a mass lodged next to your spine.’
Martin didn’t reply. He was tired, and he wanted to get back to Javeed. He couldn’t understand why people insisted on putting needless obstacles in his path.
‘At this point,’ the doctor continued, ‘we believe it’s a secondary growth from a cancer in your liver. We need to operate immediately, to remove the spinal tumour and to try to resect the primary tumour.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Maybe four or five hours. We’ll do it this afternoon.’
‘And then I can go?’ Martin pressed him. Javeed would start fretting if he wasn’t home by nightfall.
The doctor switched to English. ‘Have you understood what I’ve been saying?’
‘Of course.’ Martin was offended. ‘What do you think I am, a tourist? I’ve lived here for fifteen years; my wife’s Iranian.’
‘You have cancer, Mr Seymour. We need to operate on your liver and your spinal cord. I can’t say how long it will take to recover from the surgery.’
Martin’s skin tingled with fear, as if the gruff, middle-aged man seated in front of him had just brandished a knife in his face. It wasn’t that he’d lacked the vocabulary to understand the message the first time, but for him, sarataan carried none of the terrible resonance of its English equivalent.
‘I have cancer?’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s operable?’
‘The operation will help,’ the doctor assured him.
‘How much?’ Martin understood how absurd it was to demand certainty when he’d barely been diagnosed, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. ‘Can you cure it? If you cut out what you’ve found then follow up with drugs and radiation, will that finish it off?’
The doctor said, ‘We’ll see.’
14
As Nasim sat waiting for Blank Frank to be rebuilt, she suddenly had a vision of herself standing at the edge of an aquarium pool, trying to persuade a two-hundred-tonne blue whale to swat a ball through a hoop with its nose. However smart the animal was, and however agile it could be in the open ocean, the real trick was finding a way for it to move without crushing everything in sight.
She’d managed to shoehorn the project into Zendegi’s existing lease of computing resources from the Cloud; even so, the petabytes of data she was manipulating were almost choking the allocated racetrack memory. Paying for more storage wasn’t an option; the boss had agreed to let her play around for a while to see if this wild idea panned out, but only if she could keep the whole thing from showing up in the accounts.
The model-building algorithm she’d used all those years ago on the zebra finch data did not scale well, but after she and Bahador had spent a fortnight trying to refine it, to no avail, she’d decided to plough ahead regardless. They needed some results to show to investors as soon as possible; elegance and efficiency could come later.
Bahador knocked and entered the room; Nasim had taken to leaving the door half open to spare him the formalities.
‘We’re getting a strong demand surge from the south-east Asian arcades,’ he said. ‘We’re still below critical latency, but it’s tight.’
‘Okay.’ Nasim gritted her teeth. ‘If you have to, just . . . kill all my stuff.’
‘Will do.’ Bahador departed as quietly as he’d come.
You could have argued with me, Nasim thought irritably. At least gone through the motions, before accepting the inevitable. She watched the progress bars from her half-dozen tasks inching towards completion. Normally she would have been delighted that so many Indonesians and Malaysians were starting their weekend with an hour or two in Zendegi, but the racetrack drives she was sharing with these gamers were the only place she had to hold the intermediate results of her calculations. If Zendegi needed the storage there was no question of saving what she had in an offline back-up; writing that much data to holographic dye cubes would take hours. She’d simply have to hand the space over immediately, tossing a day’s work into the void.
The HCP had scanned the brains of more than four thousand subjects in unprecedented detail; most of the scans had been done on cadavers, but diffusion tensor imaging, which tracked the flow of water molecules along living nerve fibres, had also been employed. The full data set included equal numbers of males and females, but for the kind of composite model Nasim was trying to build it was worth analysing the sexes separately, removing at least one source of variation; the more alike the brains’ anatomy and organisation, the clearer the final picture would be. She’d started with the males, because she knew that if she’d chosen females for the demonstration everyone would have demanded to know why. But the model-building algorithm needed to generate temporary data for every possible pair of scans. Even using just the male subjects meant dealing with close on two million pairings.
One task reached its endpoint, saving its results and freeing up its working storage and processor allocation. Go see a movie instead, Nasim begged the teenagers of Kuala Lumpur. Just for tonight.
She brought up a latency histogram. It was flickering at the edge of critical, with a small proportion of customers experiencing minor, sporadic delays between their actions and the changes they wrought upon the virtual world. Mere head movements were handled locally, within the ghal’eha; no amount of congestion within Zendegi’s servers could disrupt the relationship between the user’s gaze and the image rendered in their goggles. But the object descriptions being fed to the castles needed to be updated rapidly enough to maintain the illusion of a fluid, responsive world. A tranquil stroll across a Martian desert might not suffer from a few extra milliseconds of latency, but a game of virtual table tennis could go downhill very fast. And while the brain was good at filtering out brief perceptual glitches, once they crossed a certain threshold all it could do was encourage you to stop indulging in risky behaviour for the sensorially confused - preferably after getting rid of the suspect contents of your stomach.
A second task finished. A third. Nasim peeked at one of the high-load games, looking down on a group of six hundred Indonesians who’d come together on a single, crowded battlefield to take on an army of leering demons. Along with their implausible rippling physiques, most of the good guys had magic charms and special powers - hard-won in gruelling quests, or stolen in battle, or maybe just bought with real money on the side. But nobody had signed up to play the spawn of the underworld; the enemy was entirely simulated. The game’s designers had the mechanics of a certain style of swordplay down pat, and Zendegi’s framework made the demons’ motions anatomically plausible, but aside from threats to tear out their opponents’ hearts they weren’t much good at repartee.
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