Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  On the third floor there were two more metal gates that needed power-tools to break through; it was another twenty minutes before they were standing before the cells themselves. Martin raised his phone and snapped the scene: a row of identical doors stretching away down the corridor ahead of them, with no windows, just thin slits that appeared to be bolted shut. The place was shabbily clean, with a strong smell of disinfectant not quite masking an undercurrent of excrement. Even now, Martin could hear only faint, muffled shouting from a few inmates; the cells were almost soundproof.

  The first key was matched, the first door swung open. A middle-aged man limped out into the corridor; he seemed dazed, unsure of what was happening. He was dressed in loose white clothes, bare-foot; above his thick beard his face was covered in welts and bruises. He spoke with his liberators in a soft voice, with an air of puzzlement. Maybe he’d heard nothing of Jabari, of the strikes and marches. Perhaps he’d spoken to no one but his captors for years.

  Martin held up his phone and started filming.

  Behrouz said, ‘I’m going this way.’ He shook his keys and gestured at a second line of cells that started further to their right.

  ‘Okay.’ Martin didn’t follow him; he wanted to record what was happening, but he didn’t want to thrust his camera into the faces of these fragile people. Another door opened in the corridor ahead of him; a tall, skinny youth, shirtless, with long red weals on his back, stepped forward nervously. As he talked with the protesters he was as quiet as the first man, but much more anxious, blinking and flinching away from anyone who came too close. Then he sat down on the floor outside the cell and cradled his head in his arms.

  When the third cell opened there were shouts of jubilation; Mahnoosh was among the liberators here, cheering the loudest. After a moment Martin recognised the freed prisoner as a young man who’d been arrested on the first day of the siege; his face was bruised and one eye was swollen shut, but he was still wearing torn street clothes rather than prison garb. Some of his friends lifted him up on their shoulders and carried him towards the stairs.

  As Martin turned to keep them in view, he heard a gunshot, very close. One of the protesters staggered, bleeding from the shoulder. Martin swung around, his ears ringing in the silence. A man with a neatly trimmed beard, wearing a pale green shirt decorated with the prison authority insignia, was standing a few metres away, in front of an open utilities closet.

  The guard turned to Martin, shouting angrily, gesturing with his pistol. Martin raised his hands in surrender, but the guard kept screaming insults or instructions. Martin had no idea what he was saying, and the only response he could string together was an apology for his incomprehension: ‘Ma’zerat mikham, agha. Farsi balad nistam.’

  The guard aimed his gun directly at Martin’s head.

  Mahnoosh called out urgently, ‘Put down the phone! He wants you to put down the phone!’

  Martin tried to drop it, but his fingers wouldn’t unclench. He wished he’d taken the keys when he’d been offered them.

  The guard grunted and sagged to the ground. Someone had hurled a fire-extinguisher and hit him in the back. People piled on top of him, grabbing the gun and restraining him. Martin felt lightheaded; he sat on the floor and watched, detached from everything. The guard was taken to a newly vacated cell; the wounded protester was given a makeshift bandage and helped to the stairs. There was a hospital in the prison complex, Martin recalled. He wondered if they’d be willing to treat the man.

  ‘Hey! Martin jan!’

  Martin looked up to see Omar approaching, with Behrouz following behind him. His face was gaunt and he was walking with a limp, but he was beaming. Martin rose to his feet and stepped forward to embrace him, fighting back tears of relief.

  ‘What happened? It looks like you lost twenty kilos.’

  ‘I did a hunger strike,’ Omar replied. ‘Looks like it worked. Twenty kilos and the walls come down; ten more and they would have made me President.’

  Omar wanted to phone Rana. The protesters had managed to force open two offices with working landlines, but there were already long queues for those, so they decided to try the floor below. As the three of them were walking down the stairs, Martin’s phone emitted a chime he’d never heard before. He checked the display, and after a moment he realised that it was now showing an icon for the radio mesh network that he’d seen used at the Majlis protest. Someone must have found the local jammer and disabled it.

  He showed Omar, who tried a few numbers, but the network was still jammed across most of the city. On the second floor one of the landlines was free; while Omar was making his call, Martin’s phone managed another novel sound. Someone on the network was offering a streaming video feed.

  He tapped the icon, and it expanded into a shaky camera shot of a TV screen tuned to an IRIB news broadcast. Martin gave the phone to Behrouz.

  Other people around them were already cheering ecstatically. Behrouz scowled, struggling to hear more. Martin waited patiently; there was a loop of text running at the bottom of the screen, it would all be spelled out eventually.

  Behrouz said, ‘The moderate clerics have won some kind of deal. There’s going to be a referendum on the Guardian Council veto powers within three months, followed by new elections for the President and the Majlis before the end of the year.’

  That was it, that was the saving move. If the deal held, there would be no civil war, but no turning back to the status quo either.

