Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  ‘I’d prefer a real one, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  Arash made the call. Martin’s hands finally stopped moving of their own accord, but his legs felt unsteady; he walked over to the wall and sat down on the floor. Dr Jobrani had given him a list of warning symptoms for declining liver function. Wrist tremors were near the top of the list.

  Arash returned the notepad and hovered anxiously. Martin said, ‘It’s okay, I’m not having a heart attack.’

  His hands were steady now. He made a call himself. ‘Omar jan, I’m sorry, but is there any way you can pick up Javeed from school?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll send Farshid.’ Omar paused. ‘What’s happening?’

  Martin said, ‘I need to go to the hospital. Can you tell Javeed there’s nothing to worry about?’

  ‘I’ll tell him. Do you want me to bring him there later?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll give you a call when I’ve seen a doctor.’

  ‘Okay.’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘That’s my taxi now,’ Martin lied. ‘Khoda hafez.’

  ‘Khoda hafez.’

  Arash was looking worried. ‘Should I call an ambulance?’

  ‘No.’ Martin made a brief call to Dr Jobrani’s message service, describing his symptoms and saying he was coming in straight away.

  He was beginning to feel lightheaded. The taxi arrived, and Arash helped him in. The driver played something loud and ugly on his music system, but Martin didn’t have the energy to complain, and after a while his attention was wandering so much that he didn’t really care.

  He found himself sitting in a chair in the emergency waiting room, with no memory of having entered the building. When he turned and looked around, the woman behind him frowned disapprovingly, as if she suspected he was in some kind of self-inflicted drug haze. He drifted off again, then realised someone was examining him in a different room.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ The doctor, a young man Martin had never seen before, was patting his cheek gently. ‘Can you try to focus, Mr Seymour? Have you been taking any drugs not recorded on your file? Tranquillisers? Sleeping pills?’

  ‘No.’ Martin looked around the room. ‘I don’t know how I got here.’

  ‘I think you have some swelling,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m going to get you scanned as soon as possible.’

  ‘Swelling in my liver?’

  ‘In your brain. Ammonia in your blood can cause some types of brain cells to enlarge.’

  ‘I didn’t drink ammonia,’ Martin protested. Ammonia in the blood? It sounded like something only an alien could have. ‘Am I dying?’ He was too spaced out to feel much fear at the prospect, but how could he say good-bye to Javeed in this state?

  The doctor squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. ‘You’re not dying, you’re just disoriented. We’ll have you fixed up in no time.’

  A nurse wearing an olive headscarf held a paper cup of water to his lips. Afternoon sunlight reflected into his eyes from something glinting on the far side of the room.

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘Wait a second.’ The nurse rearranged his pillows and tried again. This time water entered his mouth. He could feel the sunlight on his cheek now. He had a line in his arm. It was nice of her to give him fluids by mouth when he had a line in his arm.

  Martin slept fitfully. When he woke, he could see the ward reflected in a window, hiding the darkness outside. He felt terrible, but he felt whole again. Everything since the bookshop seemed unreal; he knew the gist of what had happened, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually been present for any of it.

  A nurse strode past his bed. ‘Excuse me? Can I make a phone call, please?’ he asked her. As he spoke, the taste in his mouth and the smell of his breath made him nauseous. His belongings were probably in the drawer beside the bed, but he didn’t trust himself to get to them unaided.

  ‘It’s two in the morning,’ she said, approaching.

  Martin covered his mouth with one hand, trying to spare her from his nuclear halitosis. ‘I have to tell people where I am.’

  The nurse waved her notepad at his bracelet to access his records. ‘Your designated contact, Mr Omar Rezaee, was informed of your admission earlier this evening.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’

  When she’d left, Martin thought this over for a while and decided it wasn’t enough. He swung his legs out of the bed and managed to open the drawer without pulling the intravenous line from his arm.

  ‘I’m fine, Omar jan,’ he whispered into his notepad. ‘Tell Javeed I’m fine. I’ll call soon.’ He had the machine send his words as a text message. Then he climbed back into bed and sank into a dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, Dr Jobrani came to see him. Martin had to bite his tongue during the examination; he was tired of strangers touching his body, however respectfully, however necessary it was.

  ‘So do you want the transplant now?’ Jobrani inquired tartly. ‘Or have you decided to be the first human being who tries to live without the urea cycle?’

  ‘I want three more days,’ Martin said.

  Jobrani snorted. ‘You’ll be waiting more than three days for a theatre. Probably ten.’

  ‘I want three days out of the hospital.’

  Jobrani collapsed his stethoscope into an oversized pen with a Pfizer logo and slipped it into his pocket. ‘I want world peace and a holiday in Tahiti.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a ticket for the replica in Dubai. Two days. Please, it’s important.’

  Jobrani was unmoved. ‘What do you want to do? Finish writing your memoirs?’

