Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  ‘Hmm.’ Caplan glanced down at some notes displayed on the table-top. ‘You mention reading players’ facial expressions?’

  Nasim gestured at her goggles; they’d be invisible to Caplan, but they both knew they were there. ‘In less than a year, these will be replaced by contact lenses. It won’t be long before we routinely have an unobstructed view of players’ faces.’

  Caplan said, ‘Sure, but don’t you think human face-reading skills have already been surpassed by micro-expression analysis?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But it might still be useful to developers to have something less forensic, for those times when they want a Proxy who seems attentive or sympathetic, rather than one who can beat you at poker or deliver a knock-out cross-examination in a murder trial. Anyway, that’s only one skill out of dozens.’

  ‘Many of the other skills are verbal, though, aren’t they?’ Caplan pointed out. ‘I’m still not quite clear what the deal is with language.’

  ‘Ah.’ Nasim knew this was her weakest point, but she confronted it head-on. ‘Obviously the HCP data itself will only encode knowledge of English; that’s the nature of the population they scanned. In the worst-case scenario, that could mean that we’d have to restrict our verbal modules to English, which we’d then license to VR providers with a large English-language customer base. Even so, that’s a huge market, so we could expect a decent return in terms of revenue even if we couldn’t use the same modules generally within Zendegi itself.’

  ‘And the less worse-case?’

  ‘We could probably exploit English-based modules in non-English scenarios to some degree, just by feeding their input and output through existing translation software - just as we do for players who don’t share a common language. But I’d hope we could do one better than that and train at least some of the modules to be bilingual.’

  ‘Expose them to huge data-sets and tweak them to give the right responses?’ Caplan suggested.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While hoping you don’t obliterate the very skills that make these networks more useful than the dumb translator software that gets created the same way?’

  Nasim replied, ‘Well, yes. We can only try it and see how it pans out. What else should we do?’

  Caplan said, ‘Have you ever heard of side-loading?’

  ‘No,’ Nasim confessed.

  Caplan smiled slightly. ‘You didn’t research me very thoroughly, did you? Just checked that I still had a pulse and a bank balance.’

  Nasim felt herself flush slightly, but took some comfort in the fact that her icon wouldn’t betray her response. She said, ‘I’m sorry if I didn’t dig deeply enough. I think I got distracted when I discovered that you owned an island in Cyber-Jahan.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone? They’re so cheap.’ Caplan dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. ‘Anyway . . . ten years ago I acquired a Swiss company called Eikonometrics.’ He slid a document across the table. Nasim glanced down; it was a report on the company’s research over the last fiscal year. A soft blue glow at the edges flagged it as a file Caplan had put into their shared dataspace, rather than a physical stack of paper.

  ‘They started out in subliminal image classification,’ Caplan explained. ‘They had a plan to harvest the brain-power of internet users by flashing up flowers and puppy dogs and road crash scenes just long enough to get a distinctive EEG signature. It was a very silly idea; some aspects of artificial vision might still be inferior to the equivalent human skills, but software caught up with the kind of results you could get on the cheap like that a long time ago.’

  ‘So why did you buy them?’

  ‘Their business plan sucked,’ Caplan said, ‘but they’d gained some genuine insight into neural information processing, and they’d started branching out into EBLD - Evidence-Based Lie Detection. Polygraphs are about as reliable as witch-dunking, so it’s not a huge boast to say that twenty-first century brain-scanning techniques have the potential to out-perform them. You stick a witness in a PET scanner or MRI machine and see what parts of their brain light up when they discuss their testimony or view certain images. There was a fad for that in the teens, and Eikonometrics got some grants and did some interesting research. But then it became clear that in any practical context there were too many problems interpreting the responses - and most jurisdictions started ruling it out on privacy as well as technical grounds. That’s when Eikonometrics shares hit rock-bottom, and I would have been crazy not to snap them up.’

  ‘Okay.’ Nasim was starting to get an inkling of where this was heading. ‘And side-loading . . . ?’

  ‘Side-loading,’ Caplan replied, ‘is the process of training a neural network to mimic a particular organic brain, based on a rich set of non-intrusive scans of the brain in action. It’s midway between the extremes: in classic uploading, you look at the brain’s anatomy in microscopic detail and try to reproduce everything from that, whereas in classic neural-network training, what’s available to you is just stimulus and response: sensory input and visible behaviour, with the brain as a black box.

  ‘In side-loading, you get to peer inside the box, even if you don’t get to take it apart. You don’t have the resolution you’d get by peeling the brain with an ATLUM, but you have the advantage that you can expose the living brain to all kinds of stimuli - words, images, sounds, tastes, smells - and see how they bounce around inside the skull. And it doesn’t really matter how little external behaviour is evoked if you can watch the pattern of internal changes rippling out from every stone you toss in.’

  Nasim said, ‘That all sounds fine in principle. But how far has it actually taken you?’

  Caplan gestured at the Eikonometrics report. ‘Six months ago, we took a rat that had been trained to solve a particular maze. By observing its brain’s responses to a barrage of random sensory cues, we managed to modify an initially unrelated virtual rat to run the same maze.’

