Zendegi (33 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
‘Great. Thank you.’
When Nasim arrived at the shop, Martin was locking up and pulling down the shutters.
‘You don’t stay open at lunchtime?’ she asked.
‘I only open in the mornings myself,’ he said. ‘There’s a student who comes in and does the evening shift, but I don’t have anyone for the afternoons yet.’
The place he took her to was a crowded juice bar with three tiny plastic tables squeezed between the wall and the serving counter, but the owner really did whip up a traditional herb-and-vegetable omelette without complaint - and without throwing in a handful of ground beef or diced chicken for ‘added flavour’.
‘How’s Javeed?’ she asked.
Martin took a while to reply. ‘He’s still thinking it through, working out the implications. Every now and then he gets a fresh realisation that Mahnoosh is really not coming back. Before his sixth birthday, we talked about it and he decided to let the day pass. He didn’t want to celebrate without her.’
Nasim tried to think of something encouraging to say. ‘I’m sure he’s going to be resilient in the long run.’ Her mother had told her that Martin had cancer, but she had no intention of quizzing him about that. Most of their conversations since the funeral had revolved around Zendegi; she was only too happy to help provide the poor kid with some distraction.
Martin said, ‘Javeed’s godparents, Omar and Rana, are wonderful people. So I don’t want anything I say to be taken as a slight on their characters.’
‘Okay.’ Nasim shifted uncomfortably in her plastic chair. She had no idea where he was heading. She’d met the couple only once, at Mahnoosh’s funeral, though her mother knew them through mutual friends.
‘Omar already treats Javeed like a son,’ Martin continued. ‘I can’t imagine anyone else caring more about his welfare. But some of Omar’s ideas, the way he talks about women, about ethnic groups . . .’ He trailed off. ‘You lived in the States for a while, didn’t you?’
‘About twelve years,’ Nasim replied.
‘I think you understand what I’m saying. It’s hard work to get all that racist, sexist garbage even halfway under control. Nobody really gets it out of their system. But that’s no reason to give up and say it doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course not,’ Nasim agreed cautiously.
‘I don’t want Omar raising my son,’ Martin said bluntly. ‘There are things that are important to me that he’ll simply never accept - let alone pass on to a child with any conviction. I know I should be grateful that Javeed has someone like Omar prepared to look after him. But I can’t make peace with it. I just can’t. That’s why I’ve come to you.’
Nasim felt the blood draining from her face. He was going to ask her to adopt the boy.
‘Martin, I—’ She stopped, too flustered to say anything coherent. Mahnoosh had been her cousin, but she’d barely known her, let alone Javeed. If there’d been no one - literally no one else in the world, she might have been prepared to do this, but Martin seemed to be telling her that he wanted to toss aside his loyal and loving friends . . . just because she had a more Western sensibility?
Martin went on, ‘Last night I saw a replay of the football match in Zendegi between the two Azimis. Each team held the other to a draw.’ He laughed. ‘I was probably the last person in the world to notice what you’ve achieved, to appreciate how amazing it was.’
Nasim was utterly confused now. Was he trying to flatter her? Praising her technical skills as if that had some bearing on her eligibility for this role?
‘But once I saw that game,’ he continued, ‘I knew it was the answer. Javeed’s happiest times with me these days are all in Zendegi. And I don’t think he’d find it strange or frightening; I think he’d just accept it. I think it would make perfect sense to him.’
Nasim said, ‘What would make sense to him? What is it you’re asking me to do?’ She thought she knew now, but having narrowly averted embarrassing them both with her first misunderstanding, she wasn’t willing to take anything for granted.
‘I want you to do for me what you did for Azimi,’ Martin announced calmly. ‘I want you to make a Proxy of me that can live on in Zendegi and help raise my son.’
After forty minutes the owner of the juice bar started giving them dark looks. There were only so many banana milkshakes Nasim could bring herself to order for the sake of staying put, so they walked back to Martin’s empty shop and sat in the small coffee lounge where patrons were invited to flick through their potential purchases.
‘I have some money from my wife’s insurance,’ Martin told her, for the fifth time.
‘That’s not the point,’ Nasim replied patiently. ‘It’s not a question of expense. It’s a question of complexity.’
‘I’m not asking for anything sophisticated,’ Martin insisted. ‘I don’t expect this Proxy to deliver lectures on moral philosophy; I just want him to have the right gut reaction if his son starts referring to women as whores or Arabs as wild animals.’
Nasim said, ‘If it were that simple, I could go back to the office right now and crank out an ordinary, scripted Proxy that flew off the handle in response to any list of triggers you cared to spell out. Do you honestly want something that crude?’
‘Not that crude,’ Martin conceded.
‘So do you really think that a Proxy whose only ability was knowing when to lay down the law - and who became tongue-tied whenever he was challenged to defend his views - would have any impact on your son at all? I’m not talking about high-powered philosophy! I’m talking about debating a six-year-old, or a twelve-year-old, with a more subtle response than “Because I said so”.’
Martin was beginning to look deflated. He said, ‘I’m going to have to go and pick up Javeed from school.’
Nasim said, ‘I’m sorry, Martin. You know if there’s anything else I can do—’
‘Thank you.’
