Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  Instead, they started: with fists, batons, boots. They were aiming for the placards, but they pummelled and tore at everything that lay in their path. The demonstrators were not outnumbered, but they were hemmed in on all sides. They were attempting to regroup to protect the women, and at the same time trying to hold on to the placards and keep them aloft as a gesture of defiance. The men being beaten on the perimeter were quickly becoming dazed and bloody, but it was hard for their comrades to pull them back from the front line without ceding ground. Martin heard brakes squealing. He swung around. A tarpaulin-covered truck had stopped dead in the road, and for one terrible moment he had a vision of soldiers with automatic weapons piling out. But nobody emerged from the back of the truck, just the driver and two companions from the cab. They were solidly built middle-aged men, in work clothes, not uniforms, and they threw themselves into the fray with a grim, unflinching determination that reminded Martin of one of his uncles trying to separate feral cousins at a family gathering thirty years before. He filmed one of the men grabbing a baton-wielding Basiji under the arms and flinging him back onto the grass as if hefting a sack of potatoes.

  In rapid succession there was a mosquito whine of more bikes arriving, angry shouting from the road, then another group of civilians joining the fight. Underneath his struggle to remain detached and simply record the details, Martin felt a mixture of admiration and dread. Most Iranians had no tolerance for seeing defenceless people being beaten, and they weren’t shy about taking on thugs. But one punch-up on Ferdowsi Square would not settle anything. Unless someone within the regime came up with a political solution, people’s frustration at the repression and hypocrisy they faced would continue to escalate - until the only possible response was a full-scale, bloody crackdown: 2009 all over again.

  Martin could see nothing at ground level now but a scrum of backs and furious elbows, but someone deep within the pack, propped up by companions to a visible height, was still holding one of the placards over their heads. As Martin tilted the phone to capture the sight, a Basiji turned and glared at him.

  ‘Hey, motherfucker! Hand it over!’ He seemed to have learnt English from one of Omar’s DVDs - perhaps the mujahedin-friendly Rambo III. As the Basiji approached, baton in hand, Martin lowered the phone and looked around for an escape route, but between the vehicles parked on the roadside and the brawling mob spread across the grass, he was fenced in.

  Behrouz caught his eye; in all the turmoil they’d become separated and he’d ended up about twenty metres away, near the edge of the square’s ornamental pool. He held up his hand and Martin tossed the phone to him, half expecting it to end up in the water as punishment for his lifelong neglect of ball skills. But Behrouz caught it, and without a moment’s hesitation dashed out into the traffic and vanished behind an approaching truck. Martin froze, waiting for an ominous squeal and a thump, but the sound never came.

  ‘Khub bazi,’ muttered the cop admiringly. The Basiji grimaced and spat on the ground, but did not give chase. Martin’s heart was pounding. Behrouz had his own keys to the car, which was parked a few hundred metres away; he’d get the phone to safety, then come back.

  Martin turned to the cop. ‘So, how do you feel when passing truck drivers have to do your job for you?’

  The cop looked wounded. He held out his hands, wrists together. We can’t interfere. Our hands are tied.

  4

  Nasim called in sick and prepared to spend the day at home, watching rumours and snippets of news ricochet between the satellite channels and the Persian blogosphere. She didn’t have to go through the charade of making her voice sound pitifully hoarse and congested; the department’s new personnel system made it as simple as choosing an option on her phone’s menu, and for a single day’s absence she wouldn’t need a medical certificate.

  The truth was, she really did have a cold coming on, which always happened when she was short of sleep, but normally she would have brushed off the symptoms and joined her colleagues in the lab. Her mother was more disciplined; she too had stayed up half the night, channel-hopping beside Nasim, but she’d still gone in to work. Her students needed her, she’d declared. Ordinary life couldn’t grind to a halt just because there were people battling for the future of their country half a world away.

  Nasim sat in the living room with her laptop beside her, listening for the ping of News Alerts while she cycled the TV between the BBC, Al Jazeera and IRIB. The Iranian government had ordered the country’s internet providers to shut down all domestic accounts and coffeenets, but they had not yet disabled business access or international phone lines, so journalists and some bloggers were still getting news out. Nasim suspected that the government didn’t really care; they were far more interested in keeping their own people in the dark than they were in fretting over international opinion.

  IRIB, the national broadcaster, wasn’t ignoring the unrest, but it was covering it as a kind of social malaise arising directly out of unemployment. The poor state of the economy was not an unmentionable topic, but the network’s commentators blathered platitudes about the need for people to be patient and give the ‘new’ Majlis time to address the problem.

