Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  The lights had been out in her mother’s apartment as she’d come up the stairs; it would have been nice to sit and talk with her, but it was after eleven, too late to disturb her. Nasim had eaten at the office a couple of hours before, but she couldn’t face trying to sleep yet, so she sat in the living room and had her notepad stream a news summary to the wallscreen.

  If she lost Zendegi, what would she do? It was not as if she’d be unemployable; the company was a household name, and even if it went down in flames people would understand the market forces involved, they wouldn’t write off the technical staff as incompetent. The question was: could she face something new?

  Zendegi was the fifth job she’d had since returning to Iran, and the only one that had really suited her. She’d stuck out her first position - Online Outreach Director with Hezb-e-Haalaa - for almost six years, but in the end she’d finally had to admit that she was a bad match for politics. Everyone who’d been abroad in 2012 had suffered from martyr envy, but she’d lived through enough of the aftermath’s mundanity and compromise to get over it. Iran was a democracy now, wobbly and imperfect but probably not doomed, and she’d lost any sense that she was personally responsible for shoring it up. If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries had risked their lives to regain.

  ‘ . . . has been tipped as a possible Nobel recipient for his work on bacterial colonies . . .’

  Nasim gestured rewind-and-replay. The story was just a superficial thirty-second filler, but her knowledge-miner had correctly identified its subject as one of her former colleagues.

  She watched Dinesh’s smiling face as he deflected accusations of personal genius and attributed everything to his wonderful team. It wasn’t news to her that HETE had been successful, but at some point she’d stopped paying attention. ‘Good for you, Dr Bose,’ she muttered, sincere but still envious. She wasn’t jealous of these snippets of fame; she just wished she could have steered her own life half as well. Dinesh had made good use of his personal obsessions - which might otherwise have been merely neurotic - by harnessing them to an admirable goal. Nasim couldn’t believe that he’d spent a single day in the last ten years feeling bored and unfulfilled or guilty and self-indulgent. That was enough to make anyone want to smack him across the head.

  A truck’s horn blared close by, followed by a long, teeth-gritting squeal of brakes. Nasim went to the balcony and looked down at the highway; a near-miss this time, not a pile-up. It was enough to wake the birds, though. She stood in the dark listening to them chatter, wondering what they made of the strange racket that had roused them.

  Back in the living room, the notepad had detected her absence and paused its display. Nasim made a throat-cutting gesture that blanked the screen, but instead of heading for the bedroom she sat down again.

  She’d kept her gaze averted from another scientific endeavour, though it had attracted far more media coverage than HETE. If she was serious about exorcising jealousies and regrets, she might as well go for the big one.

  Nasim cupped her right hand beside her mouth to let her notepad know that she was addressing it and not just babbling dementedly to herself.

  ‘Human Connectome Project,’ she said.

  The map of the brain that appeared a heartbeat later was multicoloured and translucent, the familiar shape woven from a tangle of fanciful cables. Nasim had seen the emblematic image a few times before and dismissed it as eye candy, but now that she was actually paying attention she suspected that it was based on genuine regional connectivity statistics, with the glossy conduits rendered thick or thin in proportion to a tractographic count of nerve fibres between the different areas they linked. Like a schematic drawing of a metro system, it told something truthful in bright colours, even if it wasn’t an engineering blueprint for the real tracks and stations.

  She laughed softly; this wasn’t so painful. Two months before, when the news of the first draft’s completion had edged into her peripheral vision, it had filled her with a sense of uselessness and stupidity. If she hadn’t succumbed to the naïve fantasy that her homeland needed her, she could have been popping champagne in Cambridge or Düsseldorf and cheering for the cameras; just one face in an anonymous white-coated crowd, but still basking in the glow of her small part in the collective achievement.

  Now she felt just a wry impatience with her own touchiness and fragility. She was forty years old; if she couldn’t get over a few bad career choices after fifteen years, that was pathetic. She’d forgotten an entire marriage in less time than that.

  She navigated quickly past the gee-whiz bullet points, the byte counts trailing zeroes illustrated with comic-book stacks of Blu-rays reaching to the sky. Yes, that’s a lot of data you gathered, we’re all very impressed.

  The paper that announced the draft map itself had appeared in PLoS Computational Biology; Nasim followed the link to it. There was one more blow for her ego waiting here; her own work on integrating data from multiple subjects and imaging techniques wasn’t even cited in the references. She cursed the cheating bastards and skimmed back through the paper, looking for the evidence that would nail them. Whatever disappointments she’d brought upon herself, she still deserved this one tiny footnote in history.

  Except she didn’t. They’d used a different method entirely, statistical rather than functional, developed four years after she’d left the field. The final map they’d generated from their thousands of individual scans owed nothing whatsoever to her ideas about matching neural sub-circuits.

