Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  Azimi glanced at the boss, but then spoke for himself. ‘As I understand it, that’s not even possible. I’m not an expert, but they tell me they can only copy a very small part of the brain this way. Anything more is too complicated for the technology.’

  Nasim was cheered; he’d actually been paying attention when she’d briefed him.

  Razavi said, ‘Did you have any qualms when you learnt that this project required the brains of two thousand dead men?’

  The boss cut in. ‘We had no direct involvement with those donors, but the information they provided was offered up willingly to benefit all of humanity. This is nothing new; when a doctor makes use of a medical atlas, the truth is that it’s only because thousands of people allowed their bodies to be dissected after they died that we have that knowledge at our fingertips. We should be grateful to those people for their generosity, and grateful to God for his glorious creation. And your lovely nose, Ms Razavi, should be the most grateful beneficiary of all.’

  When the laughter had died down, another journalist took the opportunity to speak. ‘Mr Azimi, what do you think will happen if the Kuwaiti team have access to this game? If they can play against you as many times as they like, won’t that give them an unfair advantage?’

  Azimi was prepared for that one. ‘In this game, my Proxy will be just one player. People can get together with anyone they like to make up the numbers - but with all due respect to both our fans and our rivals, any team they form will still fall a long way short of the Iranian national team.’

  ‘The advertising’s come back on my photos,’ Nasim’s mother complained. ‘I can’t even look at my own wedding without someone trying to sell me haemorrhoid cream.’

  Nasim said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She’d just finished eating dinner and was finally beginning to unwind.

  She switched on the TV and chose ‘photos’ from the menu. Sure enough, even at the albums stage a sliding banner of slogans and links was superimposed over the bottom of each preview image.

  Nasim put the TV into administrator mode. She launched debugging and monitoring software, followed by the client for the online photo manager, Rubens. A decade before, she’d encouraged her mother to start using the free system. The interface was simple, the images were accessible anywhere, and everything was backed-up automatically to three separate locations.

  The client froze. After staring at the debugger’s window for a few seconds, Nasim understood what had happened. The server had figured out that the client was being monitored, and was refusing to talk to it. It wasn’t going to co-operate with a snitch.

  Nasim swore under her breath. When the ads had first appeared she’d managed to find a simple way to block them. That task had grown slightly trickier over the years, but now it looked as if the program’s defences had been ramped up substantially. She said, ‘This might have to wait until the weekend.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ her mother replied. ‘I never said you had to fix it straight away.’

  ‘All right.’ Nasim switched off the TV and started carrying the plates to the dishwasher. ‘But remind me again, or I might forget.’

  ‘I saw your press conference,’ her mother said. ‘On IRIB.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Nasim hadn’t seen anyone from IRIB in the room, though on reflection she wasn’t surprised that they’d picked up the story. ‘How do you think it went?’

  ‘You do know this is going to upset people?’

  Nasim groaned. ‘Are you going to complain about the brain donors now? You’re the one who wanted me to stay in the States and spend my whole career up to my elbows in grey matter.’ She closed the dishwasher and walked back into the living room.

  ‘It’s not the dead people’s brains that worry me,’ her mother replied, ‘it’s what you’re doing with the live ones. People aren’t going to be comfortable with that.’

  “‘People”? Which people?’ Nasim resisted the urge to tell her that if she had some ethical point to make she should make it, and stop hiding behind imaginary third parties. ‘We’re not in a theocracy any more, and I’m not going to be cowed into acting as if we were.’

  ‘No,’ her mother agreed, ‘we’re not in a theocracy, but your fellow citizens are perfectly capable of voting conservatives back into power if they start to feel that their values are being threatened.’

  ‘Threatened by what? A small improvement in the state of the art for faking celebrities in online football games?’

  Her mother shook her head impatiently. ‘Maybe not, but what comes next? I’m sure there are people who’d pay to be intimate with a Proxy of someone famous.’

  Nasim was bemused. Zendegi had its share of tame virtual pickup joints - whose flesh-and-blood customers could always take things further elsewhere - but the board would have run a mile from any suggestion of facilitating cyber-sex. ‘So now you think I’m a pimp?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be obtuse!’ Her mother glared at her. ‘But it’s not in your hands how other people use these methods.’

  Nasim said, ‘There are already people peddling sex with virtual celebrities. I don’t think they’re looking to increase their level of psychological realism.’

  ‘Okay, put that aside. What’s going to happen to workers whose skills can be transferred to computers this way?’

  ‘You think we’ve made Azimi redundant?’ Nasim replied. ‘He’ll get a cut every time someone plays the game!’

  ‘And you think ordinary people will get the same kind of deal?’ her mother countered. ‘Let alone their colleagues who are put out of work without even being parties to the contract?’

  ‘Automation’s nothing new,’ Nasim said feebly. ‘Anyway . . . we’re a long way from using this for anything more than novelty value. Don’t expect a robot plumber anytime soon.’

  ‘Are you cheating your customers,’ her mother asked bluntly, ‘or are your claims about this technology real?’

