Zendegi

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.

26

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.