Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  So how could she leave Javeed to grasp at the same kind of shadows if there was any chance at all of replacing them with something more solid? She’d told Martin that what he’d asked for was impossible - but was that literally true? It would certainly be far more difficult than he’d imagined, but that was not the same thing at all.

  She climbed out of bed; the room light came on slowly to avoid dazzling her as she crossed to her desk. It took her half an hour to cobble together a rough map of the brain regions that Martin’s Proxy would need personalised in order to meet his goals. She had estimates of varying quality for the total amount of data required to differentiate each region in an individual from the crude average that Blank Frank represented.

  That was a start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. The rate at which the best scanning techniques pulled useful, distinguishing data out of a subject’s skull varied enormously, depending on how well the activity they were performing had been tailored for the region being mapped. It also tended to follow a law of diminishing returns: the better the Proxy became at mimicking the subject, the harder it became to home in on the remaining differences. But she could take the average rate she’d measured for the Faribas as a reasonable first approximation. Martin didn’t know how long he had to live, but what if she assumed that he could manage, say, three hour-long sessions a week for a year?

  Nasim re-checked her calculations twice, but she hadn’t made a mistake. What he’d asked of her was not necessarily impossible. That was a long way from knowing that it could actually be done, but purely in terms of the information flows required it would not be like shifting an ocean with an eyedropper. Merely Lake Erie with a teaspoon.

  It was afternoon on the US East Coast; Caplan kept strange hours, but he was usually awake by now. She emailed him: ‘Can you spare a few minutes to talk?’

  The reply came back within seconds. ‘Sure.’

  Caplan preferred to meet in augmented reality, but Nasim wasn’t set up for that at home, so they settled for plain audio. She lay on her bed with her notepad beside her and did her best to explain Martin’s plight succinctly; she knew Caplan wouldn’t have much patience for the details.

  As it was, he interrupted her halfway through. ‘Why doesn’t your friend just freeze himself? All cancers will be treatable in a decade.’

  Cancers, maybe; Nasim doubted that being frozen to death would be cured so quickly. ‘He has a son,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point. He wants to raise his own son, not come back when Javeed’s an adult.’

  ‘Well, he can’t freeze the kid,’ Caplan mused. ‘That would be illegal. Unless Iran has much more progressive legislation on these things than we have.’

  Nasim struggled to reorganise her tactics. How did you get through to someone whose entire world view had been moulded by tenth-rate science fiction? Empathy for Javeed was out; Caplan probably believed that the only consequence of being orphaned at six was that you tried harder than anyone else to reach the top of your class in space academy.

  She said, ‘Why did you buy Eikonometrics?’

  Caplan didn’t reply, so she answered for him. ‘To find out how far side-loading can go. You want to know if it can ever be a substitute for uploading: if you’ll ever be able to reproduce the entire functionality of your brain without slicing it up and feeding it through an electron microscope.’

  Caplan said, ‘That’s not the only question that makes side-loading interesting. But please go on, if you have a point to make.’

  ‘This is a chance to find out more about the limits of the technique, ’ Nasim said. ‘You’ll have a highly motivated volunteer, and a project that will force us to push the envelope.’

  ‘Motivated volunteers aren’t hard to find,’ Caplan replied.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But the people who’d take the bait if you sprinkled some buzzwords around the net are your fellow wannabe-immortals, who’ll expect perfect copies of their minds to wake up in cyberspace. Martin has no such illusions; he understands that the Proxy will have massive limitations. He doesn’t imagine that we can make him live forever; he just wants us to use his brain to craft some software that can do a certain job.’

  ‘So when exactly did I become the Make-a-Wish Foundation?’ Caplan protested irritably.

  ‘This isn’t charity,’ Nasim insisted. ‘It would yield valuable information for both of us.’ She was sure Caplan could see that; he was probably just annoyed that she was trying to set the agenda.

  He said, ‘What would you tell your own staff, your own management?’

  ‘That it’s research that could lead to even better Proxies,’ Nasim replied. ‘Which is perfectly true. If this works, Martin benefits, Zendegi benefits, you benefit. If it doesn’t, we’ll probably still learn a great deal just from seeing exactly where things fail. So what’s the downside?’

  She waited, wondering if Caplan was going to make her swear not to turn Martin’s Proxy into a transcendent being who would rob him of his rightful place as lord of the solar system.

  He said, ‘If it doesn’t work, are you prepared to clean up the mess? To put your botched creation out of its misery?’

  Nasim was about to reply scornfully that the Proxy would be immune to any such need, but she caught herself. That was certainly the result she’d be aiming for: a devoted parent who lived in the moment, committed to his son’s wellbeing, but no more capable of contemplating - or regretting - his own nature than Virtual Azimi or the chatty Faribas.

  A failure, though, could miss that target in many different directions.

  Nasim steeled herself. She said, ‘I’ll spell out all the risks to Martin; in the end he’s the one who’ll have to decide the fate of anything derived from his own mind. But yes, if it comes down to it, I’m prepared to clean up the mess.’

