Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  ‘Excuse me.’ She took the device from her pocket - expecting an angry summons from the boss, but half-daring to hope it was a message from Falaki informing her that his supervisor processes had paid off and pinned down the hackers.

  The message was from an anonymous sender, and it consisted of five English words:

  ‘Care to discuss a truce?’

  Beneath this curt offer was a link to a site in Zendegi.

  Nasim stepped into the ghal’e and watched the walls rise up around her. She hadn’t been inside one of these machines for years; she’d grown used to a God’s-eye-view of the games, not a participant’s. When a voice from the interface told her to flip down her goggles she muttered an obscene reply under her breath; she hated being prodded. She’d go in when she was ready.

  She’d talked it over with Bahador and Falaki, and they’d decided to restart just enough of Zendegi to enable the meeting to take place immediately. Everyone else would remain shut out; Nasim and her host would have the system to themselves. If the meeting ran on too long, Bahador wouldn’t let Zendegi bleed money by delaying the full re-launch, but this way some of the tracking would be simpler. There was no guarantee that they’d be able to locate the physical source of the hacker’s virtual presence, but it was worth doing what they could to improve the odds.

  Okay, you want a truce? Here are my terms: Zendegi changes absolutely nothing, and you get six years in prison for commercial sabotage.

  Nasim flipped down the goggles.

  It was dusk. She was standing, alone, in a motionless Ferris wheel gondola, high above an amusement park. She could hear tinny music, and people talking and laughing in the distance below her. The Wiener Riesenrad was not as popular a virtual postcard as the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramid of Giza, but it cost next to nothing to keep it on file.

  Below her, people milled around the stalls of the amusement park; all of them Proxies, of course. There was nothing to stop the hacker arriving on the ground among that virtual crowd, but given that the link in the email had pointed specifically to this gondola there didn’t seem much point waiting anywhere else.

  ‘Nasim Golestani?’

  Nasim turned around. A clean-shaven middle-aged man, dressed in old-fashioned Western clothes - coat, tie, fedora - stood in the adjacent gondola, some ten or twelve metres away.

  ‘I’m Nasim,’ she replied, in English. ‘What should I call you?’

  ‘Rollo.’ He spoke with an American accent.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Rollo.’ Ah, Iranian civility; her mother would be proud. ‘Would you like to join me here? I promise I won’t push you out.’

  ‘I’m fine where I am, thank you.’

  ‘As you wish.’ The wind blew gently across the park, rattling the huge machine, but Nasim’s default auditory settings put clarity above realism; she’d have no trouble hearing his voice.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve already guessed who I represent,’ Rollo said confidently.

  Nasim hesitated before replying, but she couldn’t see what she’d have to gain by bluffing. ‘I have no idea. Honestly.’ If he was an emissary of Hojatoleslam Shahidi, he had a strange way of showing his adherence to Islamic tradition, and why anyone from Cyber-Jahan or the Chinese labour unions would be into fedoras and Ferris wheels was beyond her.

  ‘The CHL,’ Rollo declared.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Cis-Humanist League.’

  Nasim refrained from groaning. ‘Okay, I get it: cis, not trans. I’m not what you’d call a Latin buff, but I did a year of organic chemistry.’

  She waited for Rollo to say something more, but he seemed momentarily taken aback, as if he’d been expecting a very different response.

  ‘So you’re “on the side of humans”,’ she said. ‘You’re . . . pro-technology? But you’re opposed to the crazies, the transcendence cults?’ He didn’t contradict her. ‘Great. Welcome to the club. I’m quite partial to my own species myself.’

  Rollo looked positively wounded now. ‘You haven’t even read our manifesto, have you?’

  ‘Strangely, no,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Seeing as I’d never even heard of you until twenty seconds ago.’

  He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The arrogance is breathtaking! You march right into territory we’ve been mapping for decades, and then you turn around and tell me you have no idea who we are?’

  Nasim spread her hands. ‘What can I say? Fire your publicist.’ She caught herself; she was letting her hostility get the better of her. This man might be a self-important prick who thought everyone in the universe read his blog rants, but he had just brought Zendegi to its knees. A computer-savvy anti-Caplan. Maybe if she locked them both in a room together they’d annihilate each other.

  ‘I’ll make it simple for you then,’ Rollo said. ‘Item seven of the manifesto: No consciousness without autonomy. It’s unethical to create conscious software that lacks the ability to take control of its own destiny.’

  Nasim said, ‘Exactly what “conscious software” do you have in mind? Do you want Virtual Azimi to have voting rights?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Rollo replied impatiently. ‘We only targeted that game to hit you in the wallet; it’s obvious that Virtual Azimi can’t be conscious. But that’s where we draw the line: no higher functions, no language, no social skills. You don’t get to clone a slice of humanity and use it to churn out battery hens.’

  Nasim was starting to feel off-balance; after steeling herself for the prospect of negotiating with a theologian who solemnly believed in angels and djinn, she was having to do some recalibration to focus on an adversary so much closer to her own philosophical territory.