  Nasim had almost dozed off when a brief coda to IRIB’s main news bulletin brought her fully awake. ‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari says his research into the drug problem has been misrepresented by malicious elements of the foreign media.’ Nasim thumbed up the volume. ‘Mr Jabari issued a statement in Tehran this afternoon, describing a recent visit he made to an area of the city frequented by drug users, in order to gain insight into this tragedy. Having met one confused young man in urgent need of spiritual counselling, Mr Jabari agreed to drive him to his own mosque, in order to obtain advice from the mullah there. Unfortunately Mr Jabari’s car was involved in an accident, and now his act of charity has been portrayed in some quarters as an act of immorality. Mr Jabari stated that he would not take legal action against the slanderers, as his reputation among honest Iranians has not been affected by these lies.’

  Nasim experienced a strange sense of cultural dislocation. This sounded exactly like the kind of story a senator in Washington might try to spin, as an intermediate step between the initial flat-out denial and the inevitable, tearful press conference with spouse, booking into rehab and finding of Jesus. She tried to picture Hassan Jabari standing at a podium with his wife beside him, blaming everything on prescription pills, then announcing that he was off to Qom for six months to get in touch with his spiritual side.

  The doorbell rang. Nasim ignored it, hoping it was an easily discouraged Jehovah’s Witness, but the caller was persistent. She muted the TV and walked down the hall.

  She opened the door to a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who asked, ‘Nasim Golestani?’ When Nasim nodded, she went on, ‘My name’s Jane Frampton, I’m a science journalist. I was hoping to have a word with you.’

  ‘A journalist?’

  Frampton must have mistaken Nasim’s expression of alarm for some kind of struggle to place her name, because she added helpfully, ‘You might remember me from such New York Times bestsellers as The Sociobiology of The Simpsons and The Metaphysics of Melrose Place.’

  ‘I . . . don’t have much time to read outside my field,’ Nasim managed diplomatically.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘What is it you wanted to talk about?’ By now her mother would have had the woman ensconced in the living room, sipping tea and chewing gaz, but Nasim considered hospitality to be a greatly overrated virtue.

  Frampton smiled. ‘The HCP. Off the record, of course—’

  Nasim replied firmly, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible. You should direct all your questions to the MIT News Office.’

  ‘There’ll be no comeback, I promise,’ Frampton insisted. ‘I know how to protect my sources.’

  ‘I’m not a source! I don’t want to be a source!’ Nasim was bewildered. Why would any journalist go to the trouble of tracking her down? She was all in f
avour of academic free speech, but a costly, politically sensitive project still awaiting funding was never going to get off the ground if every postdoc who hoped to play a part in it started acting as a self-appointed spokesperson.

  When she’d finally convinced Frampton that she had nothing to offer her, Nasim returned to the living room and sat with her laptop on her knees, reading the latest blog entries. Jabari’s statement was already being torn apart by dozens of expatriate Iranians, and even a few in-country bloggers had managed to get their own sardonic responses out onto foreign servers. As Nasim scrolled obsessively through the posts - all of them quoting the same tiny crumbs of information - she knew she was beginning to act pathologically, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t contributing anything to the struggle; she could sit here reading blogs all day, endorsing some views and arguing with others, but nothing she did would change the situation on the ground in Tehran or Shiraz. She should have gone to work, taken her mind off the protests, and caught up with all the news when she came home.

  She glanced over at the picture of her father on the wall, impossibly young, frozen in time. What would he have expected of her? Probably not to care about anyone’s expectations. But when she followed her own instincts, ignoring her mother’s sensible example, she ended up sitting here in a masochistic stupor, hitting keys like a trained rat, aching for a reward that could never be delivered.

  The doorbell rang again. Nasim tore herself away from the laptop and opened the door this time on a gaunt young man.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Looking at the hollows of his face she could easily have imagined that he was going door-to-door begging for food, but he was wearing a designer-label jacket that probably cost as much as a small car.

  ‘Are you Nasim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Nate Caplan.’ He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, ‘My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it.’

  ‘Aha.’ Nasim was beginning to wonder if it was possible to overdose on cold remedies to the point of hallucinating.

  ‘I know I look skinny,’ Caplan continued, ‘but I have no lipid deficiencies that would lead to neurohistological abnormalities. I’ve had biopsies to confirm that. And I’m willing to give up the caloric restriction if you make it worth my while.’

  Nasim knew what was happening now. This was why her contact details were supposed to be kept private, even while the Human Connectome Project remained nothing more than a set of ambitious proposals surrounded by a fog of blogospheric hype.

  ‘How did you get my address?’ she demanded.

  Caplan gave her a co-conspirator’s smile. ‘I know you have to be careful. But I promise you, I’m not setting you up. You’ll get the money, and it will be untraceable. All I want from you in return is a guarantee that when the time comes, I’ll be the one.’