  ‘Something like that.’ More like checking the proofs. ‘What are my chances of surviving the transplant?’

  ‘Now?’ Jobrani thought about it. ‘Fifty-fifty.’

  Martin said, ‘And there’s nothing you can do to give me a few days out of here that won’t involve the same level of risk?’

  ‘Nothing I can justify medically.’

  ‘I’ll pay the full cost,’ Martin said. ‘You won’t have to lie to my insurance company.’

  ‘There’s an implant we could put in with keyhole surgery,’ Jobrani conceded reluctantly. ‘No general anaesthetic. We might still nick a vein and kill you, but probably not.’

  ‘And this implant will keep me healthy?’

  ‘It should keep you conscious, and a notch above bed-ridden; it substitutes for some of the liver’s functions, but not all of them. It’s what we would have used if you’d reached this point and there hadn’t been a perfectly good organ waiting for you.’

  ‘How much will that cost me?’

  ‘Five million.’

  ‘Rials?’

  ‘Tomans.’

  A toman was ten Iranian rials. Five million tomans was about ten thousand US dollars; Martin still had enough of Mahnoosh’s life insurance to cover it. He’d wanted to leave that money for Javeed, but his own policy would pay out soon enough.

  Martin said, ‘How soon could I have it done?’

  Jobrani struggled with his notepad’s interface, frowning and cursing under his breath. ‘If you can pay in advance, we can do it tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Fine.’ Martin took his own notepad from the bedside table and transferred the money.

  Javeed would be in school. Martin called Omar and let him know how things were going; Omar said he’d bring Javeed in to visit in the afternoon.

  Martin lay back and closed his eyes for a few minutes, trying to build up the strength for one more call.

  He was surprised when Nasim answered; given all the problems Zendegi was facing, the most he’d been hoping for was her voicemail.

  ‘I won’t be able to come in tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Are you all right, Martin?’

  ‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘This is crunch time; no more scans. You need to build the Proxy with whatever you’ve got.’

  Nasim was silent for a while, then she said, ‘Okay. I can do that.’

  ‘What sort of time are we looking at?’ />
  ‘I’ll do a provisional build overnight,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll test it myself sometime tomorrow. But then I’ll need you to come in and . . .’

  ‘Give the final verdict.’ Martin had interviewed his own potential replacements for most of his journalistic postings; if he looked at it that way it might not be so strange.

  Nasim said, ‘When will you be able to do that?’

  ‘I’m in the hospital right now, but they’ll be letting me out soon. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I saw the news,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sorry you’re having a hard time.’

  Nasim laughed. ‘Don’t worry about it. Whatever else is going on, we’re going to make this happen.’

  When Martin put the notepad down and looked up at the ceiling, violet bruises moved across the white plaster in waves.

  26

  Nasim spent the day reading reports from Falaki’s team and passing her summaries up the chain of command. With three days remaining to the first of Rollo’s deadlines, the board had decided to hold off making any decision until it was clear how the investigation in Holland was panning out. An act of capitulation that resolved Zendegi’s problems might make the stock market happy, but a timely arrest could do the same without eroding the value of the company’s intellectual property. The security experts at the FLOPS House were working diligently through the log files Falaki had sent them, as well as their own staff access records, and they were hopeful that they’d soon identify the culprit. Certainly everyone was confident that an outsider could not have done the deed.

  The total number of customers using Zendegi was down twenty per cent on the same time slots the week before, but there had also been tens of thousands of people joining up; perhaps they were hoping to witness some entertaining mayhem if there was another attack. The first breach had certainly been more amusing than repellent, so anyone who’d missed the whole punitive escalation angle might be expecting something diverting that would let them hold on to their dinner. Nasim knew that Happy Universe had long included a kind of ritualised breakdown of the usual game-world boundaries, where selected environments could sporadically gate-crash each other just to stir things up. But she wasn’t about to kid herself that the cis-humanists’ assault would lapse into a kind of harmless anarchist theatre.

  By the time she’d cleared her in-tray of everything pressing involving the extortionists, it was nine in the evening and no one else was in the building. She went to the tea room and microwaved one of the vegetable lasagnes she kept in the freezer there; she sat eating in the empty room, giving herself fifteen minutes away from her desk and screen. She didn’t feel ready for the task that lay ahead of her, but she knew that if she went home now she’d get no sleep at all, and only have to face the same thing, twice as tired, the following night.

  She’d prepared a test environment for the Proxy weeks before: a simply furnished antechamber where in the future - if all went well - the Proxy would be brought up to date with developments in Javeed’s life before it stepped through into a different space to meet him. It would be her job to deliver these briefings, but she would not enter the environment through a ghal’e; her own sense of immersion was not important, and software could move her icon for her while her webcam supplied facial data.

  Back in her office, she set the test in motion.

