Zendegi

As Arif set to work, Bahador said quietly, ‘It’s disturbing, isn’t it?’

‘Being invaded by sheep?’

He shook his head. ‘The prospect of spawning a few thousand slaves like that.’

Nasim didn’t reply immediately. The truth was, she shared his disquiet to a degree, though it didn’t make much sense. She’d convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with the Faribas popping in and out of existence all over Zendegi, whispering advice to the scripted Proxies in dozens of games, whenever the Proxies’ behaviour was too difficult to humanise by other means.

‘They’re not slaves,’ she said. ‘They’ve learnt how to do a microscopic part of what a human does. If a factory worker guides a robot arm through a sequence of moves, does the robot become as human as the worker?’

‘No,’ Bahador replied, ‘and I don’t think the Faribas are human either. But it’s still eerie, churning them out by the thousands.’

Nasim said, ‘What difference does it make, whether it’s one or a thousand?’

Bahador spread his hands in an admission of uncertainty. ‘Maybe none at all; I don’t know. If I were sure that I knew the right way to think about this…’ He trailed off, but Nasim could guess where he’d been heading. If he’d been certain that the Faribas were conscious, he would have been out on the street with Shahidi’s followers. If he’d been certain that they were not, he would have applauded Arif’s idea without reservation.

Arif worked quickly; the necessary hooks to the Fariba modules were all in place already, he just had to tie them together with a few other systems. When it was done, he tried out the anomalyrecogniser on an instance of the Virtual Azimi game; the sheep all flashed red, and nothing else was targeted. Then he quickly added code to purge the selected objects.

He turned to Nasim. ‘Can I-?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Arif ran his program. The sheep vanished. The human players began to cheer and applaud; the Proxies looked around, found nothing unfamiliar, and decided to stop feigning injuries.

Nasim said, ‘Launch it on everything.’

Arif was taken aback. ‘Everything? No more tests?’

Nasim glanced at her watch. ‘We’ve lost at least three-quarters of a million dollars already. I’m willing to bet that this is going to make things better, not worse.’

Arif didn’t have personal authorisation to launch so many processes at once, let alone the kind that intervened in every single game across Zendegi. Bahador and Nasim both had to sign off on the move – and an automatic notification of their action would be passed further up the hierarchy.

As she waited to be summoned to the boss’s office to explain what had happened, Nasim took some comfort from checking a sample of the games on Khosrow’s list. Minions was back to its usual uninhibited gore-fest; the biplanes had fallen victim to their own blatant absurdity. Nasim didn’t ask for details of the symptoms that had afflicted all the other games, but as she flicked from environment to environment it occurred to her that some anomalies might have been subtler than sheep or treacle bombs.

Still, if they were subtle enough to be missed by the Faribas, maybe they’d be subtle enough for the players themselves to continue to the end of their session without even noticing that anything was amiss. As various games finished, the corrupted instances would be discarded; Bahador had had three people checking through back-up files, and he was sure they had reliable versions of all the major games. As new groups of players came online, they would start afresh with a safe copy of the program. There were a few games on Zendegi that ran continuously, supposedly 24 hours a day, but their fans were used to occasional reboots.

All in all, they’d been lucky. Arif and the Faribas had saved them from a crippling débâcle that could easily have been ten times worse than the losses in revenue and prestige they’d already suffered.

Nasim’s notepad buzzed; she was wanted upstairs. She knew that the good news wouldn’t be enough when she still couldn’t answer the hard questions: Who had done this and why? How had they broken through Zendegi’s defences and defeated all of the elaborate cross-checks that were meant to guarantee the integrity of every game?

And given that they’d managed to do all that once, how could they be prevented from doing it again?

It was after one in the morning when Nasim arrived home. She went out onto the balcony to refill the finches’ food trough and change their water. Her ex-husband had given her the original breeding pair as a kind of joke, after she’d told him she missed her old research. At least Hamid had had a sense of humour. Unfortunately, the same perennially light-hearted attitude had extended to his relationships with other women. Nasim certainly hadn’t wanted someone who’d smother her with possessiveness and earnest declarations of undying love, but with Hamid she’d erred in the other direction.