  Omar was sitting on the floor, the office phone in his hand, weeping with joy. Behind him was a huge grey filing cabinet that someone had tipped on its side, spilling VEVAK’s meticulous accounts of their interrogations all over the floor. Maybe there hadn’t been enough time to put everything through the shredders. Or maybe the fuckers had thought they’d be coming back.

  Martin turned to Behrouz and held out his hand. ‘Mubaarak.’ Behrouz shook it, but even as his expression of disbelief slowly melted into a kind of stunned acceptance, he wasn’t ready to claim victory.

  ‘Nothing’s certain yet,’ he insisted.

  ‘No,’ Martin conceded.

  Behrouz smiled. ‘But it starts today. It might take us another ten years to be free - but it starts today.’

  10

  Nasim stared glumly across the sea of dinner jackets and evening gowns, trying to think of a way to escape to her hotel room before someone made yet another hypocritical speech in praise of Kourosh Ansari, President-elect of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  She turned to her mother. ‘I can’t believe I let you drag me down here. Half these people spent the last thirty years trying to get America to bomb their own country, just so they could go back and turn it into their own cosy little kleptocracy.’

  ‘That’s unfair!’ her mother replied. ‘A quarter of them at most. Anyway, that’s just the old men; you should be thinking about their sons.’

  Nasim grimaced. ‘My idea of a romantic evening does not include a speech by Donald Rumsfeld at the Heritage Foundation.’

  ‘How many people have you actually spoken to tonight?’

  ‘Am I allowed to count waiters?’

  ‘Go and mingle.’ Her mother made a shooing gesture. ‘I didn’t buy you that dress so you could spend the night whining in my ear.’

  Nasim left her and headed for the canapés. Amazingly enough, there’d been a vegetarian option, but it had been a quarter of the size of the other main courses and she was still famished.

  As she stood at the buffet table trying to determine whether there was anything left that she could eat - other than garnishes - a voice beside her said, ‘Congratulations on your new President.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Nasim resisted the urge to add acerbically, ‘I do hope you’ll let us keep this one.’ She turned to face the speaker; the painfully thin young man looked familiar, but it took her a few seconds to place him. ‘Are you stalking me?’ she demanded. ‘Did you follow me to Washington?’

  Caplan looked affronted. ‘Would you
like to see my invitation? I’m a major donor to the Iranian-American Friendship Council.’

  ‘Since when? Three days ago?’

  ‘Six, actually.’

  ‘Six? A real futurologist.’ Nasim looked around for hotel security, but there was no honest complaint she could make that wouldn’t sound deranged and paranoid. ‘What exactly is it that you think I can do for you? Haven’t you heard the news about the HCP?’

  ‘Congress decided not to fund it.’ Caplan was stoical. ‘That’s sad, but it’s not unexpected. So there’ll be no big, coordinated federal project, but I’m sure you’ll still find grants here and there. I’ll be setting up my own foundation to help with that, though of course I can’t replace someone like Churchland.’

  Zachary Churchland had died three weeks before and descended into the frosty limbo of an Alcor cryonic vault. He had left the bulk of his estate to the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project, having finally concluded that he couldn’t trust his immortal soul to human hands.

  ‘I heard someone’s contesting his will,’ Nasim recalled. ‘Not just his widow; his first wife, too—’

  ‘Third wife. Actually I’m helping her fund the case,’ Caplan explained smoothly.

  Nasim stared at him. ‘How does someone get to marry Zachary Churchland, then end up needing help to fund anything?’

  ‘A party in Las Vegas, a truckload of cocaine, and several professional athletes.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked. But if she got nothing in the divorce, why would she be any luckier at the graveside? Or freezer-side.’

  Caplan smiled. ‘She won’t be. But I found a lawyer who’s convinced her otherwise, based in part on the Leona Helmsley case - you know, the woman who was ruled mentally unfit after leaving twelve million to her dog. The ongoing litigation should help keep the bequest out of the Superintelligence Project’s hands for quite a while.’

  Pet dog, pet god; maybe the precedent would actually fly for a dyslexic judge. Still, Nasim was baffled. ‘Why should you care who gets Churchland’s money? It’s either Bullshit Squared, or the wives. It’s lost to the HCP.’

  ‘No doubt it is,’ Caplan conceded, ‘but I don’t want the superintelligence to come into existence before I’m uploaded. It’s very important to me that I’m the first transcendent being in this stellar system. I can’t risk having to compete with another resource-hungry entity; I have personal plans that require at least one Jovian mass of computronium.’

  ‘Really? I have “personal plans” that require Naveen Andrews and a bottle of coconut oil, but I don’t expect they’re going to happen either.’

  Caplan was bemused. ‘Why are you so hostile?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve had enough experience of deluded fundamentalists to last a lifetime.’

  ‘Well, you’re wasting your energy,’ Caplan replied loftily. ‘One way or another, everything I speak of will come to pass. You can either join us, or be left behind.’