  A wide-angle view of the antechamber appeared on the screen. The walls were panelled with oak, and two plush red sofas stood on either side of each of the two doors. The Proxy entered through one door, emerging from a world of featureless whiteness resembling the inside of a closed ghal’e. Its icon was being moved for it involuntarily at first, but as it woke to find itself in mid-step it took the reins easily enough. It was using the same form of puppetry Martin had used when he was lying in the MRI, but starting it flat on its back would only have encouraged it to brood on its strange condition as it struggled to recall how to get its icon upright.

  Nasim’s icon was seated on one of the sofas by the second door. The Proxy turned to face her, smiling in recognition, and the screen switched to her point of view.

  ‘Nasim?’ the Proxy said. ‘What are you doing in Zendegi? Where’s Javeed?’

  ‘You’ll see Javeed soon,’ she said. ‘I’m just here to bring you up to speed.’

  The Proxy frowned slightly, but then it seemed to grasp what she meant. It waited patiently for her to say more.

  ‘It’s 2030,’ she said. ‘Javeed’s nine years old now; his birthday was last week.’

  ‘Okay.’ The Proxy beamed at her, apparently unperturbed by the realisation that he must have been woken more than a hundred times already. Certainly the neural activity maps in the corner of the screen revealed no stress, no fear, no hostility.

  ‘His icon’s been updated,’ Nasim continued, ‘so don’t be surprised by how tall he’s become.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ The Proxy gestured at the door. ‘What’s he into now? Still the Shahnameh?’

  ‘Close: elephant racing.’

  The Proxy laughed. ‘How? How can he sit on an elephant in Zendegi?’

  ‘Most of the ghal’eha now have something like a retractable mechanical bull,’ Nasim explained. ‘There’s a geodesic frame to support it, and it folds up out of the way when it’s not needed. The shape’s variable, so you can feel like you’re riding almost anything: a motorbike, a horse, an elephant. Or you could just be sitting on a motionless chair.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ the Proxy said. ‘Elephant races! Javeed will be over the moon.’

  Nasim said, ‘Does the situation bother you?’

  ‘What situation?’

  ‘The fact that Martin’s been dead for more than two years,’ she said bluntly.

  The Proxy’s face showed nothing but sympathy. ‘How’s Javeed coping?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ Nasim replied.

  The Proxy said quietly, ‘I hope I’ve been some help.’

  Nasim wasn’t comfortable responding to that. ‘What’s your relationship to Javeed?’ she asked.

  ‘Relationship? I’m his father. Javeed is my son.’ The Proxy’s expression was mildly quizzical; the neural maps still showed no distress, no anxiety.

  ‘If Javeed’s your son, what should I call you?’

  The Proxy was amused. ‘You know my name: Martin Seymour.’

  ‘But Martin’s dead,’ Nasim insisted.

  ‘From cancer,’ the Proxy replied. ‘Liver cancer. We all knew that was coming.’

  ‘So how can you be Martin, when Martin’s dead?’

  The Proxy roared with laughter. ‘I get it now: you’re just screwing with me, to see my reaction. You know how I can be Martin, Nasim. You of all people know how.’

  Nasim kept her nerve. ‘And that doesn’t bother you at all? How you’re here? Who you are?’

  The Proxy regarded her with good-natured bemusement. ‘Why would it bother me? Martin is dead. I’m here in his place. Wasn’t that the whole point?’

  Nasim restarted the Proxy and pushed it harder. This time, she claimed, it was 2040; she had her icon aged to make the lapse seem more real.

  ‘Javeed’s nineteen,’ she said. ‘He’s engaged to be married.’ She hesitated. ‘I expect it’s hard for you, knowing that you’ll miss your son’s wedding.’

  The Proxy remained sanguine. ‘I’m sure he’ll show me the video. I never expected to be there in person, like a ghost trapped in a wallscreen; the truth is, I never thought he’d keep me around this long at all. But if he still wants my advice, I’m happy to keep giving it.’

  Nasim said, ‘Maybe he doesn’t want your advice, but he doesn’t know how to stop waking you. Do you think it’s easy for him to shut you down and walk away?’

  The Proxy replied, with just a trace of irritation, ‘Don’t take offence, Nasim, but that’s something I’ll discuss with Javeed face to face.’

  Nasim soon lost any sense of reticence; she had an obligation to be
as thorough as she could, to test her creation almost to destruction while Martin was still in a position to judge the results. She restarted the Proxy again and again, announcing different ages for Javeed, trying different ways to provoke it into angst. In her darkest moments she had feared that she might have been creating some mewling, pitiful thing that would chafe against its limitations, obsessing over its lack of embodiment, its imperfect memory, its truncated sense of self. But the consequences of its neural deficits appeared to have turned out exactly as she’d hoped: the Proxy seemed incapable of missing the things it lacked.