Zendegi

Martin shed his hi-tech attachments and reclaimed his belongings. He walked to the ghal’eha room where Javeed was waiting with Bahador, already wearing his signed Azimi jersey over his school clothes. Martin squatted down and embraced him tightly.

‘Mubaarak, pesaram. We’ll get an island for those elephants as soon as we get home.’

They took a bus to Omar’s shop. Martin had told Omar the same half-truth he’d told Javeed: that Nasim had equipment that was easier on his back. Omar had not made a big deal about it, and he greeted them as warmly as ever.

As Martin stood listening to Javeed recounting his adventure for Omar and Farshid, he thought: this is it, this is how it will be. Exactly the same scene, even after I’m gone: Javeed returning from his weekly session in Zendegi with his father.

Omar, Rana and Farshid would love and protect him, but he would not have lost his old life, his old family, completely. Even Mahnoosh would still be there beside him, in the Proxy’s echoes of Martin’s memories of her.

It was stranger than Zal’s story, but it could still come true. All he had to do was immerse himself in the side-loading process – and hang on long enough to be sure that it worked.

20

Nasim walked past the protesters in silence. For the first few days she’d tried taunting them, hoping to get a violent reaction recorded on the building’s security cameras that would force the police to intervene and move them on. But she had to admit that they were disciplined; even her suggestion that their favourite mullah belonged on the same bonfire as all the rest had raised barely a snarl. They’d studied 2012 and they’d learnt from the winning side: the only route to popular respect was through restraint.

The crowd outside Zendegi’s offices grew larger every day; this morning Nasim reckoned it was close to a hundred. Shahidi had found out about the Faribas and had wisely shifted his focus to them; by going quiet about Virtual Azimi he was no longer asking anyone to make the impossible choice between football and piety.

His supporters had adopted a curious slogan, repeated on all their placards: OUR SOULS ARE NOT FOR THESE MACHINES. A prohibition, rather than a flat-out denial of the possibility. Why couldn’t they simply have scoffed at the prospect of machines ever possessing ‘souls’? That was the current Vatican position, which left their amateur philosophers with no controversy to fret over. Shahidi himself certainly hadn’t said anything implying that Proxies modelled on fragments of human brains should be seen as human, but nor had he explicitly denounced the ambiguous slogan. He wanted it both ways, benefiting from the sly nod towards the most backwards, superstitious notions that would classify the Proxies as a form of forbidden ‘sorcery’, while at the same time declining to make the claim – no doubt preposterous, and even blasphemous, in most of his colleagues’ eyes – that a piece of software ever could have a soul.

Martin arrived for his ten o’clock solo session. He was punctual as always, but he was looking increasingly frail. He was no longer working in the bookstore, and Nasim had managed to persuade him to accept payment for his time here; though Zendegi would not be mining his scans for fragments to incorporate into games, there was still the possibility that their research would ultimately lead to commercial benefit.

As Nasim fitted his EEG skullcap, she said, ‘Do you think you could come for two hours tomorrow?’

‘Of course.’ Martin hesitated. ‘So there’s a problem?’

‘The network’s not converging as quickly as I’d hoped,’ she confessed. ‘More data can only be a good thing.’

‘Okay.’ Martin met her eyes in the mirror. ‘Two hours is fine, starting from tomorrow. Make it ten hours a day if you have to.’

Nasim smiled. ‘I promise you, you’d go crazy long before ten.’

When he was in the scanner, she went to her office to monitor the start of the data collection.

Martin’s sessions with Javeed were crucial, but they did not yield anywhere near enough data. Even his current interactions with his son relied upon neural circuitry that could not be clearly resolved during the events themselves; for the Proxy to have any chance at all of handling a decade’s worth of future encounters, the side-loading needed to have a much wider base.