Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  The stallion snorted haughtily as he emerged from the tent, not quite betraying him, but making it clear that he was there only on sufferance. He moved quietly back the way he’d come, glad now of the mud on his clothes.

  Then he stood at the edge of the river and bellowed, ‘Javeed! Pesaram! Koja’i?’

  The reply came back instantly: happy, relieved, not quite tearful. ‘Baba! Inja hastam! Inja bia!’

  Martin strode towards his son’s voice, oblivious to everything else around him, barely noticing the member of Zal’s retinue approaching him before the man stepped directly into his path.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Forgive me, sir; I’ve been searching for my son.’ Martin looked past his interlocutor; Javeed was standing on a patch of bare ground between two men. One of them had a scimitar in a scabbard strapped to his back; Martin’s skin tingled with fear and revulsion, but he had to trust the game to have kept the threat abstract and muted. If anyone had waved a blade in Javeed’s face—

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  Martin forced himself to focus on the man blocking his way. ‘We were in the river, fishing; our boat struck a rock and went down. My son and I became separated. I swear, until now I was afraid he’d drowned.’

  The man regarded him suspiciously, but a flicker of compassion crossed his face. Martin was sure he wasn’t human, but he wondered if he was one of the new-style Proxies that Nasim had mentioned, boosted with fragments of neural circuitry. Are you a dumb cousin of the thing I’ll leave behind? Martin wondered. Just human enough to react with real emotion to the idea of a drowned child?

  The man with the scimitar said, ‘We thought he was a thief. Why didn’t he speak the truth?’

  Martin said, ‘Sir, I apologise, but sometimes he goes crazy from the sun. His mind runs away from his work; all he can talk about is elephants.’

  The third man laughed. ‘Elephants in “Lavosestan”? He’s got too much imagination to be a fisherman.’

  Martin tried to appear deferential, though part of him was having trouble resisting the urge to grab a fallen tree branch and start clubbing everyone who continued to stand between him and his son. ‘As you say, sir. But he’s done no wrong, and we need to go back and drag out the boat while there’s still a chance to find it.’

  The two men closest to Javeed exchanged glances. ‘Very well,’ said the one with the scimitar. They stood aside; Javeed ran to Martin and took his hand.

  As they walked out of the camp Javeed said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you were going to leave me there.’

  Martin’s heart was pierced, but he forced himself to speak calmly. ‘I’d never do that. You know I’d never do that.’

  Javeed said mournfully, ‘What will we tell Zal?’

  ‘It’s not what we’ll tell him, it’s what we’ll show him.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Martin produced the bag, making as a big a show of it as he could. Javeed was enraptured.

  ‘You got it! What’s in it? What is it?’

  ‘I didn’t look inside. That would have been rude.’

  Javeed flapped his arms and grimaced with impatience. ‘Give it to me! Let me look!’

  ‘Not a chance!’ Martin replied. ‘I’ll give it to you outside the prison, but only to carry, not to open. It’s Zal’s business what’s inside.’

  All the way back into the city, Javeed kept begging for a peek, but it soon turned into a game; he was teasing Martin, he didn’t expect to get his way. Martin was giddy with relief; Javeed hadn’t really felt abandoned, and the delay in freeing him had been worth it in the end.

  ‘We should bring lunch for Zal,’ Javeed suggested.

  ‘Good idea.’ They bought some apples, grapes and pomegranates from the man who’d told them the way to the prison, then some cooked ground beef wrapped in flatbread from another shop.

  At the prison, the warder seemed to have forgotten his previous bribe. ‘One visit a month! By royal decree!’ He started to close the gate, determined to follow the letter of the law until Martin reached into his money-belt and came up with a handful of amendments and exceptions.

  As they entered the cell block, Zal was standing near the edge of his cage. ‘Father! Little Brother! What have you done? I don’t deserve this feast!’ They passed him the food and he shared it out among his cellmates.