  ‘None of the side-loads can be conscious in the human sense,’ she said. ‘They have no notion of their own past or future, no long-term memory, no personal goals.’ Martin’s Proxy would inherit some of his narrative memories, but she was hoping Rollo had no knowledge of that project.

  He said, ‘So if I scooped out enough of your brain to give you amnesia and rob you of all sense of identity, I’d be entitled to do what I like with you? To treat you as a commodity?’

  ‘I’d say the major ethical problem there is that you’d essentially be killing me,’ Nasim replied. ‘But nobody had their mind wiped to make the side-loads. The HCP donors were already dead, and the people we scanned are all still living their own complete, fulfilling lives, irrespective of anything that happens in Zendegi.’

  ‘And if I copy you exactly,’ Rollo countered, ‘atom for atom, and then mutilate your duplicate, then it’s acceptable?’

  Here we go, Nasim thought, hypotheticals about matter transmitters. The golden key that unlocks every philosophical quandary.

  ‘Nobody gets mutilated when a side-load is made,’ she said. ‘We build them up from nothing, we don’t hack them down from some perfect, fully-functioning virtual brain.’

  ‘I know that,’ Rollo replied, ‘but the end product is still the same. And you don’t even know exactly which mental processes you have and haven’t excluded! I’ve read the patent applications, with all their talk of functional mapping, but don’t kid yourself that it’s down to some kind of fine art, where you can pick out a subset of abilities precisely - let alone guarantee that they’ll all fit together into some kind of stable entity. If you want to make something human, make it whole. If you want to enable people to step from their bodies into virtual immortality, perfectly copied, with all their abilities preserved and all their rights intact . . . go ahead and do it, we have no problem with that.’

  ‘That’s fifty years away, at least,’ Nasim said, ‘maybe a hundred.’

  Rollo shrugged. ‘No doubt. But if you want to put humanity into a cheese grater and slice off little slavelets to pimp to the factories and the VR games, well . . . then you’ve got a war on your hands.’

  Nasim looked away. Part of her wanted, very badly, to start blustering about his imminent capture, but she had no idea what the prospects of that were, and in any ca
se a bout of premature triumphalism wouldn’t win her any favours.

  ‘You might find the factories harder to breach than Zendegi,’ she said. They’d probably go for in-house computing rather than the Cloud. Especially now.

  ‘Of course,’ Rollo said. ‘And sabotage is not our preferred option anyway. We’ll be campaigning hard to outlaw side-loading everywhere; smearing shit over your customers is just a short-term tactic. Eventually you’ll find a way to block us out, and even if Zendegi and Eikonometrics go bankrupt in the process, your intellectual property will just end up with someone else. But we’re starting early, outside the law, because it’s the only way to nip this atrocity in the bud: to slow the growth of the practice by making it clear - from the start, to everyone - that doing things this way will attract a penalty.’

  ‘Atrocity?’ Nasim scowled. ‘If you’re such a warrior for the rights of conscious beings, stop pissing around with Zendegi and go derail a massacre somewhere.’

  The lights on the Ferris wheel snapped on; some of the Proxies beneath them clapped and cheered.

  Rollo looked back at Nasim calmly. ‘So you’re happy with your games modules; your conscience is clear. Fine. But do you really think it will stop there? If there is no law, if there is no line drawn, what makes you so sure that it’s not going to end with software that even you’d call conscious? With no rights and no freedom. It might not require anything that sophisticated to churn out shoes or notepads, but what about aged-care services? Or child-minding?’

  Nasim’s skin crawled at his use of that phrase, but she still didn’t believe that he knew about Martin.

  ‘Every time you attack us,’ she said, ‘we use tens of thousands of side-loads as part of the defence. How does that grab your conscience?’

  Rollo betrayed no surprise or anguish, but his icon wouldn’t necessarily display every emotion that crossed his flesh-and-blood face. After a while he said, ‘That’s disgusting, but it’s not going to change anything.’

  He looked down at the Proxies. ‘How long will it be before the process is so cheap and simple that you’re using side-loads in every crowd scene? Computers are never going to rise up and enslave us, like the idiots in Hollywood portrayed it - or rescue us, like the idiots in Houston believe - but you’d happily send our most human-like mind-children straight into a hell of meaningless servitude and fragmented consciousness that we built for them all by ourselves.’

  Nasim said, ‘The only thing that’s going to come close to hell for side-loads is if we have to keep using them to screen out your shit.’

  Rollo met her gaze. ‘These are our terms: you can keep Virtual Azimi and anything else that’s limited to vision and motor skills, but you have to announce an end to the use of all other side-loads. If you don’t make the promise within seven days, and honour it within another seven, the attacks will resume.’

  Nasim nodded curtly, to signal understanding. She felt a grudging respect for him, for at least setting conditions that were probably survivable; the deadlines weren’t impossible, and with the sports Proxies untouched Zendegi could still remain afloat. She said, ‘It’s not my decision, but I’ll pass on the message.’