  19

  Martin had begun shaving his head three weeks before it was necessary, to give Javeed time to grow used to his altered appearance before he was confronted with the more significant change: the change in their routine. He’d been expecting a tantrum when he broke the news, so he chose the time and place carefully: at home, the day before their next visit to Zendegi, having just made their choices on the website.

  ‘But I want to go to the shop!’ Javeed screamed.

  ‘Sssh. We’ll still go to the shop, straight afterwards. You can still talk to Uncle Omar and Farshid.’

  ‘But that’s stupid!’

  It was a fair complaint. If they were going to Omar’s shop anyway, why not use the ghal’eha there?

  ‘Aunty Nasim has a special kind of ghal’e that’s easier for me to use, easier on my back. So she very kindly said that we could use that.’

  ‘I hate her!’ Javeed proclaimed.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Martin said flatly. ‘You hardly know her. Anyway, you don’t even have to talk to her. We’ll go there, we’ll use the ghal’eha, then we’ll go to the shop. Okay?’

  ‘No! I want to do it the proper way!’ Javeed’s face contorted in anguish.

  ‘Well, you have a choice: we can go to Aunty Nasim for Zendegi, then visit Uncle Omar in the shop, or we can just stay home and you can play for an hour on your console instead.’

  Javeed’s face became a shade redder. ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘That’s the choice. Now do you want to help me cook dinner?’

  ‘No - I’ll help you throw it in the toilet where it belongs!’

  Martin forced himself not to smile. ‘Shaitan nasho. And if you don’t like my cooking, that’s all the more reason to help.’

  Javeed sat and wept as if the world were ending, but Martin hardened his heart. Javeed was too stubborn to reconcile himself to the new plan immediately, but while part of his insecurity obviously stemmed from Mahnoosh’s death, Martin had no intention of letting that become a reason to indulge him on everything.

  Within an hour, the tantrum had cooled into a long sulk. Javeed was not quite stubborn enough to start throwing food or breaking things
and risk losing Zendegi completely.

  After school the next day, they caught the bus to the small office block north of the city centre that housed Zendegi’s operations. Apparently most of the actual computers were elsewhere, scattered around the globe and leased as required. Nasim was waiting for them in the lobby; Javeed was aloof rather than downright rude to her, and Martin suspected that he just came across as shy.

  On the fifth floor, Martin explained to Javeed, ‘My ghal’e is a special kind, like I told you, so I’ll be in a room close by, but not right next to you.’ He tensed, prepared for an outburst, but Javeed just gave him a dissatisfied glare. When they reached the end of the corridor Bahador met them; he introduced himself to Javeed by waving a child-sized football jersey prominently signed by Ashkan Azimi. ‘Agha Ashkan told me I should give this to a friend of mine, but I don’t know anyone in quite the right size.’ Javeed’s eyes lit up with delight. He knew he was being bribed into compliance, but yesterday’s complaints suddenly seemed petty.

  Martin squatted down and kissed him. ‘Be good, pesaram. I’ll see you in Zendegi.’

  Nasim led Martin to the MRI room. The scanner was far more compact than the older model in the hospital’s radiology department - a machine that Martin had come to know all too well - but Bernard, the Swiss technician who operated Zendegi’s version, had assured Martin that the magnetic field was an order of magnitude stronger. Martin had come in on three mornings the previous week to learn how to control his icon while lying flat on his back with his head immobilised in a padded helmet.

  He took out his wallet and removed his watch, his wedding ring, his belt and his shoes. He was wearing clothes that had been pre-checked and certified metal-free to save him from having to change for the scanner, but Bernard ran a detector over him quickly to be sure.

  Nasim fitted the skullcap that would be used to take EEG recordings simultaneously with the multi-mode MRI; Martin sat beneath a UV light and watched in a mirror as the semi-permanent tattoos they’d given him revealed themselves with green fluorescence, to aid in the alignment of the cap. In order to limit interactions with the MRI’s magnetic field and radio pulses, the skullcap’s ‘circuitry’ was purely optical, reading the electric field leaking out of his brain by observing its effect on tiny capsules of electrolytes incorporated into the tattoos.

  Bernard swabbed Martin’s arm with disinfectant and injected him with a mixture of contrast agents that had been magnetically polarised overnight in a special-purpose machine. You could image brain activity to a certain extent just by watching haemoglobin in the blood losing its oxygen to hungry neurons, and that was one signal they’d be looking for. But there were a dozen other processes that could be monitored simultaneously with modern machines - making the image sharper, more responsive and more informative - and extra chemicals with enhanced magnetic properties were needed to render those processes visible. Bernard had sketched the details, but Martin had had too much else on his mind to take it in. It was sufficient to know that they were pulling out all the stops to gather as much information as possible.