  When the warder left, Javeed approached the bars. ‘We got what you asked for,’ he whispered, holding the bag discreetly by his side. The other prisoners averted their eyes as the contraband changed hands.

  ‘Truly you are worthy of my praise and gratitude,’ Zal said. ‘Half of all I have is yours.’

  Javeed shook his head. ‘Just the elephants.’

  Zal smiled. ‘As you wish, Little Brother.’ He stepped back and unknotted the drawstring of the bag, then he pulled the mouth wide and drew out a golden feather.

  Martin caught a flash of unease on Javeed’s face. ‘Are you okay?’ he whispered. They both knew what the feather meant, what it would bring.

  Javeed nodded.

  ‘We can go now if you want to. We’ll sort out the elephants on the website.’

  ‘I want to stay,’ Javeed said. He added, barely audibly, ‘I want to see it.’

  ‘Father, do you have a flint with you?’ Zal asked Martin.

  When Martin shook his head, one of the other prisoners produced a small grey stone that had been hidden in his clothes. He handed it to Zal, who clasped him gratefully on the shoulder.

  Zal struck the flint against a bar of his cell, holding the feather in the same hand. ‘Thanks to God and King Hushang, for the gift of fire.’ Martin saw the spark, but nothing followed. Zal repeated the motion a second time, a third. Finally, the feather caught alight.

  White smoke wafted across the prison. The feather blazed with an intense light, but remained unconsumed. The inmates stood and watched the flame, then one by one their knees buckled and they fell to the ground, asleep.

  A voice echoed through the building, tender and outraged, loud enough to shake Martin’s teeth. ‘What is this injustice? Who has put my own sweet child in a cage?’

  The Simorgh stood at the entrance from the courtyard, filling the doorway, stooped to fit. Its dog’s head alone was half the size of a man; its muscular raptor’s body, adorned with shimmering metallic feathers, was squeezed into the confined space - but rather than making it look trapped and trammelled, this only concentrated its power.

  Martin touched Javeed’s hand and they backed away slowly towards the prison’s far wall. However many Brownie points they’d earned with its foster-son, they did not want to be standing in this creature’s path when it decided to move.

  Zal knelt and lowered his face. ‘My beloved protector, I am ashamed to ask for your help. You see with your own eyes where my carelessness has brought me. But I must find a way to marry Rudabeh without turning her family against mine. Give me this chance to salvage my fortune, and I will not disgrace myself again.’

  Martin looked down at Javeed; he was not unafraid, but he was utterly engrossed. Javeed’s hair was a few shades lighter than that of the average Tehrani; nobody had ever spurned him because of it, least of all his parents, but that didn’t seem to be the point. And whatever resonance he’d found in the story of Zal’s childhood, he seemed to have taken consolation in the idea that his hero’s abandonment had gained him a strange kind of love and protection, more fierce, more powerful than the human kind he’d lost.

  The Simorgh charged, a blur of flowing muscle and outstretched talons wreathed in gold. Javeed flinched, emitting an involuntary whimper. Martin said, ‘Enough,’ and brought them out.

  He waited in the whiteness for the motor to free him, then he heard Nasim pull off the cage. He flipped up the goggles himself.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Nasim asked. Martin wasn’t sure if she’d watched the whole session, but in any case he wasn’t in the mood to start analysing the implications for the Proxy of all the choices he
’d made.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Right.’

  Martin shed his hi-tech attachments and reclaimed his belongings. He walked to the ghal’eha room where Javeed was waiting with Bahador, already wearing his signed Azimi jersey over his school clothes. Martin squatted down and embraced him tightly.

  ‘Mubaarak, pesaram. We’ll get an island for those elephants as soon as we get home.’

  They took a bus to Omar’s shop. Martin had told Omar the same half-truth he’d told Javeed: that Nasim had equipment that was easier on his back. Omar had not made a big deal about it, and he greeted them as warmly as ever.