  ‘They’re real.’ Maybe people would over-interpret the process, or ignore the fine print, but it was not all smoke and mirrors and celebrity fetishism. On a timescale of seconds, in a very limited domain, Virtual Azimi really had learnt to act like the original.

  ‘Then it will be improved upon,’ her mother said, ‘and it will be used in other ways. If you don’t understand why some people might resist that, then I don’t know what planet you’re living on.’

  When Nasim went upstairs she had her knowledge-miner show her an updated news summary.

  Nobody was rioting in the streets, burning Azimi’s jersey for his crimes against nature, or Islam, or sport. On the contrary, fans were already signing up for a chance to play in the first demonstration match: one team captained by the real Azimi, the other by his virtual counterpart.

  The story certainly had made an impact, bouncing around the globe within hours, but the reception had been mostly positive, albeit with some scepticism at the prospect that any real skills had been extracted from Azimi’s brain. Comics had mined the news for its slight tinge of surrealism - an Egyptian sketch show portrayed their president engaged in a wrestling match with his virtual self - but so far, there’d been no rabid denunciations. As far as Nasim could see, most people were treating the process as scarcely more controversial than if they’d taped yellow markers to Azimi’s joints and used motion-capture to insert him into the game.

  In the dregs of the knowledge-miner’s sweep was the news that the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project had issued a video press release, with their public affairs officer, Michelle Bello, interviewing their director, Conrad Esch. The topical question addressed was whether the BSBSP had gleaned anything from the Human Connectome Project that might prove to be of more lasting significance than this brief spurt of interest in an online game.

  Apparently, the answer was yes. By carefully studying the HCP data over the last few months, the Superintelligence Project had acquired vital clues that would allow it to construct a Class Three Emergent Godlet within five years.

  ‘And
when that happens, what can we expect?’ Bello asked.

  ‘Within two or three hours, the planet will be entirely in the hands of the Benign Superintelligence. Human affairs will be re-organised, within seconds, into their optimal state: no more war, no more sorrow, no more death.’

  ‘But how can we be sure of that?’ Bello probed fearlessly. ‘Computers are capable of all kinds of errors and mistakes.’

  ‘Computers built and programmed by humans, yes,’ Esch conceded. ‘But remember, by definition, every element in the ascending chain of Godlets will be superior to its predecessor, in both intelligence and benignity. We’ve done the theoretical groundwork; now we’re assembling the final pieces that will start the chain reaction. The endpoint is simply a matter of logic: God is coming into being. There is no disputing that, and there is no stopping it.’

  Nasim said, ‘Which of these reminds you most of a cat?’

  Fariba examined the four photographs: the Eiffel Tower, a parrot in a cage, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Empire State Building. A patch of light on the screen tracked her focus of attention as it moved from image to image.

  ‘The pyramid most of all,’ Fariba said, ‘because of the thing Egyptians had for cats. Second is the bird, because it’s a pet too, and because the cat might want to eat it.’

  Nasim gestured for a reset before the urge to say ‘thank you’ or ‘good’ or ‘correct’ could start to nag at her. Four new pictures appeared: a bicycle lying flat on the road with some scattered groceries around it; a wilted flower; a wrecking ball swinging towards an apartment block; and a very young girl holding the hand of an old woman bent over in pain.

  ‘Which of these pictures is the saddest?’ Nasim asked. Fariba, with no memory of the previous test, contemplated the images for a few seconds before replying, ‘Maybe the bicycle. The girl with the grandma is stronger emotionally, but I’m not sure if its sadness and its sweetness should cancel each other out, or stand alone!’

  Nasim gestured reset and halt, and turned to Bahador.

  ‘I spend a few days playing football,’ he said, ‘and look what happens behind my back.’

  ‘A few days? It’s been five weeks!’ They’d had to fit water dispensers into the ghal’eha so all the Azimi groupies didn’t dehydrate as they helped beta-test the game. ‘What do you think?’

  Bahador smiled. ‘It’s amazing. How many women did you side-load? ’

  ‘Twenty. Students mostly.’ Each recruit had lain in the MRI for ten hour-long sessions, going through a series of undemanding tasks: looking at pictures, reading short essays, listening to recorded speeches, answering simple questions. At night, the side-loading software had prodded and kneaded the inarticulate Blank Francine - assembled by Nasim from the HCP women - into her less tongue-tied Iranian cousin, Farsiphone Fariba: fluent in the written and spoken language, brimming with word associations, conversant with thousands of commonplace facts.

  Fariba would never be mistaken for a philosopher or a poet. Conventional Proxies - which improvised around elaborate, branching scripts - could have far deeper, more convincing interactions with people, at least in situations for which they’d been tailor-made. But Fariba wasn’t meant to do anything as a stand-alone system. Conventional software would still provide the back-story, goals, memory and context, but Fariba would make it a thousand times easier for developers to construct a flexible character who wouldn’t lapse into embarrassing silence if the conversation moved beyond the range of possibilities envisaged in the script.

