Zendegi

After forty minutes the owner of the juice bar started giving them dark looks. There were only so many banana milkshakes Nasim could bring herself to order for the sake of staying put, so they walked back to Martin’s empty shop and sat in the small coffee lounge where patrons were invited to flick through their potential purchases.

‘I have some money from my wife’s insurance,’ Martin told her, for the fifth time.

‘That’s not the point,’ Nasim replied patiently. ‘It’s not a question of expense. It’s a question of complexity.’

‘I’m not asking for anything sophisticated,’ Martin insisted. ‘I don’t expect this Proxy to deliver lectures on moral philosophy; I just want him to have the right gut reaction if his son starts referring to women as whores or Arabs as wild animals.’

Nasim said, ‘If it were that simple, I could go back to the office right now and crank out an ordinary, scripted Proxy that flew off the handle in response to any list of triggers you cared to spell out. Do you honestly want something that crude?’

‘Not that crude,’ Martin conceded.

‘So do you really think that a Proxy whose only ability was knowing when to lay down the law – and who became tongue-tied whenever he was challenged to defend his views – would have any impact on your son at all? I’m not talking about high-powered philosophy! I’m talking about debating a six-year-old, or a twelve-year-old, with a more subtle response than “Because I said so”.’

Martin was beginning to look deflated. He said, ‘I’m going to have to go and pick up Javeed from school.’

Nasim said, ‘I’m sorry, Martin. You know if there’s anything else I can do-’

‘Thank you.’

In the taxi back to the office, Nasim felt drained. She wondered how many other people had watched Virtual Azimi tenaciously holding his ground against the original – as if this proved them to be perfectly matched mirror-images – and concluded: This is it, my chance to cheat death. Well, if Azimi was hit by a truck, his widow would certainly receive royalties from the game for as long as it remained popular, but most people could forget about a Proxy preserving their earning capacity, let alone anything more personal. Maybe she should have told Martin that, while the match hadn’t literally been fixed, Azimi would have been crazy to hammer his Proxy’s team into the ground; that might have been good for his ego, but it wouldn’t have helped anyone’s bank balance.

Bahador spotted her as she stepped out of the elevator. ‘Did you hear about the cleric in Qom?’ he asked.

‘No-?’ They walked together down the corridor; Bahador wasn’t smiling, so Nasim decided that this probably wasn’t the opening line to a joke.

‘Hojatoleslam Shahidi. He just issued a statement denouncing Virtual Azimi as an affront to God and human dignity.’

‘An affront? Why?’

Bahador read from his notepad. ‘ “God’s gifts to us should be shared, and taught, and used freely to delight him, but they must not be made into commodities to be bought and sold.”’

Nasim rubbed her eyes. ‘Okay, but does he have any actual followers who’ll boycott the game, or is he just another fat fart in a turban, hallucinating relevance and trying to make a headline?’

Bahador looked around nervously, as if he was afraid someone might have overheard her. ‘I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.’

‘You didn’t SocNet him?’

Bahador fiddled with the notepad. ‘He does have an Ummah-Space page, but it looks like most of his friends are sycobots.’

‘Hmm.’ It had been a while since Nasim’s online outreach job, but anyone who didn’t filter out interest-feigning bots was hardly going to be a formidable organiser. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ she said.

Nasim spent the afternoon in a videoconference with a developer who was using the Fariba modules in a new game called Murder in Manolos, a gossipy whodunnit set among North Tehran’s Mall Princess cliques. Unlike Virtual Azimi, the novel technology would not be a selling point for the public; the aim was simply to get a smoother result for the non-player characters, with lower development costs.

There were a few technical hitches in the interface with the modules, but overall the project was going quite well. Nasim watched some demonstration runs; the Fariba-enhanced bit-players seemed at least as lifelike as anyone in an equivalent TV drama. She had added a feature to the library recently that had turned out to be invaluable, a routine called WTFquery(). When one of the Fariba modules generated some potential dialogue, before having the Proxy utter the words you could try out the whole exchange on another (non-identical) Fariba, and see if its neural response classified the would-be contribution as (A) a pertinent observation, (B) witty banter, or (C) a complete non sequitur. Screening out bizarre interjections from the Proxies that would have been the equivalent of stamping ‘idiot robot’ on their foreheads did at least as much for their credibility as anything they actually said.