Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  ‘The White Fortress!’ Jack announced, pointing into the heat-haze, proving that he’d been paying the game world far more attention than Martin had. In real life, Martin had never ridden anything larger than a donkey, but Sohrab’s horse responded to his urging and galloped ahead; Jack was left in the dust, though when Martin turned he could see him catching up.

  Sohrab had been born in the town of Samangan, on the border between Persia and its neighbour Turan. When his mother had finally explained his lineage to him, he’d decided to gather an army from Turan and march on Persia to seize Kavus’s throne for his absent father, and then claim Turan as his own. His campaign did not end well, but Martin was content to sample the relatively upbeat beginning; the twelve-year-old Javeed might be into swordplay and gore, but epic tragedy was unlikely to hold much attraction for him for several more years.

  As he drew nearer to the white stone building, a smear of dust appeared in front of it. A lone Persian soldier was riding out to confront the invaders.

  Jack caught up with Martin, his horse covered in sweat. ‘Do you really want to start this war?’ he asked. ‘What if you sent a message to Rostam first? What if you told him who you were and asked for his advice?’

  Martin rolled his eyes. ‘Stop trying to play peacemaker! This is what Sohrab does!’

  ‘Okay, pesaram.’ Jack laughed to cover his nervousness; he had no way of knowing if he’d tested Javeed’s patience by pushing the same line a hundred times before. ‘Well, at least I can tell Princess Tahmineh I gave you some advice.’

  Martin could make out their enemy now, as his armour glinted in the morning sun. He urged his mount forward; the thought of the coming confrontation turned his stomach, but a boy who had never seen a real act of bloodshed would not be so squeamish.

  The two adversaries came to a halt within shouting distance. The Persian soldier was tall and solidly built; in real life Martin would have given him a very wide berth, with or without the presence of lances. The man’s beard was flecked with grey; he had survived a few decades as a warrior.

  ‘I am Hejir!’ the Persian called out to him. ‘I serve Kavus, Lord of the World. Tell me your loyalty and your intentions.’

  Martin smothered his conciliatory instincts and followed the script. ‘I am Sohrab, loyal to my own proud lineage, and I’ve come to take the crown from that fool.’

  Hejir recoiled in disgust. ‘I can still smell the milk of your mother on your breath! Turn back, or she’ll be washing your body in her tears.’

  ‘Can it be true that you’ve heard nothing of the glory of Sohrab? No man who had would dare to face me alone!’

  ‘Kavus will have your head as my tribute,’ Hejir replied. ‘Your body I will bury here in the dirt.’

  Jack had caught up; Martin turned and motioned to him to stay back.

  Martin called out, ‘Surrender now, and I’ll spare your life. Cling to stubborn pride, and I’ll give no quarter.’

  Hejir raised his lance. ‘Return to Turan while you still have the breath for idle boasting. It is no shame for a child to flee from a warrior.’

  Martin leant forward and commanded his horse to charge.

  The desert streaked past him jerkily, like something shot on a hand-held camera, but the signals from his motionless, horizontal body turned the whole thing into a strange, smooth swoop, as if he were an eagle descending down the face of a cliff. Hejir was charging too, flying up to meet him. As they approached, Martin fumbled with his lance; his gloves made it tangible but he had no reliable sense of the geometry of the encounter. Hejir struck him squarely in the chest; Martin’s weapon didn’t even make contact.

  As they separated, Martin looked down; his armour was dented, but there was no other damage, and he had not so much as shifted in his saddle. Hejir looked formidable to Martin’s eyes, but baby-faced Sohrab was a giant, too heavy to be dislodged by the force of any ordinary blow.

  Martin brought his horse around. He could see Jack approaching in the distance. Hejir was circling back towards him; his lance had snapped, but he’d drawn his sword. Martin would have leant over and vomited if there’d been any way to get the stuff out of his throat, but he had to appear suitably exhilarated for Jack’s sake. He was a high-spirited boy with a stick for a sword: Javeed with his shampoo-bottle missiles, six years on. He thought of Javeed’s face after Kavus’s flying pavilion had gone into a spin. That was the look he wanted: a pure, innocent thrill.

  Hejir was closing with frightening speed, already gripping his sword with both hands. Martin contemplated throwing the fight, simply letting himself be knocked down and injured; that in itself would be a test for Jack to witness, and other tests could follow in later battles. But he didn’t have time for the luxury of slowly building up his nerve. He raised his lance and focused all his attention on the impending encounter. Hejir was committed to coming close enough to strike a blow, but their weapons were no longer evenly matched, and their bodies never had been.

  The lance struck Hejir and threw him from his horse. Martin wheeled around and saw the Persian soldier flat on his back, his sword far away in the dust. Martin dropped the lance and dismounted, unsheathing his own sword and striding towards his enemy. As Hejir rose to his knees Martin swung at him like a child playing with a plastic toy; the gloves did their best to imbue the steel with a sense of real weight, of real consequence, but the task was beyond them.