  ‘Observing its brain how? Do you mean micro-electrodes snuggling up to ten thousand neurons?’

  Caplan shook his head. ‘Not at all. Purely non-invasive methods: multi-mode MRI and surface electrodes.’

  Nasim was impressed now; this was more than she’d expected. ‘And with humans?’

  ‘With humans,’ Caplan said, ‘the problem is that we don’t really have a good generic virtual brain to use as a starting point. When the HCP published their results we started trying to construct one, but it looks as if you’re doing a much better job at that than we are so far.’

  Nasim mulled over this frank assessment, sting included. The algorithm she’d used on the finch brains was public knowledge, but it wasn’t so cut and dried that someone coming in cold could apply it to the HCP scans and expect to crank out a good result. So she had a head-start on the path towards something Caplan wanted, badly - but it would be a mistake to overplay her hand and imagine that this made her indispensable.

  ‘So you think Eikonometrics can find a way to side-load languages into my Proxy modules?’ she asked.

  ‘I think it’s worth trying,’ Caplan said. ‘I think it’s your best chance. And there might be some other useful skills you could endow them with, the same way.’ He smiled. ‘Since I got your email, I’ve been giving that some thought. Suppose you could side-load motor skills from a few celebrity athletes: sign up the right soccer players and the Middle East is yours again. Add the right cricket players and Cyber-Jahan is history.’

  Nasim was speechless. Motor skills were probably the simplest case imaginable - certainly less challenging than side-loading a second language. And Caplan was right: millions of people would vote with their credit cards to ‘play beside’ their sporting heroes, captured with an authenticity that no celebrity-endorsed console game could ever come close to achieving.

  The most she’d been expecting from Caplan was a modest cash injection, giving her a chance to pursue her research far enough to see if it could be commercialised. Instead, he’d just offered Zendegi a plausible rout
e to market domination.

  Nasim forced herself to reply coolly, ‘It seems we both have something the other could use.’

  Caplan inclined his head in agreement.

  She said, ‘I’m going to have to discuss this with my superiors.’ If the Eikonometrics research was as promising as Caplan made it sound, Nasim was sure she could hook them on the sporting angle alone. ‘And there’ll be a complex joint venture agreement to be thrashed out—’

  Caplan said, ‘I understand. Bring on the lawyers! But don’t run away and hide this time. Don’t forget, you’re at the heart of the deal.’

  Nasim laughed, but she regarded his bland, youthful icon with unease. Caplan would emerge with a substantial stake in the company, but this wasn’t just about the cash flow that a synergistic marriage of their technologies could yield.

  By setting up this meeting, she’d probably saved her job, her employer, her career . . . but no amount of commercial success with the Proxies would be enough for Caplan. She knew what the only worthwhile endpoint was for him - and she’d just agreed to harness herself to his cause.

  15

  Martin ran two kilometres on the treadmill. It took him fifteen minutes, and by the time he’d finished he was drenched in sweat - but then, that was the whole point of the exercise.

  He grabbed a mat from a pile in the corner of the gym, put his towel over it and knelt down. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, then slipped on the goggles that were linked to the Physiotherapy Department’s computers. When he looked down, his clothes had vanished from sight, along with much of his body: skin, fat, blood vessels, genitals, viscera. All that remained of him was muscle, bones and tendons. The towel beneath him was gone as well; he appeared to be kneeling on a transparent cushion that was supporting him over a mirrored surface that had replaced part of the gym’s carpeted floor.

  He moved his right foot in front of him, to the left, as he lowered his chest towards the ground, stretching out his left leg behind him to lie flat, while his right leg was bent and trapped beneath him. Looking down at his virtual reflection, he could see the piriformis muscle that crossed his right buttock at the back of his hip, helpfully highlighted in blue.

  The operation to remove the tumour on his spine had impinged on a nerve in his spinal cord, giving rise to a month of excruciating pain. The pain felt as if it was in the muscle, though that had not actually been damaged at all: the pain there was a phantom, a false message. But his body didn’t know the difference, and the muscle had clenched up tightly to protect itself against the perceived injury. Now that the nerve had settled down, that tightness had turned the original phantom pain into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the piriformis muscle really was the problem now. Not only had it been damaged by its own defensive response, by refusing to move normally it was pulling everything else around it out of shape. It needed to be coaxed back into its old routine, but after a month spent cowed and quivering, that was easier said than done.

  Martin leant forward as far as he could; the pressure on his right leg as he folded it against his body was transferred to the piriformis, stretching it a little. He kept the position for a count of twenty, then eased off.

  Resting, he gazed down at the reflection of the back of his leg, at the inelegant network of fleshy ropes that had managed to tug itself so far out of balance that he was still taking painkillers just to sleep. There was something almost comical about the fact that the cancer itself had, so far, given him no pain, and the sophisticated drugs targeted against it had left him with none of the side-effects he’d been prepared to face, based on a lifetime of media images of people on chemotherapy. Instead, he just felt as if he’d been kicked in the arse by a donkey.

