Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  The message from Nasim read: I think we’ve found something worth trying.

  ‘Martin, this is Dr Zahedi.’ Nasim stepped aside so they could shake hands.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Martin said. His mouth was dry. Nasim had answered most of his questions on the phone, but he was still feeling anxious.

  Dr Zahedi gestured at a chair in the corner of the MRI room, partly hidden behind a movable screen. ‘Take a seat, please,’ she said.

  Nasim said, ‘I’ll give you some privacy.’

  Dr Zahedi took Martin’s blood pressure and listened to his heart. He gave her the physicians’ access code to his online medical records and she flipped through his scans and pathology reports in silence. It occurred to Martin that Bernard had never logged the injection of his exotic contrast agents in these records - and if Dr Zahedi logged what she was about to give him, he’d have a lot of explaining to do to his oncologist.

  ‘The drug Ms Golestani has asked me to administer has moderate sedative and disinhibitory effects,’ Dr Zahedi explained. ‘It’s been approved at much higher doses as one component in a regime used for general anaesthesia, but the dose we’d be giving you today would be less than a tenth of that.’

  Martin said, ‘So there’s no chance I’m going to . . . stop breathing, or have a heart attack?’

  ‘The chances of any adverse side-effects are extremely low,’ Dr Zahedi assured him. ‘Even with your impaired liver function, I’m confident that you won’t be in any danger. But I’ll be here throughout the session, to be absolutely sure that nothing goes wrong.’

  ‘Okay.’ Having gone out of his way to avoid the risks of surgery, Martin had a claustrophobic sense of his choices narrowing. But he was not going to be paralysed and cut wide open; he was not going to be breathing through a tube. He would be taking one tenth the dose of one component of a general anaesthetic.

  ‘The other aspect of the protocol that requires your consent is the use of an infrared laser to induce mild pain,’ Dr Zahedi continued. ‘This will be applied only to one finger, and the power will be well below the threshold that could cause tissue damage. There will also be a limit imposed on the number of times the laser can be used in a given period; I’ve been asked not to disclose the details, to avoid the possibility that it could reduce your aversive response. But I’m satisfied that there’s very little chance of psychological trauma.’

  Martin said, ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ Nasim had already explained the logic behind the finger-zapping. The drug was intended to make him more suggestible, more responsive to the images he was shown, but at the same time it would put him at risk of wandering off on a mental tangent. Eikonometrics had found that Rhesus monkeys on the same drug could be induced to keep focusing on a barrage of less-than-riveting images by inducing mild pain whenever their attention wandered. If that had got past an animal-experimentation ethics committee, Martin was willing to give it a go.

  He signed the consent forms. When Nasim rejoined them and asked if he had any questions, he said, ‘Tell me once more that this isn’t going to make the Proxy permanently stoned.’

  Nasim smiled; they’d been over this already. She said, ‘Giving you a drug that changes some activity patterns in your brain means we’re gathering data that’s only directly comparable to the Proxy’s activity if it’s also been subject to the same changes. So we will, in effect, need to “drug” the Proxy while we train it to match your responses. But that’s still going to bring the Proxy’s neural wiring closer to yours - with benefits that will persist when it’s operated normally.’

  Martin thought he almost understood, but Nasim, seeing the lingering doubt on his face, took one more shot.

  ‘Think of it this way,’ she said. ‘A method actor wants to play you in a movie, so he takes you to a bar and gets you tipsy, so you open up more than you otherwise would. All he’s seeing is what you’re like on alcohol, so naïvely you could say that all he’s really gained is the power to imitate you in that particular state. But of course, it doesn’t really mean he’s going to play you as a drunk in the movie. It just means he’s got some dirt on you that helps him to play you better, sober.’

  Martin said, ‘So basically, all this technology is a substitute for Robert De Niro and a bottle of Jim Beam?’

  Dr Zahedi administered the injection. After a few seconds, Martin felt . . . pleasant. Untroubled. He sat smiling faintly while Nasim fitted the skullcap and goggles and led him to the MRI.

  Before she flipped the goggles down, Nasim pushed something that looked like a thimble over Martin’s right index finger. She said, ‘If you really can’t stay focused, just take this off. But if you do that, it’s the end of the session.’

  ‘Okay. I understand.’

  When everything was in place, the servo-motor whirred. For the past few weeks Martin had experienced a sinking feeling as he slid into the machine for his solo scans, but the drug certainly took the edge off that.

  The sequence of photos that had been interrupted in his last session resumed from the beginning. Martin gazed at the old man in his earthquake-ravaged house; he was sure he’d felt sympathy for his plight before, but this time it was as if a physical barrier that had been standing between the two of them had been erased. Not only was the man’s presence more vivid and compelling, Martin found himself examining the scene as if he genuinely had a role to play, a stake in the outcome, an ongoing connection. Where would the man get food, water, shelter? What had he been through? Who was he mourning?

  After a couple of seconds the man was gone, but Martin ignored the image in front of him and kept pondering the implications of the quake. His arm jerked involuntarily, as if he’d touched the edge of a hot plate and pulled his hand away before registering what had happened. Then he felt the painful jab of heat on his finger. He was prepared to believe there was no permanent damage, but the laser certainly delivered more than a tickle.