In the taxi back to the office, Nasim felt drained. She wondered how many other people had watched Virtual Azimi tenaciously holding his ground against the original - as if this proved them to be perfectly matched mirror-images - and concluded: This is it, my chance to cheat death. Well, if Azimi was hit by a truck, his widow would certainly receive royalties from the game for as long as it remained popular, but most people could forget about a Proxy preserving their earning capacity, let alone anything more personal. Maybe she should have told Martin that, while the match hadn’t literally been fixed, Azimi would have been crazy to hammer his Proxy’s team into the ground; that might have been good for his ego, but it wouldn’t have helped anyone’s bank balance.
Bahador spotted her as she stepped out of the elevator. ‘Did you hear about the cleric in Qom?’ he asked.
‘No—?’ They walked together down the corridor; Bahador wasn’t smiling, so Nasim decided that this probably wasn’t the opening line to a joke.
‘Hojatoleslam Shahidi. He just issued a statement denouncing Virtual Azimi as an affront to God and human dignity.’
‘An affront? Why?’
Bahador read from his notepad. ‘ “God’s gifts to us should be shared, and taught, and used freely to delight him, but they must not be made into commodities to be bought and sold.”’
Nasim rubbed her eyes. ‘Okay, but does he have any actual followers who’ll boycott the game, or is he just another fat fart in a turban, hallucinating relevance and trying to make a headline?’
Bahador looked around nervously, as if he was afraid someone might have overheard her. ‘I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.’
‘You didn’t SocNet him?’
Bahador fiddled with the notepad. ‘He does have an Ummah-Space page, but it looks like most of his friends are sycobots.’
‘Hmm.’ It had been a while since Nasim’s online outreach job, but anyone who didn’t filter out interest-feigning bots was hardly going to be a formidable organiser. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ she said.
Nasim spent the afternoon in a videoconference with a developer who was using the Fariba modules in a new game called Murder in Manolos, a gossipy whodunnit set among North Tehran’s Mall Princess cliques. Unlike Virtual Azimi, the novel technology would not be a selling point for the public; the aim was simply to get a smoother result for the non-player characters, with lower development costs.
There were a few technical hitches in the interface with the modules, but overall the project was going quite well. Nasim watched some demonstration runs; the Fariba-enhanced bit-players seemed at least as lifelike as anyone in an equivalent TV drama. She had added a feature to the library recently that had turned out to be invaluable, a routine called WTFquery(). When one of the Fariba modules generated some potential dialogue, before having the Proxy utter the words you could try out the whole exchange on another (non-identical) Fariba, and see if its neural response classified the would-be contribution as (A) a pertinent observation, (B) witty banter, or (C) a complete non sequitur. Screening out bizarre interjections from the Proxies that would have been the equivalent of stamping ‘idiot robot’ on their foreheads did at least as much for their credibility as anything they actually said.
Nasim woke to darkness, certain that her father was in the house. Was he asleep in the spare room? Or had he got up to use the bathroom - was that what had woken her? She strained her ears, listening for his footsteps.
It took a few seconds for her conviction to fade. She could still see the two of them standing in the kitchen together, arguing about her work on the Faribas. In the dream, his hair had turned grey. That small touch had been enough to keep her satisfied, to make the whole scenario seem perfectly reasonable.
She checked her watch; it was just after three. Her alarm was set for five-thirty. She lay still, trying to clear her mind and let her limbs grow heavy, but after a few minutes she decided that it wasn’t going to happen.
How much had she screwed up her life, she wondered, by trying to imagine her father’s advice, his opinions, his disappointments, his praise? She was sure she would have stayed at MIT in 2012 if she hadn’t felt compelled to return to Iran to prove that his struggle had meant something to her. But the problem hadn’t been some nagging ghost in her head; the problem had been the silence. She’d wanted to live as if he were beside her, to cheat the murderers who’d taken him from her, but she’d never really mastered that act. Her own memories, her own love for him, her own judgement had not been enough.
So how could she leave Javeed to grasp at the same kind of shadows if there was any chance at all of replacing them with something more solid? She’d told Martin that what he’d asked for was impossible - but was that literally true? It would certainly be far more difficult than he’d imagined, but that was not the same thing at all.
She climbed out of bed; the room light came on slowly to avoid dazzling her as she crossed to her desk. It took her half an hour to cobble together a rough map of the brain regions that Martin’s Proxy would need personalised in order to meet his goals. She had estimates of varying quality for the total amount of data required to differentiate each region in an individual from the crude average that Blank Frank represented.
That was a start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. The rate at which the best scanning techniques pulled useful, distinguishing data out of a subject’s skull varied enormously, depending on how well the activity they were performing had been tailored for the region being mapped. It also tended to follow a law of diminishing returns: the better the Proxy became at mimicking the subject, the harder it became to home in on the remaining differences. But she could take the average rate she’d measured for the Faribas as a reasonable first approximation. Martin didn’t know how long he had to live, but what if she assumed that he could manage, say, three hour-long sessions a week for a year?
Nasim re-checked her calculations twice, but she hadn’t made a mistake. What he’d asked of her was not necessarily impossible. That was a long way from knowing that it could actually be done, but purely in terms of the information flows required it would not be like shifting an ocean with an eyedropper. Merely Lake Erie with a teaspoon.
It was afternoon on the US East Coast; Caplan kept strange hours, but he was usually awake by now. She emailed him: ‘Can you spare a few minutes to talk?’
The reply came back within seconds. ‘Sure.’
Caplan preferred to meet in augmented reality, but Nasim wasn’t set up for that at home, so they settled for plain audio. She lay on her bed with her notepad beside her and did her best to explain Martin’s plight succinctly; she knew Caplan wouldn’t have much patience for the details.
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