Greg Egan - Zendegi

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.

How much of this equanimity was down to her choice of ersatz neuroanatomy, and how much to Martin’s own clear-eyed acceptance of the imperfect deal he was buying into, Nasim couldn’t say. But the result was about as far as it could have been from a tortured abomination, screaming that if it couldn’t have real wind on its face, real hope for its future and real memories of its past it should be wiped from the face of the Earth. Confronted with stark reminders of its nature and every kind of stress short of outright sadism, it remained simply grateful for its chance to outlive Martin and keep watch over his son.

Nasim continued the tests until dawn, then she took a break to grab a quick shower, change her clothes and gulp down some coffee. Then she sat and worked her way through another dozen permutations. It was beyond her power, beyond anyone’s, to know how the Proxy would respond to every conceivable piece of news that the coming decades might bring, but when she pushed the envelope the results tended more to laughter than to tears.

‘I’m afraid Javeed’s become a follower of Shahidi,’ she declared. ‘He doesn’t want to see you any more.’

The Proxy’s shocked silence dissolved into guffaws. ‘Nice try, Nasim, but we agreed that if Javeed doesn’t want to wake me, no one else will. I’m guessing Martin’s still alive and you’re just putting me through my paces before he signs off on me.’

Nasim replied provocatively, ‘And does it worry you that one of us might reject you?’