Greg Egan: Zendegi

‘There was a family I met in Kabul,’ Martin said. ‘Ali and Zahra. They had four children; three girls and a baby boy.’

They were sitting in the MRI room. Peyman had made himself scarce. Nasim said, ‘Go on.’

‘They were from a small village in Bamyan Province. They’d been living without papers in Iran for three years, but they got caught in a sweep and sent back across the border. It wasn’t safe in their village, so they ended up in Kabul.

‘I met Ali on the street. It was winter; he was selling firewood – smashed-up furniture from garbage dumps, mostly. He invited me to his home and introduced me to his family; I interviewed him and his wife. I didn’t have a photographer with me, so I made a time to come back the next day.

‘When I returned… some people from the group that Ali had fled in Bamyan had found him, a few hours before. They’d cut off his head, in front of his family. In front of his wife and kids.’ Martin covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I didn’t see it happen, but I saw what it did to them.’

Nasim was silent for a while, trying to think of a way through the impasse. ‘There are a couple of things we could try,’ she said. ‘I could go back and find all the images we showed you that triggered that memory, and then rebuild the Proxy omitting your responses to them. Or we could put in some kind of filter, so the Proxy gets shielded from anything similar that happens in Zendegi.’

Martin looked up at her, incredulous. ‘Filtering his memories or censoring his experiences isn’t going to fix this. The Proxy should have been able to remember what had happened and talk about it with Javeed, calmly and sanely. If we just pluck it out of his head, or shield him from anything that reminds him of it, then what about the next thing that makes him go ballistic? The problem doesn’t lie with his memories; it’s the fact that he doesn’t have the capacity to deal with them.’

Nasim said defensively, ‘I did tell you that there’d be limitations.’ She had certainly included all the brain regions normally associated with impulse control, but given that the Proxy was, by design, incapable of forming all of the same perspectives as the original, there were always going to be situations where it was not going to behave the same way.

‘I’m not blaming you,’ Martin replied, without rancour. ‘You explained everything. I didn’t listen.’

Nasim shifted in her chair. ‘So what will you do?’

‘Javeed will live with Omar,’ Martin said. ‘There was never any choice about that.’

‘Can you talk to Omar?’

‘I have to.’ Martin laughed and wiped his eyes. ‘But how do you tell someone who’s offered to spend the next ten years raising your son that you’ve got a list of subjects on which you’d prefer that he kept his mouth shut? How do I do that without poisoning our friendship – and poisoning him against Javeed? Maybe I can slip it into some notes I hand him, just after the list of Javeed’s allergies.’

Nasim said, ‘You’ve been friends for fifteen years. Surely you can talk to him about anything now?’

Martin regarded her with bemusement. ‘Is it like that for you? No boundaries at all?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ Nasim admitted.

‘I’ve never been that close to Omar,’ Martin said. ‘Ever since I arrived in Tehran he’s gone out of his way to help me, but even now it’s still like we’re… guest and host. We can kid around about things that don’t matter, but we don’t criticise each other – that would be crass and ungracious. And after all these years of mutual tact, I don’t know how to change the rules without making it feel like a slap in the face.’

Nasim didn’t know what advice to give him. ‘You’ll find a way,’ she said.

Martin spread his hands: maybe. ‘Thanks for trying so hard with the side-load,’ he said. ‘I hope the research still tells you something useful.’ He stood.

‘I’ll give you a lift home,’ Nasim offered.

Martin shook his head. ‘I’ll get a taxi. You must have other things to do.’

‘Let’s not do ta’arof. I cleared my diary for the morning; I’ll give you a lift.’

They rode in silence most of the way. Nasim felt helpless; a part of her was still hunting for ways to salvage the project, to patch over the difficulties and make everything work. She knew that it was pointless, though. Whatever she proposed now, Martin was not going to change his mind.

When they reached the house, she walked with Martin to the door. ‘After the operation, if you’re not able to cope with an ordinary ghal’e, I can still organise time in a scanner.’

Martin said, ‘Thanks, but if the transplant’s successful I should be in much better shape. Actually, I’m planning some trips with Javeed. There’s only so much Zendegi-ye-Behtar I can take.’

‘Okay.’ They shook hands. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

Nasim was halfway back to the city when her notepad buzzed. The call was from Falaki: too much to deal with while she was driving, so she found a side-street where she could park and call him back.

‘There’s good news and bad news,’ Falaki said.

‘Please don’t make me choose.’

‘I’ll start with the short version then,’ he said. ‘We know pretty much what happened at the FLOPS House. But we don’t know who did it, and we don’t expect to find out anytime soon.’

Nasim digested that. ‘Okay. How did they do it?’

‘It was a chip hack. The FLOPS House found a rogue processor in one of their servers; that’s what enabled everything that happened to you there. But it looks as if the chip would have covered the tracks of whoever steered the attack, so we can’t expect to get reliable evidence as to who that was.’

Nasim stared out into the traffic. ‘They can’t find out who had physical access to the server?’

‘The processor doesn’t seem to have been put there by someone tampering after the server was installed,’ Falaki replied. ‘It looks as if it’s been there since the machine was built.’

‘So they got hacked chips into the supply line?’ Nasim had only ever heard of that being done before by major crime syndicates.

‘It looks that way,’ Falaki said.

‘Have the FLOPS House cleared all their hardware?’

‘Not yet; they’re working their way through. That could take them a month or more. The data we had on the breach helped them narrow down their first tests, but for a comprehensive sweep there’ll be no shortcuts.’

A month or more? But it was worse than that; if the cis-humanists had introduced their own custom chips into the manufacturer’s stock, there was no reason at all to think that only one provider was affected. Even if Zendegi stopped doing business with the FLOPS House, if they tried to push ahead in defiance of Rollo’s deadline, there was no guarantee that they’d be safe from a further attack.

‘There is an upside,’ Falaki said. ‘If you want to start negotiating hardware monitoring with the providers, this is the leverage you need.’

‘You could be right,’ Nasim conceded glumly. ‘But that’s still going to take five years.’

‘Of course,’ Falaki agreed.

‘And in the meantime?’

‘In the meantime, I’d say the least risky approach would be to give these people what they want.’

Nasim knew that this advice made sense, but it was still hard to swallow. ‘Did you find out anything about the CHL’s founders?’

‘There were five people who played a central role in the early discussions on the net,’ Falaki said. ‘Some of them must still be active on the same issues. We’ve passed the names on to the Dutch police, and they’ll liaise with the authorities in the relevant countries. But we’ve got no evidence at all of criminal activity by any of those individuals. Don’t expect to see them rounded up and questioned; at best, some jurisdictions might add them to surveillance lists.’