  Nasim felt lightheaded now. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. If all the late nights she’d spent in Redland’s lab had actually turned out to be irrelevant, maybe she should be grateful that she’d cut her losses and walked away. But if Zendegi was going down the tubes, and she hadn’t even left one tiny smudged thumbprint on the HCP, what was left? After forty years, what had she accomplished? One bad marriage and two failed careers.

  She stood up, her cheeks burning, refusing to sink into a heap of tears but still not able to laugh the whole thing off. Fretting about the HCP was useless vanity, but Zendegi’s fate was real and pressing. She’d seen the boss after the money men departed, and he had not looked hopeful.

  As she stared at the screen, her attention fell on a series of links leading off from the paper itself into the massive stores of data on the HCP’s own servers. In the spirit of Open Science - and as a condition of some of the funding - all the raw scans that had been used to build the map were available on the web, along with the map itself. The HCP’s first draft was not the final word; researchers around the world would keep adding more brain images and refining the results.

  But even without fresh scans to contribute, anyone could come along and re-analyse the data.

  Nasim read the whole paper. Every few paragraphs she had to break off to follow up an unfamiliar reference, or embark on a restless circuit of the room as she mulled over some technical detail, but after two hours she’d come to grips with everything.

  They’d done it deliberately, she realised. They’d chosen a different way to combine the scans, not because her technique had been rendered obsolete by a superior method, but because they’d been aiming for a different kind of map. This draft would allow neurologists to diagnose pathologies more easily, and enable computational biologists to test many of their basic ideas. What it would not do, though, was give rise to a complete, working simulation of a human brain. It was, by design, too blurred, too abstracted, too generic. But that had been a choice. The same raw data, with different methods, might well yield a different kind of map, far more amenable to being treated as a blueprint.

  There was no prospect of waking the dead; the individual memories and personalities of the subjects of the scans were unrecoverable. But their common attributes, their common skills, might not lie beyond reconstruction.

  Other people, Nasim was sure, would already have thought along the same
lines. Cyber-Jahan? Happy Universe? Games effects subcontractors, like Crowds and Power? Anyone who was serious about building the best possible Proxies would have had two months’ head start.

  But she’d trained for this race, she’d written the book on it. She was rusty on the details, but she could be back up to speed in a week or two if that was what she wanted.

  Out on the balcony, the finches were singing.

  13

  The plan had been for Mahnoosh to take Javeed to his first day of school while Martin opened the shop. The night before though, as Martin had been drifting off to sleep, Mahnoosh had turned and put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We can open late just once, can’t we?’ she’d said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s a good idea.’

  As Martin shepherded him into the car, Javeed was as excited as he’d ever been. He’d been awake since five o’clock, checking and rechecking everything in his school bag, counting his coloured pencils as if they were action figures. The impending novelty had even - finally - eclipsed the prospect of his return to Zendegi.

  ‘I know both alphabets,’ he boasted, as Martin strapped him into the back seat. ‘Some kids don’t know anything.’

  ‘Yeah, well, don’t be too full of yourself,’ Martin warned him. ‘Maybe you’re luckier than some kids. Your job is to help them catch up, not to make them feel bad.’

  ‘They should feel bad,’ Javeed retorted.

  Martin scowled. ‘Shaitan nasho!’

  Mahnoosh approached the car. She whispered to Martin, ‘I just phoned Omar about you-know-what, and he said he’d keep two ghal’eha free for us.’

  ‘Great.’

  Martin drove, blocking out Javeed’s chatter and focusing on the road, leaving it to Mahnoosh to engage with him. The school wasn’t much more than a kilometre away, and they planned to get into a routine of walking there, but today this would save them going back for the car.

  It took them ten minutes to find a parking spot, but Martin wasn’t going to drop the two of them off and circle back to pick up Mahnoosh, not today. When they finally reached the gate, the bell was ringing. They walked with Javeed across the playground, to the lines of boys and girls already forming outside his classroom.

  Mahnoosh bent down and embraced Javeed tightly.

  ‘Have you got everything, azizam?’

  ‘Yes, Mama.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a few hours. You wait for me here.’

  ‘Okay.’ Javeed squirmed a little, and she released him. Martin squatted down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Have fun. I’ll see you later.’

  Javeed went to join the line. Standing beside Mahnoosh, Martin reached over and took her hand. They waited until the teacher appeared and marched the two lines into the classroom. Mahnoosh waved, but the teacher had instructed the children to keep their eyes straight ahead, so Javeed didn’t see her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Martin asked her. The truth was he was feeling the tug of separation himself more keenly than he’d expected. For the first time in his life, Javeed would be going through something new without either of them beside him.

  Mahnoosh scowled defensively. ‘Of course. Ah, we didn’t take a photo!’

  ‘Do it when you pick him up,’ Martin suggested. ‘That’ll be better, because he’ll have something to show you; he’ll probably be waving a big drawing.’

