Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  ‘You’re taking a holiday?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ice.’

  Nasim took a couple of seconds to decode that, but given the speaker it could really only mean one thing.

  ‘You’re freezing yourself?’

  ‘Yes. Just for a short time: maybe twenty or thirty years. So unless one of us is very unlucky, this is au revoir, not good-bye.’

  Nasim felt a stab of betrayal. They were not exactly the closest of allies, but the mess they’d made, they’d made together. Now he was going to turn his back on everything and sleep through the coming firestorm in a bomb-proof vault.

  ‘You coward,’ she said.

  Caplan looked stunned for a moment, then amused. ‘I am still on Zendegi’s board; you might want to take that into account before you offer me your uncensored, spur-of-the-moment judgements.’

  Nasim was not in a mood to back down. ‘You’re happy to share the glory and the profits until the bombs start going off. If that’s not cowardice, what is it?’

  Caplan said, ‘I’m not doing this because of Houston. Apart from anything else, I don’t believe that incident represents the slightest threat to my own safety. Or yours, for that matter.’

  Nasim was utterly confused now. ‘Why, then?’

  ‘It’s a medical decision. I have no choice.’

  Caplan made a hand gesture, and his conferencing icon did a jump cut. At first Nasim thought he’d taken the form of a gaming creature of some kind, but then the combination of baldness, wizened skin and elfin features reminded her more of a documentary she’d seen on children with progeria, the genetic condition that caused massive premature ageing.

  Caplan said, ‘Who’d have thought that human and murine telomerase could respond so differently to the very same drug?’ His voice had acquired a rasp that made it sound as if half the cells in his vocal chords were being sloughed off with every word.

  ‘A biochemist?’ Nasim suggested. She would not have put it past him to fake life-threatening side-effects from one of his faddish longevity treatments just to weasel out of her charge that he was heading for the hills at the first sign of danger.

  ‘There might have been an unexpected interaction with the SIRT2 modulators,’ Caplan mused. ‘I doubt the problem was due to isotope loading, or it should have abated as soon as I went back to a standard nuclide diet.’

  ‘You really are sick?’ Nasim was loath to trust him, but she was afraid of crassly mocking a man who might actually be dying.

  ‘Either that, or special effects technicians are assaulting me with latex in my sleep.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’

  Caplan reverted to his old icon, but that image of sparkling health now carried the air of a botched face-lift or an ill-fitting toupée. ‘You weren’t to know. I wasn’t spreading it around.’

  ‘How long have you—?’

  ‘A couple of years,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be under control, but the last few months it’s gone downhill fast. It’s going to take some future medicine to fix it.’

  Nasim didn’t know how to respond to that. Caplan genuinely expected his heirs to find a way to defrost him and patch him up.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry about your friend.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She’d emailed him her final report on the side-loading project the day before, just after she’d learnt of Martin’s death.

  ‘It wasn’t all in vain,’ Caplan added. ‘I’d actually been considering side-loading a special-purpose Proxy to manage my affairs while I was on ice. But I think it’s clear now that I’ll be in much safer hands trusting to human executors and existing legal instruments.’

  ‘I see.’ Nasim bit back her anger; she had never expected him to bankroll the experiment out of sympathy for Martin’s situation. Having sold it to him on pragmatic grounds, she had no right to recoil from the news that he’d got his money’s worth.

  ‘So what do you think happened in Houston?’ she said. ‘The CHL played nice with Zendegi because we were easy to extort, but in this case there was no Cloud computing, no customers to mess with - nothing but the facility itself?’

  Caplan said, ‘I doubt it was the CHL. I’m thinking fundamentalist Christians.’

  ‘Christians?’

  ‘The Superintelligence Project stated their goals in explicitly religious language,’ Caplan pointed out. ‘ “God is coming into existence. We’re building Him right here.” What did they expect, trespassing on the territory of people with strongly held ideas about the meaning of the word?’

  ‘But they’ve been talking like that for years,’ Nasim protested. ‘Why should anyone start taking them seriously now?’

  ‘The HCP,’ Caplan replied. ‘Virtual Azimi. Some of the credibility of those achievements would have rubbed off on them, in a layperson’s eyes. You must have seen their me-too press release, saying they’d have God up and running within five years. For people who’d previously thought they were full of nothing but blasphemous hot air, it might have started looking too close for comfort. The Antichrist was coming to rule over the nations.’

  Nasim was no expert on Christianity, but it didn’t quite add up for her. ‘I thought the whole idea of religious prophecy was that it was . . . prophecy. If it starts to look as if the Beast will be born in a computer in Houston, isn’t it the role of virtuous believers to live through his reign, stay true to their faith, and reap their reward in the end? You don’t drive a truck full of fertiliser into the path of pre-ordained events that need to happen before the Second Coming, however unpleasant they might be.’

  Caplan said, ‘Maybe they took their theology lessons from Schwarzenegger movies. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was someone else who thought the side-loads tipped the balance and made the chance that the Superintelligence Project could succeed start to look like too great a risk. A government agency? A foreign power?’ He shrugged.

  ‘Outside the project itself,’ Nasim replied, ‘apart from Zachary Churchland, the only person I know of who ever took them seriously was you.’

  Caplan laughed. It sounded sincere, but then it wasn’t his real voice. ‘Yeah, I was pretty naïve back then.’

  ‘So what changed your mind?’

  ‘Watching them turn five billion dollars into nothing but padded salaries and empty verbiage.’

  That was a reasonable answer; Nasim let it rest.