  As Martin stood listening to Javeed recounting his adventure for Omar and Farshid, he thought: this is it, this is how it will be. Exactly the same scene, even after I’m gone: Javeed returning from his weekly session in Zendegi with his father.

  Omar, Rana and Farshid would love and protect him, but he would not have lost his old life, his old family, completely. Even Mahnoosh would still be there beside him, in the Proxy’s echoes of Martin’s memories of her.

  It was stranger than Zal’s story, but it could still come true. All he had to do was immerse himself in the side-loading process - and hang on long enough to be sure that it worked.

  20

  Nasim walked past the protesters in silence. For the first few days she’d tried taunting them, hoping to get a violent reaction recorded on the building’s security cameras that would force the police to intervene and move them on. But she had to admit that they were disciplined; even her suggestion that their favourite mullah belonged on the same bonfire as all the rest had raised barely a snarl. They’d studied 2012 and they’d learnt from the winning side: the only route to popular respect was through restraint.

  The crowd outside Zendegi’s offices grew larger every day; this morning Nasim reckoned it was close to a hundred. Shahidi had found out about the Faribas and had wisely shifted his focus to them; by going quiet about Virtual Azimi he was no longer asking anyone to make the impossible choice between football and piety.

  His supporters had adopted a curious slogan, repeated on all their placards: OUR SOULS ARE NOT FOR THESE MACHINES. A prohibition, rather than a flat-out denial of the possibility. Why couldn’t they simply have scoffed at the prospect of machines ever possessing ‘souls’? That was the current Vatican position, which left their amateur philosophers with no controversy to fret over. Shahidi himself certainly hadn’t said anything implying that Proxies modelled on fragments of human brains should be seen as human, but nor had he explicitly denounced the ambiguous slogan. He wanted it both ways, benefiting from the sly nod towards the most backwards, superstitious notions that would classify the Proxies as a form of forbidden ‘sorcery’, while at the same time declining to make the claim - no doubt preposterous, and even blasphemous, in most of his colleagues’ eyes - that a piece of software ever could have a soul.

  Martin arrived for his ten o’clock solo session. He was punctual as always, but he was looking increasingly frail. He was no longer working in the bookstore, and Nasim had managed to persuade him to accept payment for his time here; though Zendegi would not be mining his scans for fragments to incorporate into games, there was still the possibility that their research would ultimately lead to commercial benefit.

  As Nasim fitted his EEG skullcap, she said, ‘Do you think you could come for two hours tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course.’ Martin hesitated. ‘So there’s a problem?’

  ‘The network’s not converging as quickly as I’d hoped,’ she confessed. ‘More data can only be a good thing.’

  ‘Okay.’ Martin met her eyes in the mirror. ‘Two hours is fine, starting from tomorrow. Make it ten hours a day if you have to.’

  Nasim smiled. ‘I promise you, you’d go crazy long before ten.’

  When he was in the scanner, she went to her office to monitor the start of the data collection.

  Martin’s sessions with Javeed were crucial, but they did not yield anywhere near enough data. Even his current interactions with his son relied upon neural circuitry that could not be clearly resolved during the events themselves; for the Proxy to have any chance at all of handling a decade’s worth of future encounters, the side-loading needed to have a much wider base.

  So when Martin was alone, Nasim fed him a barrage of words, images and micro-scenarios to reach the places that no amount of children’s Shahnameh could reach. Scripting hours of hand-tailored stimuli every week would have been impossibly labour-intensive, but Nasim had set up an automated feedback process that started with some not-quite-random imagery and then homed in on material that was seen to activate the regions that required more detailed mapping, shining spotlights into those corners of his skull from which the Proxy most needed to pick up extra cues. There was nothing so crude and literal as questionnaires about Martin’s values and opinions, or rehearsals of imaginary conversations with an older Javeed; for all that Martin would have tried to respond sincerely, it would have taken superhuman self-control for anyone to behave naturally under those conditions. If he had wished to leave behind a video message for his son to view on some future birthday, he could have done that easily enough; the whole point of the side-load was to burrow deeper. The best way to do that was to deal in fragments, resolving Martin’s mental landscape with the finest granularity possible before trying to recreate it in the Proxy’s responses.

