Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  Omar joined them. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘It was good.’ Martin gave him a shorter version than Javeed’s, which was still in progress. ‘I guess when you pay for it, you don’t have to put up with the walking advertisements?’

  ‘Yeah. You can get a discount if you let them bug you, but it’s your choice.’

  Martin laughed. ‘That’s a relief. It will be good to go back and be certain that everyone around us is real.’

  Omar’s smile became equivocal.

  Martin said, ‘What? Why can’t I be sure of that?’

  ‘It’s not just ads,’ Omar explained. ‘They put in Proxies for fun as well. With some of the games there aren’t enough real people playing, so they need to make up the numbers to keep it from getting boring. Or sometimes there are characters nobody wants to be - roles that are needed, but aren’t very interesting.’

  ‘Okay.’ It made sense that some role-playing games would be padded out with grunts and cannon fodder, but Martin had never imagined that half the exuberant children splashing water onto stone in the labyrinth’s courtyard could have been the same: software extras inserted to bolster the mood. ‘Won’t that get confusing, though? What if Javeed thinks he’s making a new friend?’

  Omar shook his head impatiently. ‘You can always get Zendegi to tag the Proxies if you want to. But why spoil the fun? Maybe Javeed will play football in a stadium with twenty thousand people watching. Maybe you and twenty others will be real. Does he need to know which ones? When you take him to a movie, do you sit there pointing out which characters are real human extras and which ones are CGI?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Martin could see the logic of it, but he still wasn’t entirely happy.

  Javeed had reached his third iteration of refinements and corrections in his story to Farshid. Martin put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bas, pesaram. Say thanks to Uncle Omar, then come and help me make lunch.’

  Martin drove into the city with Javeed guarding the meal they’d cooked. Mahnoosh closed the shop and they sat on the floor in the back room, eating. Or rather, Martin ate and Mahnoosh tried to as Javeed regaled her nonstop with stories of Zendegi. By the time Martin had to go and re-open the shop, Javeed’s plate had barely been touched.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mahnoosh said. ‘I’ll reheat it at home.’

  Martin kissed them both good-bye. Javeed stood passively when Martin embraced him; if he’d been sulking he would have squirmed away, but this was his subtle freeze-out, where he declined to reciprocate affection, but also eschewed overt signs of hostility.

  People of the Book was open until nine; Martin didn’t mind the first few hours, but the evenings dragged. He’d given up hoping that they’d ever be able to afford an assistant to take the night shifts; the rent on the shop kept going up, and while their sales weren’t falling, the numbers were flat. The only way to increase revenue would be to put up prices, and a cyber-ketab - with ten complimentary bestsellers pre-loaded - already cost less than five hardbacks.

  Still, their customers weren’t deserting them yet. As Martin was getting ready to close, an elderly woman in a headscarf approached the counter.

  ‘Do you have The Moor’s Last Sigh?’ she asked.

  ‘In Farsi or English?’

  ‘Farsi.’

  Martin checked on the computer. ‘That’s print-on-demand. I could run it off for you now, if you like.’

  ‘Please.’

  Martin tapped the screen and the machine behind him started humming. ‘Good choice,’ he told the woman. ‘It’s my favourite of his. And it has the distinct advantage of never having been made into a song by U2.’

  She smiled nervously and looked around, as if she was afraid someone might overhear them. But she could have bought an electronic version in the privacy of her home if she’d wanted to. Instead, she’d chosen to walk out into the night and come back with an aromatic bundle of permanently inked pages, adorned with the name of the infamous apostate.

  Martin put the book into a plain brown bag; it was warm as a freshly baked loaf. The woman paid cash. When she’d left, he stepped out onto Enqelab Avenue and pulled down the security shutters.

  By the time Martin arrived home he was ravenous. Mahnoosh had eaten earlier, with Javeed, but she joined him anyway.

  ‘How did things go at the school?’ she asked, scraping the last of the tadigh onto his plate.

  Martin recounted the glitch with the enrolment form, and Javeed’s anxiety about her parents. ‘When I told him that your father had cut you off, he asked me if I’d ever do the same to him.’

  Mahnoosh’s face crumpled in sympathy, but then her expression softened almost to a smile and she looked at Martin as if it all made perfect sense. ‘Zal and the Simorgh,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘From the Shahnameh.’

  Martin shook his head. He’d known that Mahnoosh was mining a children’s version of Ferdowsi’s epic for bedtime stories, but he’d done no more than glance at the book himself.

  ‘Zal is born with white hair, like an old man,’ she explained. ‘His father is so superstitious that he abandons him in the wilderness, but the Simorgh - a giant bird with a dog’s head - finds him and raises him. Later, his father has a dream that the boy is still alive, and he goes into the mountains to ask his son’s forgiveness and bring him back.’

  Martin bit back a complaint about the suitability of the story; would he have protested over ‘Hansel and Gretel’? But he could see how it might have planted an idea in Javeed’s head that would have been rendered more real and threatening by a reminder of his grandparents’ behaviour.

