Authors: Greg Egan

Zendegi (52 page)

BOOK: Zendegi

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Nasim was no expert on Christianity, but it didn’t quite add up for her. ‘I thought the whole idea of religious prophecy was that it was . . . prophecy. If it starts to look as if the Beast will be born in a computer in Houston, isn’t it the role of virtuous believers to live through his reign, stay true to their faith, and reap their reward in the end? You don’t drive a truck full of fertiliser into the path of pre-ordained events that need to happen before the Second Coming, however unpleasant they might be.’

Caplan said, ‘Maybe they took their theology lessons from Schwarzenegger movies. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was someone else who thought the side-loads tipped the balance and made the chance that the Superintelligence Project could succeed start to look like too great a risk. A government agency? A foreign power?’ He shrugged.

‘Outside the project itself,’ Nasim replied, ‘apart from Zachary Churchland, the only person I know of who ever took them seriously was you.’

Caplan laughed. It sounded sincere, but then it wasn’t his real voice. ‘Yeah, I was pretty naïve back then.’

‘So what changed your mind?’

‘Watching them turn five billion dollars into nothing but padded salaries and empty verbiage.’

That was a reasonable answer; Nasim let it rest.

‘So you believe Eikonometrics will be safe in your absence?’ she said.

‘Safe from the bombers,’ Caplan replied. ‘Nobody’s going to mistake a souped-up factory robot for the Antichrist. The cis-humanists are likely to be a nuisance, but I’m sure that can be managed.’

‘How, exactly?’

‘Well, that’s part of why I wanted to talk to you,’ Caplan admitted. ‘Before I close the lid on the freezer, I’m thinking of poaching one of your guys: Arif Bahrami. He seemed to have some good ideas when you were under attack, using side-loads as part of the defence. Now that you don’t need him for that kind of thing, I wanted to ask you what you thought it would take to persuade him to join Eikonometrics.’

It was a bright spring afternoon on the day of the funeral. Martin’s old friend Behrouz had flown in from Damascus to speak at his graveside, and he delivered a warm, affectionate eulogy. He was a good choice, Nasim thought, because he had a little more distance than the other mourners. That made it easier not to grow maudlin.

As Nasim watched the coffin being lowered into the ground, the thought that she’d had even a fraction of this man’s memories and personality at her fingertips seemed more surreal than ever. The crude approximation she’d dragged out of his skull had come alive, but she could no longer understand how she’d deceived herself into thinking that it would find an equilibrium within its roughly hewn boundaries. It was hard enough for any ordinary human being to come to terms with their limitations.

Back at Omar’s house, she took a while to find the courage to face Javeed. He’d never really warmed to her, but he let her kiss his cheeks; his thoughts were elsewhere.

After the funeral, Nasim spent the evening with her mother. They had finally decided to drag all her photos out of Rubens’ clutches and manage them on their own hardware. As it turned out, it wasn’t too difficult; within a couple of hours Nasim had everything working again.

As they flipped through the library, her mother took the opportunity to do some reorganising. She paused at a misfiled picture of a young man in a suit-coat marching on the street, holding up a portrait of Khomeini.

‘That’s your father in 1978,’ she said. ‘He would have been eighteen. Nine years before you were born.’

Nasim knew she must have seen the picture before, but the juxtaposition of the Ayatollah and her father’s youthful face was unsettling. He wasn’t the only progressive who’d made the same mistake; anything had seemed better than the Shah, and the popular exiled religious leader had been widely viewed as a useful means to an end.

They sat together meandering through the family history until her mother grew tired and Nasim helped her into bed.

Upstairs, Nasim stood on the balcony watching the traffic on the highway. She had no way of knowing whether Caplan had been genuine in his claim to have finally seen through his rivals’ hype, or whether he’d decided that he could only cold-sleep in peace if they suffered a major setback first, but in a sense it didn’t matter. In the long run - assuming he woke, and regained control of a thriving business empire - there were much worse things he could do than bombing an empty building. Jupiter would probably outlast him unscathed, but he might easily side-load an army of a billion slaves on his way to a slow and messy accommodation with reality.

The best way to clip his wings would be to cut off the cash flow she’d stupidly helped create for him. That meant getting side-loading outlawed in as many countries as possible - while it was still so expensive and technically demanding that it would not merely find a niche in the black economy.

Whoever was behind the bombing in Houston, it was going to make life harder for the CHL. The line between hackers and terrorists would be blurred; their cause would be tarred with the same brush. If they wanted to become legitimate and take their fight into the political sphere, they were going to need all the allies they could get. People who could speak from experience about the risks of side-loading might be useful. Nasim could not put her hand on her heart and swear that side-loaded factory workers would be living in hell, but her testimony about Martin’s case might help persuade people that it was better to err on the side of caution.

Maybe in Javeed’s lifetime a door could be opened up into Zendegi-ye-Behtar; maybe his generation would be the first to live without the old kind of death. Whether or not that proved to be possible, it was a noble aspiration. But to squeeze some abridged, mutilated person through the first available aperture was not.

Rollo had said it well enough, not in a slogan from his manifesto but in his plea to her on the Ferris wheel. Nasim had not wanted to listen then, but the simple entreaty had stayed with her as all her excuses and rationalisations had melted away.

If you want to make it human, make it whole.

AFTERWORD

This novel was completed in July 2009, a month after the widely disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The result triggered massive street demonstrations that were met with a brutal crackdown, but even some members of the clerical establishment questioned the election’s legitimacy and condemned the mistreatment of protesters. Predicting the next few years is impossible - and the particular scenario I’ve imagined was always destined to be overtaken by reality - but I hope that this part of the story captures something of the spirit of the times and the courage and ingenuity of the Iranian people.

Hezb-e-Haalaa is fictitious, and is not modelled on any real organisation.

The fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini permitting gender reassignment is real (see ‘A Fatwa for Freedom’ by Robert Tait, The Guardian, 27 July 2005), as is the Iranian miniseries set in Nazi-occupied Europe (see ‘Iran’s Unlikely TV Hit’ by Farnaz Fassihi, The Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2007; in this report the title ‘Madare sefr darajeh’ is translated literally as ‘Zero Degree Turn’, but I’ve used a more vernacular English translation, ‘No Room to Turn’).

My source for stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was Dick Davis’s translation (Viking Penguin, New York, 2006). Note, though, that the versions re-enacted in Zendegi are definitely not scrupulously faithful to the originals.

The transliterations of Farsi I’ve used are simply intended to give the reader some idea of the sound of the words; I haven’t followed any formal system.

Supplementary material for this novel can be found at
www.gregegan.net