  ‘Can you make a few different versions?’ Bahador wondered. ‘With different weightings for the various side-loading subjects? That way the responses will always make sense, but they won’t be the same for every character that uses the modules.’

  Nasim thought it over. ‘That’s a good idea. For a composite Proxy it will still be the script that determines most of its personality, but it will be an added attraction if we can offer a kind of library of low-level variations.’ Developers could decide for themselves whether they preferred a particular character to associate cats with birds, or with pyramids. Even if nothing crucial hung on the distinction, that would give them more control over the tone of the game.

  Bahador was dripping sweat onto the carpet; he’d just come from a game and Nasim had called him in as he’d passed her office on the way to the showers. ‘I should let you go,’ she said.

  He looked down at his damp shirt. ‘Sorry, I must stink.’ He headed for the door. ‘What you’ve done is terrific. And so is the Azimi game. We’re going to make a fortune!’ He waited until he was out in the corridor before adding, ‘I expect a pay rise.’

  ‘Maybe when you start doing real work again,’ Nasim called after him.

  She sat playing with the demonstration module. She’d already run rigorous automated tests on it, yielding no surprises or major problems - but there was something addictive about chatting away to Fariba in person.

  ‘Which colour here makes you think of warm weather?’

  ‘If you could take only one of these items to a desert island, which one would you choose?’

  ‘Which of the first three pictures tells a story that’s completed by the fourth?’

  The tests didn’t always have a single right answer, but Fariba always managed a sensible response. She possessed no narrative memories, and no sophisticated beliefs - but all the words and concepts she’d acquired were wired together in a perfectly reasonable way. If she had no depth to her, she sounded less like a simpleton than an amnesiac who hadn’t yet noticed her own plight.

  The women who’d answered Nasim’s advertisement had been happy enough with the modest payments they’d received for their work - and it hadn’t exactly been arduous for them, once they’d grown used to the confined space of the scanner. Nasim didn’t feel that she’d exploited them, that she’d pillaged their brains in return for loose change; their language skills, common sense and general knowledge, however vital, had hardly been rare commodities. Literally millions of Tehrani women could have done the same job equally well.

  Nevertheless, a little more than raw vocabulary and dry factual knowledge had rubbed off. Sometimes Fariba exhibited quirks of phrasing that came straight from Asa, or offered witticisms that Azita would not have disowned. Sometimes she seemed as warm as Farah, or as acerbic as Chalipa.

  So what was the bottom line? Fariba had no long-term memory, and no sense of herself. When Nasim reset her after every test, she lost nothing, because there was nothing to lose. Even if she’d run uninterrupted for an hour or a day, the passage of time would have left no mark on her. It would be crazy to start treating her as if she had interests, goals and rights.

  But was she conscious - as much as the women who’d helped build her would have been conscious if, for a few seconds, they’d forgotten themselves and focused entirely on their simple tasks: thinking of a word, matching a picture?

  Nasim wasn’t sure. She was moving into territory where that prospect was no longer unthinkably remote; she had to tread carefully.

  Still, at most it could only be a transient form of consciousness - with no conception of itself to underpin a fear of extinction. Splicing Fariba, and a thousand variants of her, into narratives in which they played no active part wouldn’t bolster their fragmentary minds into something more substantial; that was just the illusion that human players would receive. The Faribas would still live - if they lived at all - in an eternal present, doing their simple tasks over and over again, remembering nothing.

  17

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ Martin announced for the third time.

  ‘Okay!’ Javeed had been in the bath for almost forty minutes, staging some kind of elaborate battle between the shampoo bottles. Martin listened for draining water, but all he heard was a resumption of missile sounds.

  He walked into the bathroom and pulled out the plug. Javeed looked annoyed for a moment, but then he put down the blue conditioner that had been attacking the green vitamin enricher and steppe
d onto the bath mat without complaint. Martin handed him a towel and waited for him to dry himself.

  Most of the bottles were Mahnoosh’s; Martin would have thrown them out if Javeed hadn’t kept using them as props. It had taken him three months to work up the strength to get rid of her make-up and clothes. He’d kept all her jewellery, still unable to face the task of deciding which pieces were just trinkets, and which Javeed might want to give to his own wife or daughter one day.

  Javeed rubbed the towel vigorously between his legs, as if his unprotected penis required no lighter touch than his elbow. Martin had never quite stopped cringing when he saw this, but there was nothing to be done. He’d been caught unprepared when Mahnoosh had insisted on having their son circumcised - the day before she and Javeed left the hospital - because it was the ‘normal’ thing to do. ‘What if he wants to marry an Iranian woman who isn’t as tolerant of strange foreign customs as I am?’ Islam supported the practice but attached no religious significance to it; Martin hadn’t been able to use Mahnoosh’s loathing of the mullahs as leverage. With no research on the medical pros and cons at his fingertips, all he’d managed in reply was, ‘What if he wants to clean the shower, naked, with something corrosive?’ Thirty minutes later the deed had been done.