  Nasim watched the images Martin was currently seeing, captioned for her with source information: shops in Islamabad, a Pakistani taxi, a Karachi street stall selling newspapers and cigarettes. Amputee children in a refugee camp in Quetta. Nobody could yet make video transcripts of dreams or memories, but the feedback process wallpapered these sessions with a kind of photo-library substitute for a visual autobiography.

  Mahnoosh’s face appeared; it was the same photo of her that had been on display at the funeral. When Nasim had explained the process to Martin, he’d insisted that she include his wife’s image in the initial set and let the software decide if it was useful. Apparently it was.

  Nasim closed the window, discomfited by the sense that she was intruding, even though Martin had more or less given up on the idea that anything in his skull could remain private. The neural activation map from the MRI showed that the process hadn’t gone off the rails: the data being gathered was certainly more targeted than anything they would have obtained from Rorschach blots and white noise, or random imagery and audio fragments. Whether it would be sufficient to reach their goal remained to be seen; at this stage, if she’d dropped the Proxy into any kind of test scenario it would have made the first Dickens reading seem like a triumph of sophistication.

  The version of Blank Frank she’d started with approximated far more of the brain than anything she’d built from the HCP scans before - but that didn’t make it any more functional from the beginning, it just exposed all the flaws in the construction process more acutely. It was like the difference between making a toy car out of poorly moulded plastic, and trying to do the same for a ten-thousand-gear timepiece that calculated eclipses and the phases of Venus; the first might actually move, clunkily, straight from the mould, but the second was guaranteed to seize up. It was going to take a staggering amount of polishing and fine-tuning to make all those wheels turn smoothly, let alone adapt their motions to Martin’s private cosmology.

  Bahador knocked and entered the office without waiting for Nasim to reply. He said, ‘We’re being hacked.’

  Nasim followed him back to the programmers’ room. Khosrow, Bahador’s deputy, was compiling a list based on complaint reports coming in from the arcades. Nasim stared at the summary, shocked and dismayed. It had already crossed the two thousand mark.

  A dozen of the screens around them showed specific environments that the intruders had managed to corrupt. One of the senior programmers, Milad, was examining an instance of Minions of Eblis. It had been infiltrated by a squadron of World War I biplanes, which
were dropping balloons full of something brown and sticky onto the demonic battlefield.

  ‘What’s that supposed to be?’ Nasim asked. ‘Napalm?’

  ‘Hyper-treacle,’ Milad replied, struggling not to smile at the sight of the brown goo dripping all over their customers’ icons. ‘It’s a highly viscous fluid, defined with its own custom equations of motion - which are chewing up resources big-time, because they’re deliberately difficult to compute. It’s been used in other attacks, like Happy Universe in 2023, though obviously this is a refined variant or it would never have been accepted into our object queues.’

  ‘Great.’ Nobody would actually feel the stuff as it clogged up their virtual hair and drizzled down their faces - unless they got it on their hands - but apart from looking ridiculous in front of their comrades, the players were stuck with the fact that Zendegi was treating it seriously as part of their environment. That was a recipe for kinaesthetic dissonance: if you ran into a patch of hyper-treacle it couldn’t forcibly impede your real feet, but if it glued your icon to the spot while you kept physically running, you either lost all sense of immersion in the game world, or you started to feel as sick and confused as if your inner ears, your visual system and your proprioceptive faculties had decided to go to war over their mutually exclusive theories of your body’s motion. For a few million years prior to the existence of virtual reality, this had been a very good indicator that you’d eaten something you’d be better off without. People were soon going to have some very real fluids sloshing around their ghal’eha.