Zendegi

Nasim turned around. A clean-shaven middle-aged man, dressed in old-fashioned Western clothes – coat, tie, fedora – stood in the adjacent gondola, some ten or twelve metres away.

‘I’m Nasim,’ she replied, in English. ‘What should I call you?’

‘Rollo.’ He spoke with an American accent.

‘Pleased to meet you, Rollo.’ Ah, Iranian civility; her mother would be proud. ‘Would you like to join me here? I promise I won’t push you out.’

‘I’m fine where I am, thank you.’

‘As you wish.’ The wind blew gently across the park, rattling the huge machine, but Nasim’s default auditory settings put clarity above realism; she’d have no trouble hearing his voice.

‘I’m sure you’ve already guessed who I represent,’ Rollo said confidently.

Nasim hesitated before replying, but she couldn’t see what she’d have to gain by bluffing. ‘I have no idea. Honestly.’ If he was an emissary of Hojatoleslam Shahidi, he had a strange way of showing his adherence to Islamic tradition, and why anyone from Cyber-Jahan or the Chinese labour unions would be into fedoras and Ferris wheels was beyond her.

‘The CHL,’ Rollo declared.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The Cis-Humanist League.’

Nasim refrained from groaning. ‘Okay, I get it: cis, not trans. I’m not what you’d call a Latin buff, but I did a year of organic chemistry.’

She waited for Rollo to say something more, but he seemed momentarily taken aback, as if he’d been expecting a very different response.

‘So you’re “on the side of humans”,’ she said. ‘You’re… pro-technology? But you’re opposed to the crazies, the transcendence cults?’ He didn’t contradict her. ‘Great. Welcome to the club. I’m quite partial to my own species myself.’

Rollo looked positively wounded now. ‘You haven’t even read our manifesto, have you?’

‘Strangely, no,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Seeing as I’d never even heard of you until twenty seconds ago.’

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The arrogance is breathtaking! You march right into territory we’ve been mapping for decades, and then you turn around and tell me you have no idea who we are?’

Nasim spread her hands. ‘What can I say? Fire your publicist.’ She caught herself; she was letting her hostility get the better of her. This man might be a self-important prick who thought everyone in the universe read his blog rants, but he had just brought Zendegi to its knees. A computer-savvy anti-Caplan. Maybe if she locked them both in a room together they’d annihilate each other.

‘I’ll make it simple for you then,’ Rollo said. ‘Item seven of the manifesto: No consciousness without autonomy. It’s unethical to create conscious software that lacks the ability to take control of its own destiny.’

Nasim said, ‘Exactly what “conscious software” do you have in mind? Do you want Virtual Azimi to have voting rights?’

‘Of course not,’ Rollo replied impatiently. ‘We only targeted that game to hit you in the wallet; it’s obvious that Virtual Azimi can’t be conscious. But that’s where we draw the line: no higher functions, no language, no social skills. You don’t get to clone a slice of humanity and use it to churn out battery hens.’

Nasim was starting to feel off-balance; after steeling herself for the prospect of negotiating with a theologian who solemnly believed in angels and djinn, she was having to do some recalibration to focus on an adversary so much closer to her own philosophical territory.

‘None of the side-loads can be conscious in the human sense,’ she said. ‘They have no notion of their own past or future, no long-term memory, no personal goals.’ Martin’s Proxy would inherit some of his narrative memories, but she was hoping Rollo had no knowledge of that project.

He said, ‘So if I scooped out enough of your brain to give you amnesia and rob you of all sense of identity, I’d be entitled to do what I like with you? To treat you as a commodity?’

‘I’d say the major ethical problem there is that you’d essentially be killing me,’ Nasim replied. ‘But nobody had their mind wiped to make the side-loads. The HCP donors were already dead, and the people we scanned are all still living their own complete, fulfilling lives, irrespective of anything that happens in Zendegi.’

‘And if I copy you exactly,’ Rollo countered, ‘atom for atom, and then mutilate your duplicate, then it’s acceptable?’

Here we go, Nasim thought, hypotheticals about matter transmitters. The golden key that unlocks every philosophical quandary.

‘Nobody gets mutilated when a side-load is made,’ she said. ‘We build them up from nothing, we don’t hack them down from some perfect, fully-functioning virtual brain.’