  Rollo held out his hand and turned his thumb down. The whole postcard vanished with him.

  Nasim removed her goggles and waited as the wall came down around her. When she picked up her notepad from the table beside the ghal’e Falaki called her immediately.

  ‘We couldn’t trace your visitor,’ he said, ‘but I do have some good news.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’ve got solid evidence from the supervisors of a process being corrupted at one specific provider. I’ve already passed the log files on to their security people.’

  ‘Which provider?’ Nasim asked.

  ‘The FLOPS House.’

  That was in Europe somewhere. Nasim took her notepad away from her ear to glance quickly at the screen; the machine had already matched Falaki’s words to an address book entry for the company, in Holland.

  ‘It’s very likely that this wasn’t the only site breached,’ Falaki warned her. ‘Still, it’s a start.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ If it was an inside job from within the FLOPS House, there was a chance of seeing at least one of the saboteurs arrested. Grab a thread of the conspiracy and good police work might unravel the whole thing.

  ‘What do you know about the CHL?’ she asked Falaki. He and Bahador had been monitoring the whole encounter.

  ‘They haven’t shown up on our radar in the past,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve set some things in motion, but right now we have nothing on them that you won’t get from ordinary public searches.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Falaki wasn’t expecting anything back from the FLOPS House for at least twenty-four hours. She thanked him and hung up the call.

  Nasim set her own knowledge-miner sorting through the Cis-Humanist League’s net presence; it was mostly text, and mostly on untraceable torrents. Rollo had been exaggerating slightly when he said they went back decades, but they’d been in various fora for fourteen years. Maybe Falaki would manage to trace the group’s origins to some founders who’d been less careful about protecting their identities in the days when their agenda had been a lot more abstract.

  Nasim needed to speak to the boss, but she lingered in the ghal’eha room, trying to decide exactly how she’d brief him. This wasn’t necessarily a fight to the death for Zendegi; their enemy had offered them terms of surrender that wouldn’t cripple them. And she could already see the comedians on Bloomberg: ‘Ever had a shit of a morning?’ Swiftly stopping the attacks - and appeasing Shahidi as part of the bargain - might be the only way to keep the share price from going into freefall.

  Accepting the truce need not mean the end of their current growth spurt. Zendegi had yet to sign up a star Indian cricket player, but equally, Cyber-Jahan had failed to convince anyone that their latest version of motion-capture - spiced up with myoelectric recordings and marketed as ‘Muscle Memory’ - was a serious rival to side-loading. The Indian equivalent of Virtual Azimi could still belong to either one of them.

  If they renounced more sophisticated side-loads though, that would be the end of the vision splendid, where every game developer released a special version first, exclusively for Zendegi. And Martin was not anyone’s idea of a sports star; the board would pull the plug on his side-loading immediately.

  The boss would want a transcript of her conversation with Rollo, but there was no way in the world that he was going to view the whole VR recording. So she might be able to get away with spinning her impression of the encounter, making the offer of the truce seem less trustworthy - and making him want to dig in his heels against the extortionists.

  Nasim closed her eyes and tried to see the way forward. It had been thirty years since she’d felt a strong urge to pray to anyone or anything, but for a moment she came close to begging for a miracle . . .

  Not from God, but from the Dutch computer crime squad.

  25

  When the day finally came to vacate the bookshop, Martin had had insomnia for three nights in a row. Arash, the softly-spoken commerce student who’d helped him sell the last of the stock, did most of the work disassembling the removable fixtures. The new occupants had agreed to deal with the remaining shelving when they remodelled; they’d get to sell the wood as scrap as compensation for the inconvenience of having to smash the joints apart with sledgehammers.

  Just before noon, the buyer for the print-on-demand machine dropped in and took it away. There was nothing left now but empty shelves and a pile of mystifying, Ikea-like components that might have been the parts for anything from a bedroom suite to a set of kitchen benches. Arash had a friend with a small truck coming by in the afternoon to take them to a recycling centre.

  The office computer sat on the floor. Martin turned to Arash. ‘Do you want that? It’s only two years old. I don’t have time to sell it myself.’ His voice sounded hollow in the carpetless space. He kep
t seeing Mahnoosh standing beside him in the same empty room twelve years before.

  Arash did ta’arof and refused three times, but finally agreed. Martin shook his hand.

  ‘Thanks for all your help. Especially these last two weeks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘I’d better call a taxi.’ Martin wanted to grab an hour or two of sleep before he picked up Javeed. As he pulled his notepad out of his pocket, his hand started shaking and the thing ended up on the floor. ‘Jesus!’

  Arash bent down and picked up the notepad. He said, ‘Do you want me to get a taxi?’

  Martin’s right hand was still flapping uncontrollably. He grabbed hold of it, feeling like Dr Strangelove, but then the left hand joined in too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘can you do that for me?’

  ‘I can get one on the street,’ Arash suggested, moving towards the door.