  ‘The butterfly maze, I expect.’ All the classes had been led into their rooms now, and the parents were drifting away across the playground.

  Mahnoosh said, ‘I’ll drive you to the shop.’

  ‘Martin jan, are you awake?’

  Martin opened his eyes. It was night-time; the unfamiliar room was lit by a lamp attached to the wall beside the bed. Omar was sitting on a chair, hunched towards him. Martin’s mouth was dry and his head felt heavy.

  ‘What?’ he replied stupidly.

  ‘You’re in hospital,’ Omar explained; it must have been the lamplight, but he looked impossibly haggard, as if he’d aged a decade since Martin had last seen him. ‘You had an accident.’

  ‘Really? I don’t remember.’ Visceral panic welled up in his chest. ‘Who else was in the car?’ Martin swung his legs towards the side of the bed, but the sheet was tucked in so far under the mattress that he couldn’t kick it free.

  Omar reached out and restrained him. ‘Stay there, you’ve got a drip in your arm. I picked up Javeed from school. He’s at my home, he’s fine.’

  ‘Thank you.’ In the silence that followed Martin heard his own laboured breathing; the sound didn’t seem to belong to his body. ‘What about Mahnoosh?’

  ‘She was driving.’

  ‘Can I see her?’ Martin squinted at him, trying to read his face. ‘Get a wheelchair for me. We’ll go to the women’s wing.’

  ‘There was a truck,’ Omar said. ‘It went straight through the intersection.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Omar’s hand was still resting on his shoulder. He lowered his gaze slightly. ‘She died straight away. Nobody could help her.’

  ‘No.’ Martin knew this was impossible; Omar wouldn’t lie to him knowingly, but the hospital bureaucrats could get anything wrong. ‘What if I was in the car alone? People just assume things. Did you ring the shop?’

  ‘Martin jan, I saw her,’ Omar confessed. ‘They didn’t know if you’d recover, and they needed someone to . . . say who she was.’

  Martin felt his body shuddering; he struggled to keep control. ‘I’m sorry you had to do that.’

  Omar made a dismissive gesture, muttering reflexively, ‘Khahesh mikonam.’ Don’t mention it.

  ‘You should go home,’ Martin pleaded. ‘It must be late.’

  Omar didn’t argue. ‘I’ll come back in the morning.’

  When Omar had left the room, Martin felt himself sobbing noiselessly. He closed his eyes and swam into the darkness of his skull, trying to catch up with her: looking for an afterimage of her face, a memory of her voice, any thread that he could follow. How could they have been torn apart when they’d been sitting just inches from each other?

  He had touched her hand in the school yard, he remembered. He tried to grasp it more tightly, picturing the two of them together, trying to relive everything that had followed without being shaken free of her this time.

  But the scene led nowhere, the blackness remained impenetrable. He didn’t even know the last words they’d exchanged.

  In the morning, Martin asked to see Mahnoosh’s body. They removed his drip and catheter and an orderly took him in a wheelchair to the mortuary.

  Her face was purple and swollen, barely recognisable; he gazed at it long enough to be sure that it was her, but he felt no urge to touch her, to speak to her, to hold her. This body was a kind of grisly portrait of the woman, captured at the scene of the crash; it proved that she’d been there as surely as a photograph, but that was all.

  In the ward, a doctor came to see him. He’d had an operation to stem internal bleeding, and it appeared to have been successful, but rather than officially discharging him they were making special provisions for him to attend the funeral. ‘You need to bury your wife, Mr Seymour, then come back to us after two days.’

  Omar came to pick him up. In the silent drive to his house, Martin struggled to prepare his words.

  Javeed was waiting just inside the door. He flung his arms around Martin’s leg and pressed his face against his trousers.

  Martin lowered himself gingerly to the floor and embraced his son. He held him for a few seconds, then forced himself to let go; if he clung on too long he knew he would not be able to hide the fact that he was the one seeking comfort.

  They were alone; Omar had gone on into the house, giving them privacy. ‘Where were you?’ Javeed demanded.

  ‘I was in the hospital,’ Martin said. ‘I got hurt, in the car.’

  ‘But where did Mama go?’

  ‘Mama was in the car with me.’

  ‘Is she in the hospital?’

  Marti
n didn’t answer that. ‘You know, sometimes if you get hurt, it can be like you’ve gone to sleep.’

  Javeed nodded. ‘Total Knockout.’

  ‘That’s what happened to me. The truck hit the car, it was like a big punch. I was knocked out for a day.’

  Javeed said nothing; in his games, no one was ever out cold for more than thirty seconds. ‘Mama got knocked out too,’ Martin persisted. ‘But she didn’t wake up.’

  He took Javeed’s hand. Javeed stared down at the floor and tugged on Martin’s arm, swinging it back and forth, testing something rather than trying to break free.