  He leant forward again, holding the stretch to thirty this time, trying to persuade the stupid muscle that its cringing was only making things worse. When he relaxed he scrutinised the result; he could have sworn that the bundle of blue fibres was already a few millimetres longer than when he’d started. But the imagery he was seeing wasn’t likely to be that accurate; he didn’t have magic MRIVISION, showing him his true anatomy in real time. It was all just an educated guess, a simulation cobbled together from a month-old scan and some postural cues extracted from ceiling cameras in the gym and the goggles’ superficial teraHertz view of his body. It could help him perform the exercise correctly, by looking for the same information as a human physiotherapist would, but that was it. He couldn’t look down and search himself for new secondary tumours.

  He did the piriformis stretch five times, then swapped legs and repeated the set; his left side was giving him no trouble, but the aim was to keep everything symmetrical. Then he went through half-a-dozen other lower-back exercises diligently enough, but with rather less zeal. They were all beneficial, and he didn’t doubt his physio’s advice for a moment, but it was hard to feel a sense of urgency over slightly stiff hamstrings; none of this routine was going to make a difference to the cancer, at least not directly, but if he could win back pain-free days and drug-free sleep, that would be both a victory in itself and a plausible boon to his overall health.

  Martin showered and headed out of the hospital. He’d barely taken three steps along the road when a shabby white car pulled up beside him and a man in his twenties called out, ‘Taxi?’ The car bore no company insignia; everyone in Iran was a taxi driver when they felt like it.

  Martin nodded and got in the front seat; they agreed on a price to his home. After Martin replied tersely to his attempts to start a conversation, the driver cranked up the volume on his stereo, unleashing a track with a female vocalist who sounded like an Iranian Céline Dion interspersed with an insipid male rapper.

  Martin tried to be stoical, but the song was too loud to blank out and too excruciating to ignore. ‘Please, would you mind turning that down?’ he begged.

  The driver didn’t seem offended, but he held out his hand. ‘Extra service.’

  Martin said, ‘Forget it. Please stop the car.’

  The young man pondered this new request. ‘You should pay me for my trouble.’

  Martin was unmoved; they’d gone barely a hundred metres. ‘If you want flag-fall, get yourself a taxi licence. Just stop the car.’

  ‘You have to pay me!’ the man insisted, outraged. ‘You want me to call the police?’

  ‘Go ahead.’ Martin opened the door; the driver panicked and screeched to a halt, allowing him to disembark.

  Martin slammed the door and walked away down Enqelab Avenue, trying to remember where the bus stop was. He paused and steadied himself against the side wall of a news kiosk, listening to the whine of motorbikes weaving through the pedestrians. He needed the treadmill to warm up before stretching, but it took away his energy for half the day.

  He had to be patient. In six months, the perfect new liver being cultured from his own modified skin cells would be fully grown, ready to replace the tattered organ from which the primary tumour had been sliced. Ten years ago, stage four cholangiocarcinoma would have been a death sentence - and any form of treatment a gruelling ordeal - but Martin’s weekly injections had no side-effects at all. Twenty-four hours a day, the artificial antibodies with toxins attached were bumping into the cancer cells strewn throughout his body and polishing them off, with no collateral damage. Nothing was certain - the metastasising cells could always acquire resistance - but his oncologist said he had a thirty per cent chance of surviving five more years. Thirty per cent, up from zero with the old treatments.

  Martin found the bus stop. At home, he set his alarm clock, then undressed and climbed into bed. The donkey-kick burned, but he wasn’t supposed to take any more codeine before evening. He closed his eyes and pictured Mahnoosh beside him.

  ‘I miss you,’ he whispered. He felt a twinge of guilt; sometimes it felt dishonest, or, perversely, like a kind of infidelity to summon up her presence.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be forgotten.’

  Maybe not. Or am I just putting words
into your mouth?

  ‘As if I’d let you,’ she replied scornfully.

  Martin suddenly recalled the night, not long after she’d moved in with him, when she’d been undressing for bed and he’d started chanting raucously, ‘Loose the Noosh! Loose the Noosh!’ She’d thrown a bedside lamp at him and broken his nose.

  She said, ‘Give me your hand.’

  She held it tightly as he drifted into shallow sleep, and when the alarm screeched three hours later, she still hadn’t deserted him.

  Martin was at the school five minutes before the bell. The other parents nodded to him, but didn’t come too close; a few had tried to talk to him in the past, but there had always been a fundamental disjunction between the way they’d felt obliged to engage sympathetically with his family’s tragedy, and the way Martin had preferred that they mind their own fucking business.

  Javeed emerged from his classroom staring at the ground. When he finally looked up and saw that Martin was there, his expression of relief was haunted, provisional: this time his father had come, but there was always tomorrow. Martin fought against the instinct to smother him in reassuring promises: I won’t leave you, pesaram; you’ll never be alone. Even if he’d believed the words himself, why would Javeed take them seriously? His radiant mother had died without warning, in perfect health. What could his grey-haired, limping, jaundiced father possibly say to regain an aura of invulnerability?