  Nasim passed him a pair of gloves and he slipped them on, then she helped him with his goggles; all of this equipment had been specially built for use in and around the scanner. He walked over to the MRI, lay down and wriggled around to try to find a reasonably comfortable position that allowed his head to sit in the custom-moulded restraint.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Nasim asked.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Martin’s stomach was clenched with anxiety, but he’d already asked all the questions he could think of the week before. Nasim had assured him that there was nothing he could do that would corrupt the side-loading process; even if he thrashed about and spoiled the scan, they’d just discard the bad data. There was no risk of it being used inadvertently and turning the Proxy’s brain to mush.

  ‘What if I have homicidal thoughts about my son?’ he’d asked after one of the training runs. He’d been half- joking, but it had probably focused Nasim’s attention more effectively than if he’d merely waffled on about his fear of exhibiting impatience or irritability.

  ‘Does that happen often?’ she’d inquired.

  ‘No - but have you ever tried not to think of a pink elephant? Under threat of putting your only child in the hands of your evil clone?’

  ‘Calm down, Dr Jekyll. If you have any prolonged negative thoughts, let us know and we’ll throw out the whole session. But if they’re fleeting, I wouldn’t worry. This machine isn’t capable of churning out a second-by-second transcript of everything that passes through your mind; at best, we’ll be able to discern your most persistent thought patterns and associations and train the Proxy to share them. But we’ll be working hard to get enough information to do that. Brief mental tics will be right off the radar.’

  Nasim flipped the goggles’ screens down, whiting out Martin’s vision. The top of the cage she fitted over his head included a camera that would monitor his facial expression, just as it would be monitored in an ordinary ghal’e. He heard the servo motor sliding him into place inside the scanner. He was free to move his hands, but if he tried to raise them above shoulder-height he’d get a swift reminder of his actual circumstances.

  ‘Are you ready for Zendegi?’ she asked.

  Martin said, ‘Yes.’

  Vivid blue sky. Yellow mud-brick buildings. Women in richly patterned scarves bustling past. Martin felt a tap on his hand. Javeed asked impatiently, ‘Baba, what’s wrong?’

  Martin finally gained control of his gaze and managed to turn his icon’s head towards his son’s voice without struggling against his restraints. ‘Sorry, I was just getting used to my ghal’e.’ He looked around. ‘So this is Old Kabul!’ No time to make an entrance from the city’s outskirts; they’d been inserted straight onto a busy street. A small boy leading a donkey loaded with gourds squeezed past them; he grinned at Javeed and greeted him with ‘Salaam aleikum.’ No doubt the phrase was wildly anachronistic, since they were meant to be in the pre-Islamic era, but Martin wasn’t here to nitpick. They weren’t planning to be too faithful to Ferdowsi, let alone historical fact.

  ‘We need to get to Zal!’ Javeed reminded him.

  ‘Yeah - so what’s your plan?’

  ‘They don’t know that the man in the prison is Zal,’ Javeed reasoned, ‘so you should tell them he’s your son. Then they’ll let you see him.’

  ‘Okay. So we have to find the prison. Who should we ask?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Javeed didn’t want to entrust a random passer-by with this vital query, so they made their way along the crowded street. People could be heard touting wares from all directions, but the hubbub was not unpleasant; compared to the car horns and motorbike engines of downtown Tehran it was bliss.

  Javeed spotted a pomegranate seller. He tapped Martin’s hand and whispered, ‘Buy something first, to make him happy.’

  Martin smiled and obliged. He mimed reaching into the money-belt beneath his kameez; he’d remembered to pre-order coins on the website the day before. When he’d bought the fruit he addressed the trader respectfully, ‘Sir, my oldest son has gone missing, and I heard he was arrested this morning due to some misunderstanding. I need to visit him, but I’m a stranger in this city. Can you tell me where I’ll find him?’

  The man expressed his sympathy and offered detailed directions. Martin struggled to commit them to memory; he should have ordered a pen and paper along with the coins. But Javeed appeared to have taken it all in; he set off briskly down the street, turning to Martin to urge him to catch up.

  ‘I told you Afghanis were friendly,’ Martin said, tossing the pomegranate onto the ground. The week before, one of Javeed’s schoolmates had pointed out an Afghani boy in another class and declared that his parents were sure to be murderers and the child himself a shameless thief.

  ‘That man wasn’t a real person,’ Javeed replied.

  ‘That’s true,’ Martin conceded. ‘But I’ve been to the real Kabul and met plenty of real peopl
e there.’

  Javeed scowled impatiently; this wasn’t the time to talk about such things. Martin tried to relax; if he started thinking about all the pernicious nonsense he wanted his Proxy to be prepared to counter, he’d end up hijacking every Zendegi session for community service announcements. He had to trust Nasim to extract the same abilities from subtler cues.

  They threaded their way through the crowds, past merchants selling clay pots, okra, lentils, whole butchered sheep. Martin couldn’t fault Javeed’s memory or sense of direction; he showed no signs of confusion or hesitation. In less than five minutes they were outside the prison.

  It was an imposing, fortified building. As he pounded on the gate, Martin found himself recalling Evin, and the siege. A man with a thick black beard opened the gate a crack and eyed the callers suspiciously.