  Hejir twisted to avoid the blow, but this was the end game: he was disarmed, and the giant loomed over him. He bowed his head.

  ‘I am bettered,’ he said. ‘I beg for your mercy.’

  Martin said, ‘I told you, no quarter.’ He swung the weightless sword again; his gloves shuddered as he parted Hejir’s head from his body. Blood gushed richly from the dead man’s neck, spilling onto Martin’s legs and feet. He stared down at the corpse, dazed and sickened but clinging to one certainty: he had to be prepared for Javeed to do something like this. Everyone who cared for him had to be prepared.

  ‘You worthless piece of shit!’

  Martin turned; Jack was approaching on foot, his horse a few metres behind him. ‘You fucking worthless piece of shit!’ He tore the metal helmet from his head and threw it on the ground; his face was contorted with anger and disgust.

  ‘Baba, it’s just a game,’ Martin pleaded.

  ‘Are you my son?’ Jack raged. ‘Is this what that fucker Omar did to you?’

  ‘Baba, I’m sorry—’ Martin stood his ground as Jack walked up to him and started flailing impotently with his fists at Sohrab’s giant body.

  Jack sank to his knees. ‘Is that what I taught you? You couldn’t help yourself, even when he begged for his life?’ He clawed at the dirt. ‘What am I, then? What am I doing here?’ He struck his head with his fists, distraught.

  ‘Baba, no one’s hurt, it’s just a game,’ Martin insisted. He shared Jack’s revulsion at what they’d both witnessed; he had known full well the feelings that his act would provoke. But he was sure he could have held his own response in check for Javeed’s sake; he could have stood back from his anger and found some gentler rebuke than this.

  Jack gazed up at him wretchedly, cursing and ranting incoherently. Martin could see the helplessness in his eyes; he knew he’d gone too far and he wanted to stop. But the part of him that could do it wasn’t there. Maybe he still felt the ghost of it, like a phantom limb, but it had no purchase on reality, no power to change his course.

  Martin said, ‘I’m not Javeed. This is just a test.’

  Jack emitted a blood-curdling sob; his whole body shuddered with relief. But he still hadn’t won back control: he kept cursing Omar, cursing Javeed, cursing himself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Martin said. ‘I screwed up, I’m sorry.’

  Jack looked down and shook his head impatiently. He didn’t want a post mortem, he just wanted to be done with this.

  Martin stretched out his hand and erased him.

  28

  ‘There was a family I met in Kabul,’
Martin said. ‘Ali and Zahra. They had four children; three girls and a baby boy.’

  They were sitting in the MRI room. Peyman had made himself scarce. Nasim said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘They were from a small village in Bamyan Province. They’d been living without papers in Iran for three years, but they got caught in a sweep and sent back across the border. It wasn’t safe in their village, so they ended up in Kabul.

  ‘I met Ali on the street. It was winter; he was selling firewood - smashed-up furniture from garbage dumps, mostly. He invited me to his home and introduced me to his family; I interviewed him and his wife. I didn’t have a photographer with me, so I made a time to come back the next day.

  ‘When I returned . . . some people from the group that Ali had fled in Bamyan had found him, a few hours before. They’d cut off his head, in front of his family. In front of his wife and kids.’ Martin covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I didn’t see it happen, but I saw what it did to them.’

  Nasim was silent for a while, trying to think of a way through the impasse. ‘There are a couple of things we could try,’ she said. ‘I could go back and find all the images we showed you that triggered that memory, and then rebuild the Proxy omitting your responses to them. Or we could put in some kind of filter, so the Proxy gets shielded from anything similar that happens in Zendegi.’

  Martin looked up at her, incredulous. ‘Filtering his memories or censoring his experiences isn’t going to fix this. The Proxy should have been able to remember what had happened and talk about it with Javeed, calmly and sanely. If we just pluck it out of his head, or shield him from anything that reminds him of it, then what about the next thing that makes him go ballistic? The problem doesn’t lie with his memories; it’s the fact that he doesn’t have the capacity to deal with them.’

  Nasim said defensively, ‘I did tell you that there’d be limitations.’ She had certainly included all the brain regions normally associated with impulse control, but given that the Proxy was, by design, incapable of forming all of the same perspectives as the original, there were always going to be situations where it was not going to behave the same way.

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ Martin replied, without rancour. ‘You explained everything. I didn’t listen.’

  Nasim shifted in her chair. ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Javeed will live with Omar,’ Martin said. ‘There was never any choice about that.’

  ‘Can you talk to Omar?’

  ‘I have to.’ Martin laughed and wiped his eyes. ‘But how do you tell someone who’s offered to spend the next ten years raising your son that you’ve got a list of subjects on which you’d prefer that he kept his mouth shut? How do I do that without poisoning our friendship - and poisoning him against Javeed? Maybe I can slip it into some notes I hand him, just after the list of Javeed’s allergies.’

  Nasim said, ‘You’ve been friends for fifteen years. Surely you can talk to him about anything now?’

  Martin regarded her with bemusement. ‘Is it like that for you? No boundaries at all?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ Nasim admitted.

