Greg Egan - Zendegi

‘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.

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.