  ‘So you believe Eikonometrics will be safe in your absence?’ she said.

  ‘Safe from the bombers,’ Caplan replied. ‘Nobody’s going to mistake a souped-up factory robot for the Antichrist. The cis-humanists are likely to be a nuisance, but I’m sure that can be managed.’

  ‘How, exactly?’

  ‘Well, that’s part of why I wanted to talk to you,’ Caplan admitted. ‘Before I close the lid on the freezer, I’m thinking of poaching one of your guys: Arif Bahrami. He seemed to have some good ideas when you were under attack, using side-loads as part of the defence. Now that you don’t need him for that kind of thing, I wanted to ask you what you thought it would take to persuade him to join Eikonometrics.’

  It was a bright spring afternoon on the day of the funeral. Martin’s old friend Behrouz had flown in from Damascus to speak at his graveside, and he delivered a warm, affectionate eulogy. He was a good choice, Nasim thought, because he had a little more distance than the other mourners. That made it easier not to grow maudlin.

  As Nasim watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, the thought that she’d had even a fraction of this man’s memories and personality at her fingertips seemed more surreal than ever. The crude approximation she’d dragged out of his skull had come alive, but she could no longer understand how she’d deceived herself into thinking that it would find an equilibrium within its roughly hewn boundaries. It was hard enough for any ordinary human being to come to terms with their limitations.

  Back at Omar’s house, she took a while to find the courage to face Jav
eed. He’d never really warmed to her, but he let her kiss his cheeks; his thoughts were elsewhere.

  After the funeral, Nasim spent the evening with her mother. They had finally decided to drag all her photos out of Rubens’ clutches and manage them on their own hardware. As it turned out, it wasn’t too difficult; within a couple of hours Nasim had everything working again.

  As they flipped through the library, her mother took the opportunity to do some reorganising. She paused at a misfiled picture of a young man in a suit-coat marching on the street, holding up a portrait of Khomeini.

  ‘That’s your father in 1978,’ she said. ‘He would have been eighteen. Nine years before you were born.’

  Nasim knew she must have seen the picture before, but the juxtaposition of the Ayatollah and her father’s youthful face was unsettling. He wasn’t the only progressive who’d made the same mistake; anything had seemed better than the Shah, and the popular exiled religious leader had been widely viewed as a useful means to an end.

  They sat together meandering through the family history until her mother grew tired and Nasim helped her into bed.

  Upstairs, Nasim stood on the balcony watching the traffic on the highway. She had no way of knowing whether Caplan had been genuine in his claim to have finally seen through his rivals’ hype, or whether he’d decided that he could only cold-sleep in peace if they suffered a major setback first, but in a sense it didn’t matter. In the long run - assuming he woke, and regained control of a thriving business empire - there were much worse things he could do than bombing an empty building. Jupiter would probably outlast him unscathed, but he might easily side-load an army of a billion slaves on his way to a slow and messy accommodation with reality.

  The best way to clip his wings would be to cut off the cash flow she’d stupidly helped create for him. That meant getting side-loading outlawed in as many countries as possible - while it was still so expensive and technically demanding that it would not merely find a niche in the black economy.

  Whoever was behind the bombing in Houston, it was going to make life harder for the CHL. The line between hackers and terrorists would be blurred; their cause would be tarred with the same brush. If they wanted to become legitimate and take their fight into the political sphere, they were going to need all the allies they could get. People who could speak from experience about the risks of side-loading might be useful. Nasim could not put her hand on her heart and swear that side-loaded factory workers would be living in hell, but her testimony about Martin’s case might help persuade people that it was better to err on the side of caution.

  Maybe in Javeed’s lifetime a door could be opened up into Zendegi-ye-Behtar; maybe his generation would be the first to live without the old kind of death. Whether or not that proved to be possible, it was a noble aspiration. But to squeeze some abridged, mutilated person through the first available aperture was not.

  Rollo had said it well enough, not in a slogan from his manifesto but in his plea to her on the Ferris wheel. Nasim had not wanted to listen then, but the simple entreaty had stayed with her as all her excuses and rationalisations had melted away.

  If you want to make it human, make it whole.

  AFTERWORD

  This novel was completed in July 2009, a month after the widely disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The result triggered massive street demonstrations that were met with a brutal crackdown, but even some members of the clerical establishment questioned the election’s legitimacy and condemned the mistreatment of protesters. Predicting the next few years is impossible - and the particular scenario I’ve imagined was always destined to be overtaken by reality - but I hope that this part of the story captures something of the spirit of the times and the courage and ingenuity of the Iranian people.

  Hezb-e-Haalaa is fictitious, and is not modelled on any real organisation.

  The fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini permitting gender reassignment is real (see ‘A Fatwa for Freedom’ by Robert Tait, The Guardian, 27 July 2005), as is the Iranian miniseries set in Nazi-occupied Europe (see ‘Iran’s Unlikely TV Hit’ by Farnaz Fassihi, The Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2007; in this report the title ‘Madare sefr darajeh’ is translated literally as ‘Zero Degree Turn’, but I’ve used a more vernacular English translation, ‘No Room to Turn’).

  My source for stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was Dick Davis’s translation (Viking Penguin, New York, 2006). Note, though, that the versions re-enacted in Zendegi are definitely not scrupulously faithful to the originals.

  The transliterations of Farsi I’ve used are simply intended to give the reader some idea of the sound of the words; I haven’t followed any formal system.

  Supplementary material for this novel can be found at www.gregegan.net