  ‘Are you sure they’re never going to reconcile with you?’ Martin still struggled to comprehend how anyone could maintain a feud with their own daughter for so long. ‘They must want to see their grandson.’

  ‘They have other grandsons,’ Mahnoosh replied. ‘I’ve been dead to them for twenty-seven years; one more grandchild isn’t going to change that.’

  ‘What would?’

  Mahnoosh pondered the question. ‘Maybe a pilgrimage to Karbala over broken glass, and a written renunciation of everything I believe in.’

  ‘If they’re that fanatical, I guess you’d have to divorce me as well.’

  She shrugged. ‘They kicked me out twelve years before I’d even met you. And if you’d seen the band I was in back then, you’d know you just don’t rate on the burning-bridges-with-the-parents scale.’

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t have video.’ Martin had seen a few still photos, but Mahnoosh had been unrecognisable. In fact, she’d looked disturbingly like Robert Smith. He knew there’d been an underground music scene in Tehran, but an all-female Goth-metal band called Unquiet Grave must have been several kilometres beneath the pavement.

  ‘If your parents are a lost cause,’ he said, ‘there must be someone in your family who hasn’t disowned you.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it; my sisters are even worse!’ She thought for a while. ‘One of my mother’s cousins was okay, but I think she went to America, and anyway, I haven’t seen her since I was a kid.’ She sighed. ‘Look, let’s not make a big deal of this. Javeed has enough “aunties” and “uncles” and “cousins” to spoil any child. I’ve never met my sisters’ brats, but I bet he’s luckier having Farshid around than any of them.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Martin put his plate aside. ‘So, what do you think about Zendegi?’

  ‘Ah.’ Mahnoosh smiled. ‘I promised I’d go in with him next week, after school. To see for myself, before we sign up for a subscription.’

  ‘You’ll like it,’ Martin assured her. ‘It’s a lot of fun. Just . . . stay away from anyone who looks like some marketing software’s idea of your trusted next-door neighbour. There’s no danger that they’ll talk you into buying anything, but it still feels awkward when you have to call their bluff and walk away.’

  After he’d washed the dishes and had a quick shower, Martin went to Javeed’s room and stood at the foot of his bed. �
�Shab bekheyr, pesaram,’ he whispered - softly, but not too softly to be heard. Javeed’s sleep was always disturbed by the sound of Martin coming home: voices and the clatter of plates from the kitchen, creaking floorboards, running water. If Martin failed to say goodnight before the house fell silent, Javeed would wake and call out for him.

  Martin walked over to the bookcase beside the bed and picked up what he hoped was the right volume. Out in the light of the passageway he checked; it was the book of stories from the Shahnameh. He found ‘Zal and the Simorgh’, and stood leaning against the wall as he read.

  Upon spotting the infant Zal, who’d been left to die of exposure at the foot of the Alborz Mountains - the same mountains you could see from half the streets of Tehran - the giant bird had brought him back to her nest with the intention of feeding him to her chicks. Miraculously though, the whole family of predators had taken pity on him. In fact, the Simorgh turned out to be a soft touch, feeding her adopted son the best leftovers, and even giving him a few magic feathers as a parting gift when his repentant father came to take him back.

  Nothing too frightening, and everyone was reconciled at the end. If Javeed was upset that Mahnoosh’s own parents hadn’t followed the script, Martin would just have to convince him that there were other kinds of happy ending.

  12

  Alerted by voices in Arabic and a whiff of expensive cologne, Nasim peeked out through a slit in the blinds just in time to catch sight of four men in immaculate suits strolling down the corridor past her office. Half-a-dozen more familiar figures hovered around them attentively, tripping over each other to ensure that the valued guests encountered no obstruction or inconvenience.

  This was the third group of financiers to visit the premises in a month; nobody ever introduced Nasim to these men, but she gathered that they all came from wealthy Gulf States - the kind that had invested in solar-algal oil long before their fossil wells had run dry.

  Nasim moved away from the window and sat at her desk, fidgeting unhappily with her notepad. She had no doubt that their guests had billions of rials to spare; the question was, could they be persuaded to send the smallest trickle in Zendegi’s direction? The directors laid on the hospitality, the glossy demonstrations, the optimistic growth forecasts, but it was an open secret that their biggest competitor was growing faster.

  In the last six months Cyber-Jahan had mounted a relentless campaign across the Middle East, poaching existing customers as well as signing up thousands who’d previously been uncommitted. Population wasn’t destiny; after all, it was the Koreans who dominated the Chinese VR market, and they were also doing well in Japan. But Zendegi had never quite managed to pull off its own David-and-Goliath act; the days of stealing customers from its Indian rival were long gone, and now it was faltering even in its own heartland. Nasim couldn’t see how they were going to hang on for another year without a very large injection of cash.

  There was a soft tapping on her door; it opened before she had a chance to respond. Her chief software engineer, Bahador, slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. ‘Sorry, Nasim, but the boss told me to make myself scarce. He said I looked untidy.’

