Authors: Greg Egan
Zendegi (51 page)
‘Yeah.’
Back in the guest room, Martin lay cursing himself, running through the conversation in his head, trying to imagine how he could have put things more tactfully. But he’d lost his chance; there was nothing he could say now. If he raised the subject with Omar again it would already be too tainted with a sense of grievance.
Javeed had permission to take a day off school. Martin woke him at five o’clock, an hour before they needed to leave.
‘Why are you cooking breakfast?’ Javeed asked sleepily.
‘You don’t like pancakes?’ Martin spread his arms around the stove possessively. ‘I can eat them all if you don’t want any.’
‘No!’
Omar joined them. He kept Javeed distracted, swiping food and messing around with condiments so Javeed didn’t notice that Martin wasn’t actually eating anything.
The rest of the family rose just before six. Martin still felt like an interloper around Mohsen and Nahid, but they both offered a few gruff words of encouragement. Rana shook his hand, Farshid embraced him briefly, everyone mindful of not making a big scene in front of Javeed.
Omar drove them to the hospital. Martin sat in the back beside Javeed. ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with L,’ Javeed declared.
‘In English, or in Farsi?’ Martin asked.
Javeed sighed. ‘I said L, not
lam
.’
lam
.’
‘Lamppost?’
‘No.’
‘Light pole.’
‘No.’
Martin stared out into the traffic. ‘I give up.’
‘Liver.’ Javeed cackled at his own ingenuity.
‘That’s cheating,’ Martin said. ‘You can’t see it.’
Javeed held his hands up to his face in the shape of binoculars. ‘I can already see it in the jar at the hospital. My eyes are better than yours.’
It took half an hour to get admitted; Javeed sat on a chair in reception and dozed. In the ward, Omar and Javeed waited outside while Martin changed into a paper gown. In the shower the night before, he had used the depilatory gel the hospital had given him; below the neck his body was completely hairless.
Someone knocked. Martin climbed beneath the sheet.
‘Come in.’
It was Omar, alone. Martin said, ‘Where’s Javeed?’
‘The nurse is watching him for a minute.’
‘Okay.’ Martin waited.
Omar approached the bed; he looked nervous. ‘I don’t have time to say everything properly. I just want to tell you . . . I know he’s your son. I know you want him to have your ideas, not mine. I won’t forget that, Martin jan. Whenever I talk to him, you’ll be looking over my shoulder.’
Martin searched his face, but there was no trace of resentment. ‘And that won’t drive you crazy?’
‘Maybe a little bit,’ Omar conceded. ‘But that can’t be helped. I want everything right between us.’
‘It is,’ Martin said.
Omar reached down and squeezed his arm. ‘Okay, you should talk to him now.’
Omar brought Javeed in and sat him beside the bed, then he left the room.
Javeed yawned. ‘You have to get better now, Baba,’ he said.
‘Okay, I’ll try hard,’ Martin promised.
‘Then we’ll go up in the balloon together?’
‘Absolutely.’ Martin hesitated. ‘Can I tell you something, though?’
Javeed nodded.
‘I’m going to try as hard as I can, but if I can’t get better, you mustn’t be angry with me. You have to believe that I was really trying.’
Javeed looked down, confused and dejected.
‘Pesaram? Do you believe me?’ Martin raised himself up and put an arm around his son. ‘Listen to me. I love you more than anything else; all I want to do is stay with you. But don’t be angry if I can’t do that.’
Javeed shuddered as if he was about to cry, but then he whispered in Martin’s ear, ‘If you can’t stay, the Simorgh will look after me.’ It was not a reproach; it was meant to comfort him.
‘Okay.’ Martin understood that he had caught only the faintest glimpse of the world Javeed was building in his head; Zendegi had offered no more than a crude imitation. But between the version of himself hovering around Omar like a nagging insect and whatever form he took in Javeed’s private mythology, he would not be erased completely.
Martin held Javeed until the anaesthetist came in, wheeling a small steel trolley.
He said, ‘Do you want to stay and watch me go to sleep, azizam?’ That was Mahnoosh’s name for him, but Javeed didn’t object; Martin had the right to speak for her when she could no longer speak for herself.
Javeed said, ‘I’ll stay.’
The anaesthetist inserted the line. ‘This lady’s just going to make me sleepy for the operation,’ Martin explained. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’
Javeed nodded solemnly, staring at the drip bags and monitors, distracted for a moment by the mechanics of the process.
The anaesthetist said, ‘Count backwards from a hundred.’
Martin kept his eyes on Javeed, smiling. Nothing mattered now except drawing all the bitterness out of this moment, leaving behind something that his son could carry lightly for the rest of his life.
He said, ‘One hundred elephants, all from Zavolestan.’
30
Nasim put on the augmentation goggles and took a seat in the boardroom. Caplan had not explained the purpose of the meeting, but she assumed he wanted to discuss the Houston bombing.