  He’d lost his chance with the second image, but when the third appeared - a young Iranian couple strolling in a park - he gave it his full attention. Immersed in the scene he felt a glow of paternal warmth, as if he might have been standing before Javeed and some future daughter-in-law. Unfortunately, that glow outlasted its allotted time, and he was punished accordingly.

  After that, he made an effort to prepare for the cycle: engage, react, disengage. It had to become automatic. Monkeys could do it; how hard could it be? He managed three successful immersions in a row before overshooting and burning his finger again.

  Then four immersions, then . . . it must have been twenty minutes later that he stopped to reflect on how well he was doing. Keeping up the pace had been hard at first, but once he’d got into a rhythm—

  Contemplating the task instead of performing it won him another stinging rebuke. Martin didn’t make the same mistake again. He cut short a hopeful vision of this cascade of brighter, sharper flares penetrating the fog-bound backwaters of his brain and lost himself in the flood of images, treading water in an endless present.

  22

  ‘We believe it’s an inside job. The question that remains is: inside where?’

  Jafar Falaki, of Falaki Associates, reached across Nasim’s desk and handed her his interim report. Ominously, the usage meter on the side of the USB stick read ‘2.7 terabytes’; Nasim decided that a brief oral summary might be helpful.

  ‘So you can’t rule out Zendegi’s staff,’ she said, ‘but you can’t rule out any of our providers either?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Nasim had been hoping that Falaki would identify some simple, foolish error that she or one of her colleagues had made, leaving Zendegi vulnerable to intrusions by any sufficiently resourceful stranger. Having found the hole in their defences they could have worked out how to plug it, and that would have been the end of it. It might not have told them who the intruder had been, but then, it would have left them with no urgent need to know their enemy’s identity. The embarrassment of having to admit to some shoddy pro
gramming would have been worth it. Anything was better than having to deal with full-blown industrial counter-espionage.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ she asked. ‘We have thirty-seven providers in our pool, all with impeccable reputations, all audited and certified as thoroughly as . . .’

  ‘As thoroughly as each other?’ Falaki suggested. ‘The standard industry protocols are valuable, but they’re not a watertight guarantee of anything. What you really need to do is put pressure on them to install third-party hardware monitoring.’

  Yeah, right. The major providers of Cloud computing took security very seriously, allowing independent auditors to perform snap inspections and random integrity tests. But yanking thousands of processor chips right out of their sockets and forcing them to talk to their circuit-boards through extra hardware that watched and verified their every move would not only be hugely expensive; in some of their customers’ eyes it would amount to a stark admission that there really was a problem demanding that level of overkill. For one company alone to adopt those measures would be commercial suicide. For the whole industry to adopt them, all at once, would require a miracle.

  ‘We don’t have the clout to make that happen,’ Nasim said bluntly. ‘If we banded together with all the other high-end users, we might be able to start negotiating the introduction of hardware monitoring . . . maybe ten years down the track. But pointing the finger at thirty-seven companies and saying “The blame lies either with one of you, or with us” is not going to cut it. They’re not going to invest millions of dollars to fix a problem that might have nothing to do with them, when they can pass the buck between themselves - or even better, pass it right back to us.’

  Falaki said, ‘I understand. It’s the ideal solution, but we’re not living in an ideal world.’

  Nasim turned the USB stick over in her hand. Most of the report’s weighty appendices would be automated analyses of log files, software settings, and hardware tests for Zendegi’s own equipment. Falaki’s team had scrutinised everything from personal notepads - her own included - to the company’s workstations. They’d found no evidence of an external hacker gaining access, but then they’d found no evidence of impropriety by any of her staff either.

  ‘So short of hardware monitoring, what’s the next best thing?’ she asked Falaki.

  ‘Software overseers,’ he replied. ‘Every process you run in the Cloud gets twinned with a supervisor process that watches its back - preferably from the vantage point of a different provider. It’s not foolproof and it’s quite expensive; maybe a fifty per cent resource increase if you don’t want your customers to experience lags.’ ‘But it would make life complicated for whoever’s screwing with us?’ ‘Absolutely,’ Falaki replied. ‘And it would make it far more likely that we’ll either end up with evidence against them, or succeed in blocking them out completely.’ ‘Unless they’re geniuses who can subvert anything.’

  Falaki smiled. ‘No one has magic shortcuts for every possible challenge. Even if one of your providers is completely corrupt and is messing with your processes more or less at will, we can still make it very costly for them to do that and look innocent.’

  ‘More than it costs us?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Falaki said carefully.

  Nasim was doing her best to put off imagining sharing this news with the board. A fifty per cent increase in their computing outlays would be painful, but it would be money well spent if it led them swiftly to a lone saboteur. At the opposite extreme, though, if Cyber-Jahan had decided to play dirty, the prospects could be very different. A company like that would have the expertise and resources to bleed Zendegi from two wounds at once - customer losses and expensive countermeasures - and to keep it up for months, even years.

