Authors: Greg Egan
Zendegi (32 page)
Fariba would never be mistaken for a philosopher or a poet. Conventional Proxies - which improvised around elaborate, branching scripts - could have far deeper, more convincing interactions with people, at least in situations for which they’d been tailor-made. But Fariba wasn’t meant to do anything as a stand-alone system. Conventional software would still provide the back-story, goals, memory and context, but Fariba would make it a thousand times easier for developers to construct a flexible character who wouldn’t lapse into embarrassing silence if the conversation moved beyond the range of possibilities envisaged in the script.
‘Can you make a few different versions?’ Bahador wondered. ‘With different weightings for the various side-loading subjects? That way the responses will always make sense, but they won’t be the same for every character that uses the modules.’
Nasim thought it over. ‘That’s a good idea. For a composite Proxy it will still be the script that determines most of its personality, but it will be an added attraction if we can offer a kind of library of low-level variations.’ Developers could decide for themselves whether they preferred a particular character to associate cats with birds, or with pyramids. Even if nothing crucial hung on the distinction, that would give them more control over the tone of the game.
Bahador was dripping sweat onto the carpet; he’d just come from a game and Nasim had called him in as he’d passed her office on the way to the showers. ‘I should let you go,’ she said.
He looked down at his damp shirt. ‘Sorry, I must stink.’ He headed for the door. ‘What you’ve done is terrific. And so is the Azimi game. We’re going to make a fortune!’ He waited until he was out in the corridor before adding, ‘I expect a pay rise.’
‘Maybe when you start doing real work again,’ Nasim called after him.
She sat playing with the demonstration module. She’d already run rigorous automated tests on it, yielding no surprises or major problems - but there was something addictive about chatting away to Fariba in person.
‘Which colour here makes you think of warm weather?’
‘If you could take only one of these items to a desert island, which one would you choose?’
‘Which of the first three pictures tells a story that’s completed by the fourth?’
The tests didn’t always have a single right answer, but Fariba always managed a sensible response. She possessed no narrative memories, and no sophisticated beliefs - but all the words and concepts she’d acquired were wired together in a perfectly reasonable way. If she had no depth to her, she sounded less like a simpleton than an amnesiac who hadn’t yet noticed her own plight.
The women who’d answered Nasim’s advertisement had been happy enough with the modest payments they’d received for their work - and it hadn’t exactly been arduous for them, once they’d grown used to the confined space of the scanner. Nasim didn’t feel that she’d exploited them, that she’d pillaged their brains in return for loose change; their language skills, common sense and general knowledge, however vital, had hardly been rare commodities. Literally millions of Tehrani women could have done the same job equally well.
Nevertheless, a little more than raw vocabulary and dry factual knowledge had rubbed off. Sometimes Fariba exhibited quirks of phrasing that came straight from Asa, or offered witticisms that Azita would not have disowned. Sometimes she seemed as warm as Farah, or as acerbic as Chalipa.
So what was the bottom line? Fariba had no long-term memory, and no sense of herself. When Nasim reset her after every test, she lost nothing, because there was nothing to lose. Even if she’d run uninterrupted for an hour or a day, the passage of time would have left no mark on her. It would be crazy to start treating her as if she had interests, goals and rights.
But was she conscious - as much as the women who’d helped build her would have been conscious if, for a few seconds, they’d forgotten themselves and focused entirely on their simple tasks: thinking of a word, matching a picture?
Nasim wasn’t sure. She was moving into territory where that prospect was no longer unthinkably remote; she had to tread carefully.
Still, at most it could only be a transient form of consciousness - with no conception of itself to underpin a fear of extinction. Splicing Fariba, and a thousand variants of her, into narratives in which they played no active part wouldn’t bolster their fragmentary minds into something more substantial; that was just the illusion that human players would receive. The Faribas would still live - if they lived at all - in an eternal present, doing their simple tasks over and over again, remembering nothing.
17
‘Dinner’s ready,’ Martin announced for the third time.
‘Okay!’ Javeed had been in the bath for almost forty minutes, staging some kind of elaborate battle between the shampoo bottles. Martin listened for draining water, but all he heard was a resumption of missile sounds.
He walked into the bathroom and pulled out the plug. Javeed looked annoyed for a moment, but then he put down the blue conditioner that had been attacking the green vitamin enricher and stepped onto the bath mat without complaint. Martin handed him a towel and waited for him to dry himself.
Most of the bottles were Mahnoosh’s; Martin would have thrown them out if Javeed hadn’t kept using them as props. It had taken him three months to work up the strength to get rid of her make-up and clothes. He’d kept all her jewellery, still unable to face the task of deciding which pieces were just trinkets, and which Javeed might want to give to his own wife or daughter one day.
Javeed rubbed the towel vigorously between his legs, as if his unprotected penis required no lighter touch than his elbow. Martin had never quite stopped cringing when he saw this, but there was nothing to be done. He’d been caught unprepared when Mahnoosh had insisted on having their son circumcised - the day before she and Javeed left the hospital - because it was the ‘normal’ thing to do. ‘What if he wants to marry an Iranian woman who isn’t as tolerant of strange foreign customs as I am?’ Islam supported the practice but attached no religious significance to it; Martin hadn’t been able to use Mahnoosh’s loathing of the mullahs as leverage. With no research on the medical pros and cons at his fingertips, all he’d managed in reply was, ‘What if he wants to clean the shower, naked, with something corrosive?’ Thirty minutes later the deed had been done.
