Zendegi

‘I know that,’ Rollo replied, ‘but the end product is still the same. And you don’t even know exactly which mental processes you have and haven’t excluded! I’ve read the patent applications, with all their talk of functional mapping, but don’t kid yourself that it’s down to some kind of fine art, where you can pick out a subset of abilities precisely – let alone guarantee that they’ll all fit together into some kind of stable entity. If you want to make something human, make it whole. If you want to enable people to step from their bodies into virtual immortality, perfectly copied, with all their abilities preserved and all their rights intact… go ahead and do it, we have no problem with that.’

‘That’s fifty years away, at least,’ Nasim said, ‘maybe a hundred.’

Rollo shrugged. ‘No doubt. But if you want to put humanity into a cheese grater and slice off little slavelets to pimp to the factories and the VR games, well… then you’ve got a war on your hands.’

Nasim looked away. Part of her wanted, very badly, to start blustering about his imminent capture, but she had no idea what the prospects of that were, and in any case a bout of premature triumphalism wouldn’t win her any favours.

‘You might find the factories harder to breach than Zendegi,’ she said. They’d probably go for in-house computing rather than the Cloud. Especially now.

‘Of course,’ Rollo said. ‘And sabotage is not our preferred option anyway. We’ll be campaigning hard to outlaw side-loading everywhere; smearing shit over your customers is just a short-term tactic. Eventually you’ll find a way to block us out, and even if Zendegi and Eikonometrics go bankrupt in the process, your intellectual property will just end up with someone else. But we’re starting early, outside the law, because it’s the only way to nip this atrocity in the bud: to slow the growth of the practice by making it clear – from the start, to everyone – that doing things this way will attract a penalty.’

‘Atrocity?’ Nasim scowled. ‘If you’re such a warrior for the rights of conscious beings, stop pissing around with Zendegi and go derail a massacre somewhere.’

The lights on the Ferris wheel snapped on; some of the Proxies beneath them clapped and cheered.

Rollo looked back at Nasim calmly. ‘So you’re happy with your games modules; your conscience is clear. Fine. But do you really think it will stop there? If there is no law, if there is no line drawn, what makes you so sure that it’s not going to end with software that even you’d call conscious? With no rights and no freedom. It might not require anything that sophisticated to churn out shoes or notepads, but what about aged-care services? Or child-minding?’

Nasim’s skin crawled at his use of that phrase, but she still didn’t believe that he knew about Martin.

‘Every time you attack us,’ she said, ‘we use tens of thousands of side-loads as part of the defence. How does that grab your conscience?’

Rollo betrayed no surprise or anguish, but his icon wouldn’t necessarily display every emotion that crossed his flesh-and-blood face. After a while he said, ‘That’s disgusting, but it’s not going to change anything.’

He looked down at the Proxies. ‘How long will it be before the process is so cheap and simple that you’re using side-loads in every crowd scene? Computers are never going to rise up and enslave us, like the idiots in Hollywood portrayed it – or rescue us, like the idiots in Houston believe – but you’d happily send our most human-like mind-children straight into a hell of meaningless servitude and fragmented consciousness that we built for them all by ourselves.’

Nasim said, ‘The only thing that’s going to come close to hell for side-loads is if we have to keep using them to screen out your shit.’

Rollo met her gaze. ‘These are our terms: you can keep Virtual Azimi and anything else that’s limited to vision and motor skills, but you have to announce an end to the use of all other side-loads. If you don’t make the promise within seven days, and honour it within another seven, the attacks will resume.’

Nasim nodded curtly, to signal understanding. She felt a grudging respect for him, for at least setting conditions that were probably survivable; the deadlines weren’t impossible, and with the sports Proxies untouched Zendegi could still remain afloat. She said, ‘It’s not my decision, but I’ll pass on the message.’

Rollo held out his hand and turned his thumb down. The whole postcard vanished with him.

Nasim removed her goggles and waited as the wall came down around her. When she picked up her notepad from the table beside the ghal’e Falaki called her immediately.

‘We couldn’t trace your visitor,’ he said, ‘but I do have some good news.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’ve got solid evidence from the supervisors of a process being corrupted at one specific provider. I’ve already passed the log files on to their security people.’

‘Which provider?’ Nasim asked.

‘The FLOPS House.’