  She held up the memory stick. ‘I will read this, I promise, but we might as well get as far as option three.’

  ‘All right.’ Falaki cleared his throat. ‘This only pertains to the possibility that a member of your own staff is involved, but you might want to consider it, for peace of mind.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Falaki said, ‘I sometimes find it useful to bring in another firm, run by an old business partner of mine, that employs some skilful interrogators. They could interview your staff and pursue the issue more robustly than we’ve been able to so far.’

  Nasim stared at him, waiting for his earnest face to crack. She wasn’t used to being teased by people she barely knew - it had taken Bahador a year to start including her in his office pranks - but maybe this was Falaki’s way of defusing tension in a stressful job. ‘Skilful interrogators’ was a common euphemism for a very specific kind of person in post-2012 Iran: former VEVAK agents who’d had the connections and resources to cushion their fall.

  Falaki gazed back at her blandly. He was serious.

  Nasim said, ‘I think we might pass on that.’

  Martin had been taking the disinhibitor for nearly a week before Nasim finally found the time to sit down and review the effects of the drug. There’d been an initial rise in the number of new synapses being characterised, but that much was almost inevitable; for a major pharmacological intervention to have revealed nothing new would have been as strange as if the shift from winter to summer had left the pedestrians of Tehran traipsing out identical routes through the city - making no tracks to hitherto unrevealed parks or outdoor cafés.

  Even beyond that anticipated surge, though, the drug had continued to pay off. Before, the barrage of images had been sending Martin rapidly into a glazed, unresponsive state, almost independent of the details of the content being shown to him. Now, each new image elicited a fresh response; Nasim could see the splash of activity in every scan.

  They had long ago dragged Martin up and down the highways of his life, engaging with every significant biographical event, every ethical concern, every strongly held belief and aesthetic preference. But that had not been enough to map the whole landscape - to delineate the topography that kept those highways from tumbling away into the void. What made any given human brain entirely distinct from another came down to details that were far too minor to be recounted by the subject, too minor even to be of interest to them, too minor, in fact, for any sane person to tolerate having to contemplate them, hour after hour, day after day. Only by shutting down the parts of Martin’s brain that were choking on the sheer quantity of minutiae had it become possible to start gathering the information they needed.

  Now the side-loading software had massaged the Proxy into a form that mimicked virtually all of Martin’s fragmentary responses. If the data kept coming through at the current rate, within a month or so they’d have the Proxy in a stable state, ready to test in short scenarios.

  Ready for a conversation.

  Nasim cleared all the scans and histograms from her screen and sat contemplating the endpoint of the process. A child could take comfort from just about anything: a stuffed animal, a cartoon character, a mythical figure in a storybook who lived out the same plot over and over. The imprisoned Zal that Javeed had been so delighted to encounter had been nothing but a set of branching script fragments.

  But Martin was not Javeed’s cartoon hero. He could not be replaced by a clip library of favourite scenes. Either the Proxy would capture the actual dynamic between them, or it would be useless.

  The question was, could it be enough without being too much? When she’d built the blank receptacle for the side-loading process, Nasim had used the best functional maps available, but every choice had involved a trade-off. Every region she’d omitted risked robbing the Proxy of something it would need for its task; every region she’d included risked burdening it with goals it had no power to achieve and desires it had no power to fulfil.

  So could the Proxy come close to recreating the way Martin would have spent an hour in Zendegi with his son - answering all of Javeed’s questions, sharing all his jokes, vanquishing all his fears - and still not know, or care, precisely what it was itself?

  Nasim had done
her best, but the only way she’d know for sure on which side of the line she’d fallen would be to ask the Proxy, face to face.

  23

  ‘Do you get along with birds?’ Shahin asked.

  ‘Of course!’ Javeed replied. ‘I even met the Simorgh once.’

  ‘The Simorgh?’ Shahin laughed. ‘Well then, an eagle shouldn’t trouble you one bit.’ He took a strip of leather from a small pail sitting on the ground beside him and wrapped it around Javeed’s right hand. ‘Hold your arm up, boy.’ Javeed complied. ‘A little higher,’ Shahin suggested. ‘I want to be sure he can see you way down there.’

  Shahin whistled, and took a piece of rabbit meat out of a second, covered pail. Martin heard the swish of wings before he spotted the eagle approaching, descending from a nearby cypress tree. Javeed flinched slightly as the bird came closer; he turned his face aside, but he managed to keep his arm motionless. When the eagle alighted on his leather-bound fist, it found itself unable to wrap both feet at once around this tiny perch. Martin feared that it might sink its talons into the unprotected skin further up Javeed’s arm - and though his gut reaction was all about the nonexistent threat of pain and injury, the risk of the bird puncturing the illusion of its own physicality seemed real enough. But instead, it managed a kind of balancing act, shifting from one foot to another as it gobbled the rabbit flesh that Shahin dangled in front of it as a reward. Javeed wouldn’t feel its weight pushing his arm down, but the glove could probably manage a convincing impression of those four long, muscular toes clenching and unclenching.