  Nasim said, ‘Don’t go crazy with those mushroom-stuffed vol-auvents; I heard they can slash three per cent off the lifespan of nematode worms.’

  Back in their hotel room, Nasim’s mother said, ‘I received an interesting job offer tonight.’

  ‘Someone wants to poach you?’ Nasim was excited; it would have to be a big step up the ladder if they expected to lure her away from Harvard. ‘Who? Georgetown?’

  ‘Kourosh Ansari.’ Her mother smiled at Nasim’s expression. ‘He’s looking for advisers to help plan the restructuring of the economy. In fact, his representative told me that he’d read After Oil as soon as it came out.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Nasim was stunned. She’d certainly expected that parts of the diaspora would start trickling back to Iran, but even in those abstract terms she’d been thinking of a much longer time frame. ‘Have you decided what you’ll do?’

  ‘I think I’m going to accept the offer,’ her mother said. ‘There are no guarantees that they’ll really follow through on my advice, but if I missed this chance to have some input into the reconstruction process I’d never forgive myself.’

  Nasim sat down on her bed; she picked up a pillow and held it against her chest.

  She said, ‘I want to go with you.’

  ‘You mean come for a holiday? Of course!’ Her mother beamed. ‘That would be wonderful!’

  Nasim shook her head. ‘Not just a holiday. I want to go home. I want to live in Iran again.’

  Her mother sat beside her. ‘What about your work?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s all so uncertain now.’ The fact was, for a long time she’d been tacitly assuming that the HCP would go ahead. That would have meant a mountain of paperwork at the start, but the payoff would have been at least four or five years to focus on the science without further interruptions. Now it would be back to business as usual: begging for one small grant after another, never really being able to make plans that stretched beyond the next six months. ‘Maybe there’s something just as challenging that I can do in Iran. Everything will be changing; there’ll be a thousand opportunities.’

  ‘I’d come back and visit you, you know,’ her mother said. ‘If you stayed here. It’s not as if we’d be apart all the time.’

  ‘I know.’ Nasim put an arm around her. ‘And I’d visit you too. Together we’d burn up all the oil in the world.’

  ‘So would that be so bad?’ Her mother smiled. ‘I’m not trying to run away from you. But I don’t want you destroying your whole career just because you don’t want to be left alone here.’

  Nasim said sternly, ‘I’m not a child. This is a chance to rethink my plans. I spent so long hoping I’d be part of the HCP that I ended up with tunnel vision. Why shouldn’t I think about trying something new?’

  ‘All right,’ her mother agreed. ‘You can always come with me and take a look around before you make up your mind. Just don’t burn your bridges straight away.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Nasim embraced her. ‘So let’s stop talking about me. We should be celebrating your new job!’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’

  Nasim looked around for the room service menu. ‘Just because the kitchen’s officially closed, that doesn’t mean they’ve run out of cake.’

  Later, lying awake in the dark, Nasim turned the decision over in her mind. The prospect of walking away from her brain-mapping work was wrenching, but it wasn’t as if she was trashing her files and erasing herself from history. She’d already made some contributions to the field, and other people would build on them. She didn’t have to chain herself to one project for the rest of her life just to keep the time she’d spent on it from being wasted.

  She had always wanted to return to Iran. Now that her country was finally being reborn, she had to grab the chance to witness that with her own eyes, instead of watching everything unfold from a distance. All the frustration she’d felt at not being part of the uprising would be assuaged if she could at least be a part of the rebuilding.

  She began drifting towards sleep. Her mind was still in turmoil, but she was going to have to get used to that. Going back would not be easy, but this was her time, this was her chance to reclaim the life that had been stolen from her. Going back would not be easy, but she knew now that she could not stay away.

  PART TWO

  2027-2028

  11

  It was the day for Javeed to register for school, a week before classes began. Martin drove Mahnoosh to the shop early and the three of them sat in the back room unpacking boxes. Just the smell of new books always made Martin feel refreshed and optimistic; Mahnoosh was less romantic, and suggested that this was all down to traces of glue. Javeed’s task was to crush the biofoam packing chips by hammering them relentlessly with his fists, and to complain at length about shipments that were cushioned with shredded newsprint or plastic bags full of air.

  When it was time to leave, Javeed embraced his mother tightly, clinging for a few moments longer than usual. ‘Az
izam, azizam,’ she murmured reassuringly, pressing her face against his hair. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll love school.’

  ‘I know,’ Javeed replied cheerfully.

  Martin kissed her. ‘See you this afternoon.’

  There was a long queue at the school; they had to fill in a form and then wait to have it processed. Martin didn’t understand why they couldn’t have done the whole thing online; he’d renewed his driver’s licence a month before without leaving home, thanks to a seamless process involving facial biometrics and a gadget that read the RFID tag in the card. Still, it was good for his son to see the school from the inside at least once before starting classes. When Javeed needed to use the toilet the woman ahead of them offered to keep their place in the queue, but Martin sent him on the small adventure of getting there and back by himself.