  Nasim didn’t know where to start. ‘If the HCP goes ahead, the first maps will be utterly generic. We’ll be tracing representative pathways within and between a few dozen brain regions, and then extrapolating from that. And we’ll be using hundreds of different donor brains, for different regions and different tracing techniques. If you really want to kill yourself and donate your organs to science, go right ahead, but even if I took your bribe and somehow managed to get your brain included in the project . . . you’d have no more chance of waking up in cyberspace than if you’d donated a kidney.’

  Caplan replied, more puzzled than offended, ‘Do I look like an idiot? That’s the program now. But ten years down the track, when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution—’

  ‘Ten years?’ Nasim spluttered. ‘Do you have any idea how unrealistic that is?’

  ‘Ten, twenty, thirty . . . whatever. You’re getting in on the ground floor, so this is my chance to be there with you. I need to put the fix in early.’

  Nasim said flatly, ‘I’m not taking your money. And I want to know how you got my address!’

  Caplan’s previously unshakeable confidence seemed to waver. ‘Are you saying the rabbit wasn’t your idea?’

  ‘What rabbit?’

  He took his phone from his pocket and showed her a map of the area. A small icon of a rabbit wearing a mortarboard was positioned at the location of her house. When Caplan tapped the icon with his finger, an information overlay popped up, giving her name, affiliation and research interests. The HCP wasn’t mentioned explicitly, but anyone in the know could have worked out that she belonged to a group that was hoping to be part of the project.

  ‘You really didn’t put that there?’ Caplan asked, clearly reluctant to abandon his original hypothesis: that Nasim had inserted herself into a map of Cambridge sights and attractions as an inconspicuous way to solicit bribes from wealthy anorexics.

  ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘a bunny rabbit is not an accurate representation of my mood right now.’ She started to close the door, but Caplan held up one skinny arm and took hold of the edge.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll want to talk about this again,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve thought it over.’

  ‘I’m sure I won’t.’

  ‘Just give me your email address.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Nasim increased her pressure on the door and he started yielding.

  ‘You can always reach me through my blog!’ he panted. ‘Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—’

  He pulled his hand free just in time to avoid having it squashed between the door and the jamb. Nasim locked the door and waited in the hallway, checking through the peephole until he gave up and walked away. She went to her room and summoned the Cambridge map on her own phone. Caplan’s version hadn’t been a hoax; the inane rabbit was there, exactly as before. Somehow it had been written into the map’s public database.

  Who had done this to her? How? Why? Was it a prank, or something nastier? She started mentally listing names and pondering motives, then caught herself. Instead of drifting off into a paranoid fantasy, she needed to gather some solid information.

  Nasim took her phone and walked three blocks down the street. After a delay of a minute or so, the rabbit icon on the map moved to match her new position. She walked further, to a small park. Once the rabbit had caught up, she switched off the phone. Back in the house, she checked the map again, via her laptop. The rabbit was still in the park.

  So nobody had disclosed her home address, as such - but her phone had taken it upon itself to broadcast her location in real-time to the world.

  Using the landline, she called the department’s IT support.

  ‘This is Christopher, how can I help you?’

  ‘My name’s Nasim Golestani. I’m with Professor Redland’s group.’

  ‘Okay; what’s the problem?’

  She explained the situation. Christopher sank into a thoughtful silence that lasted almost half a minute. Then he said, ‘You know AcTrack?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure you do. It’s a reality-mining plug-in that learns about academic networking using physical proximity, along with email and calling patterns. Last semester we put it on everyone’s phones.’

  The phones were supplied by the department, to ensure that everyone had compatible software; Nasim just accepted all the upgrades they sent out without even looking at them.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘so I’m running AcTrack. Is everyone else who’s running AcTrack appearing on Google Maps?’

  ‘No,’ Christopher conceded, ‘but you know Tinkle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a new femtoblogging service going through a beta trial.’

  ‘Femtoblogging?’

  ‘Like microblogging, only snappier. It tells everyone in your network where you are and how you’re feeling, once a minute. Ti
nkle are working on ways of extracting mood and contactability data automatically from non-invasive biometrics, but that part’s not implemented yet.’

  ‘But why am I running it at all,’ Nasim asked wearily, ‘and why is it telling complete strangers where I am?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt you’re actually running a Tinkle client,’ Christopher said. ‘But on the server side, AcTrack and Tinkle are both application layers that run on a lower-level platform called Murmur. It’s possible that there’s been some glitch with Murmur - maybe a server crash that was improperly recovered and ended up corrupting some files. Tinkle does hook into Google Maps, and though it shouldn’t be putting anyone on the public database, if you don’t belong to any Tinkle Clan it might have inadvertently defaulted you to public.’