  ‘Untidy?’ By any ordinary standards Bahador was perfectly well groomed, but perhaps the mere presence of the Giorgio Omanis was enough to render any less-tailored mortal shabby by comparison. Nasim gestured at the chair opposite her desk. ‘You’d better sit down and wait for the paranoia to pass.’ At least she had an office of her own, so she could close the door and draw the blinds; if she’d worked in the open plan area, she herself probably would have been banished to the ladies’ toilets.

  ‘So how’s the tour going?’ she asked in a low voice. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  Bahador nodded and leant forward. ‘When they came out of the ghal’eha, one of them said, “There’s nothing new here. We’ve seen this all before.”’

  Nasim absorbed this news glumly. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t asked to choose the demo suite; at least I can’t get blamed for that.’

  Bahador scowled. ‘Screw them. We have better lighting effects than anyone else, better facial interpolation, better gait dynamics. Then they come here and complain that we’re not hosting completely different games. No developer is going to write exclusively for us; the question is: does the game look better, does it feel more natural, when it’s running in Zendegi?’

  ‘That’s true,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but it’s starting to look pretty marginal. So long as Cyber-Jahan has more customers, developers are going to release there first. And for anything with a strong social component, sheer force of numbers is going to make the experience better.’

  Bahador didn’t reply. Nasim wished she could have said something to boost his morale, but she suspected that only a massive marketing campaign could save them now. Any advances in mere technical excellence would be like decorating the ballroom as the ship went down.

  ‘If we had better Proxies,’ Bahador mused, ‘the numbers wouldn’t matter so much.’

  ‘We do have better Proxies,’ Nasim protested. ‘We have the best biomechanical models in the world.’

  Bahador nodded impatiently. ‘But as you said, that kind of advantage is marginal. They look natural enough, but when it comes to behaviour . . .’

  ‘Behaviour is a game-specific problem. It’s out of our hands.’

  ‘That’s my point,’ Bahador replied. ‘Maybe it shouldn’t be out of our hands. If we could supplement the biomechanics with the best behavioural models - and allow developers to leverage the whole package for free - it wouldn’t matter that Cyber-Jahan had the flesh-and-blood advantage. Playing a game with ten thousand high quality Proxies would actually be better than playing in a real crowd, because smart developers could tune all the interpersonal dynamics to suit the real players.’

  Nasim said, ‘Okay, that’s a perfectly sensible goal - but we have no expertise in Proxy behaviour. And we’ve looked into this before. The boss sent me on a head-hunting trip a few years ago: India, Korea, the United States, Europe; I went to about fifty campuses and start-ups looking for researchers we could hire, or technology we could license. But there was nothing that was really close to passing for human in anything but the crudest shoot-’em-up.’

  ‘Was that when you visited the Superintelligence Project?’ Bahador had joined Zendegi a year later, but Nasim must have mentioned the trip to him before.

  ‘Yeah. No AI there.’ She had spent a day at their Houston complex, curious to find out what they’d done with Zachary Churchland’s billions once his bequest had finally made it through the Texan version of Bleak House. But the sum total of their achievements had amounted to a nine-hundred-page wish-list dressed up as a taxonomy, a fantasy of convenient but implausible properties for a vast imaginary hierarchy of software daemons and deities. The whole angelic realm had been described with the kind of detail often lavished on a game-world’s mythical bestiary, but Nasim had seen no evidence that these self-improving cyber-djinn had any more chance of being brought to life than the denizens of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.

  ‘That was five years ago,’ Bahador said. ‘The state of the art’s changed; look at the viziers in Palace Intrigue, say—’

  ‘They’re not bad,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but we’re never going to be able to acquire that technology exclusively for Zendegi. The game developers have no interest in picking a fight with Cyber-Jahan.’

  ‘So forget the state-of-the-art,’ Bahador suggested. ‘Hire the people who’ll go beyond it.’

  ‘They’re already working for the game developers! If we tried to poach Proxologists now, it’d mean a bidding war, and we just don’t have that kind of money.’

  Bahador raised his hands in a gesture of mock resignation. ‘Okay, I give up. We’re finished. I’ll send my résumé to Bangalore and brush up on my Hinglish.’

  Nasim laughed. ‘If you really want to impress them, learn Kannada; that’s the founders’ first language.’

  Bahador glanced
at his watch. ‘They’ll be taking the guests to the boardroom for tea soon. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.’

  ‘Maybe Cyber-Jahan will just acquire us,’ Nasim mused. ‘Wait for the stock to get a bit lower, then buy themselves a regional subsidiary.’

  Bahador said nothing, but he looked away, his body language suddenly reproachful, even wounded. Despite his own résumé joke, Nasim could tell that she’d crossed some kind of line. The two of them - along with a dozen of their colleagues - had worked like maniacs for the last four years to make Zendegi the most impressive VR engine on the planet. So how could she be so defeatist? How could she even think of surrender?

  When Nasim arrived home she walked out to the balcony and peered into the bird cage; the four finches were sitting firmly on their perches, fast asleep. Clearly the local Tehrani subspecies had evolved to be oblivious to the sound of traffic. Their water tray was speckled with dead insects; it seemed unlikely that this would bother them, but she changed the water anyway, moving carefully to avoid disturbing the birds.