Zendegi

Nasim stared at him, waiting for his earnest face to crack. She wasn’t used to being teased by people she barely knew – it had taken Bahador a year to start including her in his office pranks – but maybe this was Falaki’s way of defusing tension in a stressful job. ‘Skilful interrogators’ was a common euphemism for a very specific kind of person in post-2012 Iran: former VEVAK agents who’d had the connections and resources to cushion their fall.

Falaki gazed back at her blandly. He was serious.

Nasim said, ‘I think we might pass on that.’

Martin had been taking the disinhibitor for nearly a week before Nasim finally found the time to sit down and review the effects of the drug. There’d been an initial rise in the number of new synapses being characterised, but that much was almost inevitable; for a major pharmacological intervention to have revealed nothing new would have been as strange as if the shift from winter to summer had left the pedestrians of Tehran traipsing out identical routes through the city – making no tracks to hitherto unrevealed parks or outdoor cafés.

Even beyond that anticipated surge, though, the drug had continued to pay off. Before, the barrage of images had been sending Martin rapidly into a glazed, unresponsive state, almost independent of the details of the content being shown to him. Now, each new image elicited a fresh response; Nasim could see the splash of activity in every scan.

They had long ago dragged Martin up and down the highways of his life, engaging with every significant biographical event, every ethical concern, every strongly held belief and aesthetic preference. But that had not been enough to map the whole landscape – to delineate the topography that kept those highways from tumbling away into the void. What made any given human brain entirely distinct from another came down to details that were far too minor to be recounted by the subject, too minor even to be of interest to them, too minor, in fact, for any sane person to tolerate having to contemplate them, hour after hour, day after day. Only by shutting down the parts of Martin’s brain that were choking on the sheer quantity of minutiae had it become possible to start gathering the information they needed.

Now the side-loading software had massaged the Proxy into a form that mimicked virtually all of Martin’s fragmentary responses. If the data kept coming through at the current rate, within a month or so they’d have the Proxy in a stable state, ready to test in short scenarios.

Ready for a conversation.

Nasim cleared all the scans and histograms from her screen and sat contemplating the endpoint of the process. A child could take comfort from just about anything: a stuffed animal, a cartoon character, a mythical figure in a storybook who lived out the same plot over and over. The imprisoned Zal that Javeed had been so delighted to encounter had been nothing but a set of branching script fragments.

But Martin was not Javeed’s cartoon hero. He could not be replaced by a clip library of favourite scenes. Either the Proxy would capture the actual dynamic between them, or it would be useless.

The question was, could it be enough without being too much? When she’d built the blank receptacle for the side-loading process, Nasim had used the best functional maps available, but every choice had involved a trade-off. Every region she’d omitted risked robbing the Proxy of something it would need for its task; every region she’d included risked burdening it with goals it had no power to achieve and desires it had no power to fulfil.

So could the Proxy come close to recreating the way Martin would have spent an hour in Zendegi with his son – answering all of Javeed’s questions, sharing all his jokes, vanquishing all his fears – and still not know, or care, precisely what it was itself?

Nasim had done her best, but the only way she’d know for sure on which side of the line she’d fallen would be to ask the Proxy, face to face.

23

‘Do you get along with birds?’ Shahin asked.

‘Of course!’ Javeed replied. ‘I even met the Simorgh once.’

‘The Simorgh?’ Shahin laughed. ‘Well then, an eagle shouldn’t trouble you one bit.’ He took a strip of leather from a small pail sitting on the ground beside him and wrapped it around Javeed’s right hand. ‘Hold your arm up, boy.’ Javeed complied. ‘A little higher,’ Shahin suggested. ‘I want to be sure he can see you way down there.’