Zendegi

That was in Europe somewhere. Nasim took her notepad away from her ear to glance quickly at the screen; the machine had already matched Falaki’s words to an address book entry for the company, in Holland.

‘It’s very likely that this wasn’t the only site breached,’ Falaki warned her. ‘Still, it’s a start.’

‘Absolutely.’ If it was an inside job from within the FLOPS House, there was a chance of seeing at least one of the saboteurs arrested. Grab a thread of the conspiracy and good police work might unravel the whole thing.

‘What do you know about the CHL?’ she asked Falaki. He and Bahador had been monitoring the whole encounter.

‘They haven’t shown up on our radar in the past,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve set some things in motion, but right now we have nothing on them that you won’t get from ordinary public searches.’

‘Okay.’

Falaki wasn’t expecting anything back from the FLOPS House for at least twenty-four hours. She thanked him and hung up the call.

Nasim set her own knowledge-miner sorting through the Cis-Humanist League’s net presence; it was mostly text, and mostly on untraceable torrents. Rollo had been exaggerating slightly when he said they went back decades, but they’d been in various fora for fourteen years. Maybe Falaki would manage to trace the group’s origins to some founders who’d been less careful about protecting their identities in the days when their agenda had been a lot more abstract.

Nasim needed to speak to the boss, but she lingered in the ghal’eha room, trying to decide exactly how she’d brief him. This wasn’t necessarily a fight to the death for Zendegi; their enemy had offered them terms of surrender that wouldn’t cripple them. And she could already see the comedians on Bloomberg: ‘Ever had a shit of a morning?’ Swiftly stopping the attacks – and appeasing Shahidi as part of the bargain – might be the only way to keep the share price from going into freefall.

Accepting the truce need not mean the end of their current growth spurt. Zendegi had yet to sign up a star Indian cricket player, but equally, Cyber-Jahan had failed to convince anyone that their latest version of motion-capture – spiced up with myoelectric recordings and marketed as ‘Muscle Memory’ – was a serious rival to side-loading. The Indian equivalent of Virtual Azimi could still belong to either one of them.

If they renounced more sophisticated side-loads though, that would be the end of the vision splendid, where every game developer released a special version first, exclusively for Zendegi. And Martin was not anyone’s idea of a sports star; the board would pull the plug on his side-loading immediately.

The boss would want a transcript of her conversation with Rollo, but there was no way in the world that he was going to view the whole VR recording. So she might be able to get away with spinning her impression of the encounter, making the offer of the truce seem less trustworthy – and making him want to dig in his heels against the extortionists.

Nasim closed her eyes and tried to see the way forward. It had been thirty years since she’d felt a strong urge to pray to anyone or anything, but for a moment she came close to begging for a miracle…

Not from God, but from the Dutch computer crime squad.

25

When the day finally came to vacate the bookshop, Martin had had insomnia for three nights in a row. Arash, the softly-spoken commerce student who’d helped him sell the last of the stock, did most of the work disassembling the removable fixtures. The new occupants had agreed to deal with the remaining shelving when they remodelled; they’d get to sell the wood as scrap as compensation for the inconvenience of having to smash the joints apart with sledgehammers.

Just before noon, the buyer for the print-on-demand machine dropped in and took it away. There was nothing left now but empty shelves and a pile of mystifying, Ikea-like components that might have been the parts for anything from a bedroom suite to a set of kitchen benches. Arash had a friend with a small truck coming by in the afternoon to take them to a recycling centre.

The office computer sat on the floor. Martin turned to Arash. ‘Do you want that? It’s only two years old. I don’t have time to sell it myself.’ His voice sounded hollow in the carpetless space. He kept seeing Mahnoosh standing beside him in the same empty room twelve years before.

Arash did ta’arof and refused three times, but finally agreed. Martin shook his hand.

‘Thanks for all your help. Especially these last two weeks.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘I’d better call a taxi.’ Martin wanted to grab an hour or two of sleep before he picked up Javeed. As he pulled his notepad out of his pocket, his hand started shaking and the thing ended up on the floor. ‘Jesus!’

Arash bent down and picked up the notepad. He said, ‘Do you want me to get a taxi?’

Martin’s right hand was still flapping uncontrollably. He grabbed hold of it, feeling like Dr Strangelove, but then the left hand joined in too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘can you do that for me?’