  ‘I’ve never been that close to Omar,’ Martin said. ‘Ever since I arrived in Tehran he’s gone out of his way to help me, but even now it’s still like we’re . . . guest and host. We can kid around about things that don’t matter, but we don’t criticise each other - that would be crass and ungracious. And after all these years of mutual tact, I don’t know how to change the rules without making it feel like a slap in the face.’

  Nasim didn’t know what advice to give him. ‘You’ll find a way,’ she said.

  Martin spread his hands: maybe. ‘Thanks for trying so hard with the side-load,’ he said. ‘I hope the research still tells you something useful.’ He stood.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ Nasim offered.

  Martin shook his head. ‘I’ll get a taxi. You must have other things to do.’

  ‘Let’s not do ta’arof. I cleared my diary for the morning; I’ll give you a lift.’

  They rode in silence most of the way. Nasim felt helpless; a part of her was still hunting for ways to salvage the project, to patch over the difficulties and make everything work. She knew that it was pointless, though. Whatever she proposed now, Martin was not going to change his mind.

  When they reached the house, she walked with Martin to the door. ‘After the operation, if you’re not able to cope with an ordinary ghal’e, I can still organise time in a scanner.’

  Martin said, ‘Thanks, but if the transplant’s successful I should be in much better shape. Actually, I’m planning some trips with Javeed. There’s only so much Zendegi-ye-Behtar I can take.’

  ‘Okay.’ They shook hands. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  Nasim was halfway back to the city when her notepad buzzed. The call was from Falaki: too much to deal with while she was driving, so she found a side-street where she could park and call him back.

  ‘There’s good news and bad news,’ Falaki said.

  ‘Please don’t make me choose.’

  ‘I’ll start with the short version then,’ he said. ‘We know pretty much what happened at the FLOPS House. But we don’t know who did it, and we don’t expect to find out anytime soon.’

  Nasim digested that. ‘Okay. How did they do it?’

  ‘It was a chip hack. The FLOPS House found a rogue processor in one of their servers; that’s what enabled everything that happened to you there. But it looks as if the chip would have covered the tracks of whoever steered the attack, so we can’t expect to get reliable evidence as to who that was.’

  Nasim stared out into the traffic. ‘They can’t find out who had physical access to the server?’

  ‘The processor doesn’t seem to have been put there by someone tampering after the server was installed,’ Falaki replied. ‘It looks as if it’s been there since the machine was built.’

  ‘So they got hacked chips into the supply line?’ Nasim had only ever heard of that being done before by major crime syndicates.

  ‘It looks that way,’ Falaki said.

  ‘Have the FLOPS House cleared all their hardware?’

  ‘Not yet; they’re working their way through. That could take them a month or more. The data we had on the breach helped them narrow down their first tests, but for a comprehensive sweep there’ll be no shortcuts.’

  A month or more? But it was worse than that; if the cis-humanists had introduced their own custom chips into the manufacturer’s stock, there was no reason at all to think that only one provider was affected. Even if Zendegi stopped doing business with the FLOPS House, if they tried to push ahead in defiance of Rollo’s deadline, there was no guarantee that they’d be safe from a further attack.

  ‘There is an upside,’ Falaki said. ‘If you want to start negotiating hardware monitoring with the providers, this is the leverage you need.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Nasim conceded glumly. ‘But that’s still going to take five years.’

  ‘Of course,’ Falaki agreed.

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘In the meantime, I’d say the least risky approach would be to give these people what they want.’

  Nasim knew that this advice made sense, but it was still hard to swallow. ‘Did you find out anything about the CHL’s founders?’

  ‘There were five people who played a central role in the early discussions on the net,’ Falaki said. ‘Some of them must still be active on the same issues. We’ve passed the names on to the Dutch police, and they’ll liaise with the authorities in the relevant countries. But we’ve got no evidence at all of criminal activity by any of those individuals. Don’t expect to see them rounded up and questioned; at best, some jurisdictions might add them to surveillance lists.’

  ‘I see.’

  When she’d hung up, Nasim sat watching the cars stream past her, trying to psych herself up for the call to the boss. Zendegi would not go down the tubes; Virtual Azimi would keep them afloat. The act
of capitulation stung, but she would probably get to keep her livelihood.

  As she turned the notepad over in her hands, she felt her fingers shaking. She could still see the expression on the Proxy’s face as it struggled to bring itself under control: the horror at reaching out for the strength it needed from a part of its mind that simply wasn’t there.

  Nasim spent an hour and a half with the boss, mapping out Zendegi’s retreat. She had already started Bahador and Arif working on contingency plans, searching for ways to ease the transition for those games that used the Fariba modules and the other higher-level side-loads. For some of the games a fair approximation of the linguistic and social skills the Proxies were calling upon could be achieved with conventional software; Zendegi could license and adapt off-the-shelf modules and substitute them for the side-load versions. In other cases there would be no workaround, and they would simply have to pay penalty clauses to the developers.