As they ate dinner, Javeed watched the football highlights on TV. Martin didn’t feel obliged to feign interest, any more than he did with cartoons or wrestling, but he knew he’d feel a pang of jealousy when he heard Javeed excitedly discussing the results with Farshid. If he’d had more energy, perhaps he could have faked it, or even developed a genuine passion for the game. When he received his new liver, all these impossible tasks would become easy.
Javeed’s homework was half an hour of handwriting practice, copying a series of words chosen to illustrate the different forms the same letter took in different positions. Martin sat at the table beside him, offering encouragement, but Javeed didn’t need any help; his writing was already neat and precise, and he seemed to have grasped the concept of initial, medial, final and isolated forms just as easily as a child learning to write English grasped the concept of upper and lower case.
‘Okay, bedtime. Clean your teeth.’
Javeed didn’t want Martin to read him a story; that had been his mother’s job. He just wanted him to sit beside the bed until he fell asleep, and Martin was happy to oblige.
In the darkness, Martin’s thoughts returned to the splinter he’d been digging at for weeks. When Javeed had been born, Omar and Rana had taken the request to be his godparents very seriously. Omar had brought up the subject of religion, assuring Martin that he was prepared to raise Javeed as a non-Muslim. With the one major sticking point out of the way, Martin had considered everything settled, and he’d never felt an urge to revisit the decision. The whole point of making such arrangements was to put the subject out of your mind: to contemplate the unthinkable once, as an antidote to all future morbid fretting over the consequences if the worst did happen.
He still believed that Omar was a good man, a good father, a good husband. Over the years Martin had heard him say foolish things about Arabs, Jews, Afghanis, Sunnis, black people, gays, women, and supporters of rival football teams - but everyone in the world talked shit sometimes, uttering outrageous, insupportable libels against some group of people. If Martin could have heard his own lifetime’s worth of ill-considered utterances through someone else’s ears, he was quite sure he would not have emerged as any kind of paragon of fairness and decency. Judging Omar for his lax self-censorship on issues Martin had been trained since childhood to treat as taboo would just be sanctimonious. And as for his crass remarks to Farshid about the woman in the shop, Martin was fairly sure that the rise of his own interest in women had coincided precisely with the point when he’d ceased caring about his father’s opinion on anything. Farshid had probably been cringing inside and mentally humming a tune in the hope of blocking out every word. The only difference between an Iranian teenager and a Western one was that he’d been too polite to tell his father to shut up and stop making a fool of himself.
And yet . . . even if Omar’s stupefaction in the face of changing public sexual mores really was close to harmless, and even if he could actually have befriended any of the people he’d derided in his loose-tongued moments just as easily as he’d befriended an atheist like Martin, that didn’t really settle the matter. Martin wanted his son to share his own taboos. He wanted Javeed to be upbraided for repeating whatever bigoted, sexist drivel he brought back from the school-yard, not told, ‘I hear you!’ or ‘Isn’t that right?’
Was it wrong to want to have a lasting influence on his own son, beyond the colour of his hair? Was it sanctimonious to want to pass on his own values? It wasn’t about judging himself a better man than Omar. It was about not being erased from Javeed’s life completely.
But where did that longing actually get him? What choice did he have? Behrouz did not have Omar’s rough edges, but even if he and Suri had agreed to take Javeed, Javeed barely knew them. He’d be stuck in Damascus, a two-hour flight away from all his friends; learning Arabic would be the least of his problems. And any fantasy involving Australia had the same downsides multiplied tenfold. Martin hadn’t stayed close to any of his cousins; Mark and his wife Rachel had come to Tehran for his wedding, but so far he hadn’t even told them about Mahnoosh’s death, let alone his own condition. Martin could just imagine the awkward silence if he phoned them, out of the blue, brought them up to speed on his dilemma, and then enquired as to whether their house felt empty now that their own three children had moved out.
Javeed stirred. ‘Mama! Inja bia!’
Martin said, ‘Sssh, it’s okay.’ If Mahnoosh was beside them she was keeping silent; when he tried to drag her advice out of the aether, all he felt was a vague sense of concern and affection. To have known her for fifteen years was still not to know what she would have made of this mess. She’d gone along with the choice of Omar and Rana, but then, most of her other friends were divorced. Had the prospect of Javeed being raised by anyone but his own parents ever felt real to her? At least once she’d referred to Omar as a sexist troglodyte and Rana as a doormat. But Martin knew she’d loved them both, admired them both. Rana was quiet but strong; you didn’t have to join a Goth band to stick it to the dictators.
When Javeed’s breathing became slow and even, Martin left him. His back wasn’t too bad, but he was trying to get off the painkillers completely, so he needed to stay up for a few more hours to exhaust himself before trying to sleep.
He went to the living room and switched on the TV. In his presence, at this hour, it defaulted to the local news channel - though he suspected that unless World War III had broken out there’d be no news all week that wasn’t football, football, football.
18
The email read: ‘Could I meet you for lunch today? I know it’s short notice, but it’s important.’
Nasim replied, ‘Lunch where? I’m a vegetarian.’ The prospect of having to locate a meat-free meal in Tehran was enough to make most people reassess their notion of ‘important’. Online maps weren’t much help; Nasim had stopped publishing locations herself, lest she lead anyone into false hope. Even the establishments where she’d succeeded on occasion were perfectly capable of taking their one suitable dish off the menu on a whim, or adding meat to the recipe without warning.
Martin responded in thirty seconds, ‘There’s a place that does kuku-ye-sabzi, just around the corner from People of the Book.’
Nasim had her doubts about how seriously they meant sabzi, but if she’d been too busy to accept the invitation she should have used an ironclad brush-off from the start. ‘Okay. Bookshop at one?’
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