She had been turning the event over in her head for days. It was impossible not to feel unnerved by the attack; she could barely step into the building now without picturing herself and her colleagues pinned under smoking rubble. The fact that Zendegi’s most vigorous opponents to date had shown no inclination towards violence was of little comfort; the prospect of a whole new player with an unknown agenda only made things worse. Rollo had honoured his promise to leave Zendegi in peace once they’d agreed to his demands, and while the wish he’d professed to move beyond electronic sabotage and mount a purely political campaign might well have been insincere, if the cis-humanists were going to blow up anything it should have been Eikonometrics in Zürich, where the side-loaded slaves that would power the next Industrial Revolution were being forged. At the Superintelligence Project there had been no AI, downtrodden or otherwise, and the prospect of it ever arising there had been negligible.
Caplan appeared across the table. They greeted each other curtly, but before Nasim could mention Houston, Caplan said, ‘I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be out of touch for a while.’
‘You’re taking a holiday?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ice.’
Nasim took a couple of seconds to decode that, but given the speaker it could really only mean one thing.
‘You’re freezing yourself?’
‘Yes. Just for a short time: maybe twenty or thirty years. So unless one of us is very unlucky, this is au revoir, not good-bye.’
Nasim felt a stab of betrayal. They were not exactly the closest of allies, but the mess they’d made, they’d made together. Now he was going to turn his back on everything and sleep through the coming firestorm in a bomb-proof vault.
‘You coward,’ she said.
Caplan looked stunned for a moment, then amused. ‘I am still on Zendegi’s board; you might want to take that into account before you offer me your uncensored, spur-of-the-moment judgements.’
Nasim was not in a mood to back down. ‘You’re happy to share the glory and the profits until the bombs start going off. If that’s not cowardice, what is it?’
Caplan said, ‘I’m not doing this because of Houston. Apart from anything else, I don’t believe that incident represents the slightest threat to my own safety. Or yours, for that matter.’
Nasim was utterly confused now. ‘Why, then?’
‘It’s a medical decision. I have no choice.’
Caplan made a hand gesture, and his conferencing icon did a jump cut. At first Nasim thought he’d taken the form of a gaming creature of some kind, but then the combination of baldness, wizened skin and elfin features reminded her more of a documentary she’d seen on children with progeria, the genetic condition that caused massive premature ageing.
Caplan said, ‘Who’d have thought that human and murine telomerase could respond so differently to the very same drug?’ His voice had acquired a rasp that made it sound as if half the cells in his vocal chords were being sloughed off with every word.
‘A biochemist?’ Nasim suggested. She would not have put it past him to fake life-threatening side-effects from one of his faddish longevity treatments just to weasel out of her charge that he was heading for the hills at the first sign of danger.
‘There might have been an unexpected interaction with the SIRT2 modulators,’ Caplan mused. ‘I doubt the problem was due to isotope loading, or it should have abated as soon as I went back to a standard nuclide diet.’
‘You really are sick?’ Nasim was loath to trust him, but she was afraid of crassly mocking a man who might actually be dying.
‘Either that, or special effects technicians are assaulting me with latex in my sleep.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’
Caplan reverted to his old icon, but that image of sparkling health now carried the air of a botched face-lift or an ill-fitting toupée. ‘You weren’t to know. I wasn’t spreading it around.’
‘How long have you—?’
‘A couple of years,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be under control, but the last few months it’s gone downhill fast. It’s going to take some future medicine to fix it.’
Nasim didn’t know how to respond to that. Caplan genuinely expected his heirs to find a way to defrost him and patch him up.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry about your friend.’
‘Thank you.’ She’d emailed him her final report on the side-loading project the day before, just after she’d learnt of Martin’s death.
‘It wasn’t all in vain,’ Caplan added. ‘I’d actually been considering side-loading a special-purpose Proxy to manage my affairs while I was on ice. But I think it’s clear now that I’ll be in much safer hands trusting to human executors and existing legal instruments.’
‘I see.’ Nasim bit back her anger; she had never expected him to bankroll the experiment out of sympathy for Martin’s situation. Having sold it to him on pragmatic grounds, she had no right to recoil from the news that he’d got his money’s worth.
‘So what do you think happened in Houston?’ she said. ‘The CHL played nice with Zendegi because we were easy to extort, but in this case there was no Cloud computing, no customers to mess with - nothing but the facility itself?’
Caplan said, ‘I doubt it was the CHL. I’m thinking fundamentalist Christians.’
‘Christians?’
‘The Superintelligence Project stated their goals in explicitly religious language,’ Caplan pointed out. ‘ “God is coming into existence. We’re building Him right here.” What did they expect, trespassing on the territory of people with strongly held ideas about the meaning of the word?’
‘But they’ve been talking like that for years,’ Nasim protested. ‘Why should anyone start taking them seriously now?’
‘The HCP,’ Caplan replied. ‘Virtual Azimi. Some of the credibility of those achievements would have rubbed off on them, in a layperson’s eyes. You must have seen their me-too press release, saying they’d have God up and running within five years. For people who’d previously thought they were full of nothing but blasphemous hot air, it might have started looking too close for comfort. The Antichrist was coming to rule over the nations.’
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