deliver bad news. Nasim could sympathise with his discomfort. She suspected that uploading would become feasible at some point in the future – perhaps by the end of the century – but to watch a dying man clutching at straws like this was just painful.
Fitzwaller said, ‘Mr Churchland, do you really have that much faith in this technology? We are all grateful for the achievements and ingenuity of the medical profession, but surely there are limits to what mere humans can do.’
Churchland reached off-camera and retrieved an oxygen mask, which he held over his mouth and nose for three deep breaths before replying. ‘Indeed, Congressman. And I would not wish to mislead this committee into thinking that I have definitely resolved to fund a project of the kind we are discussing. In fact, over the last month or so I have received some very persuasive representations from a group who believe that it might be at best inefficient and at worst highly dangerous to proceed in this fashion.’
‘Can you elaborate, sir?’
‘I have been invited to fund an enterprise known as the Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project,’ Churchland explained. ‘Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers of self-analysis that it will design and construct its own successor, which will be armed with superior versions of all the skills the original possessed. The successor will then produce a still more proficient third version, and so on, leading to a cascade of exponentially increasing abilities. Once this process is set in motion, within weeks – perhaps within hours – a being of truly God-like powers will emerge.’
Nasim resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. However surreal the spectacle unfolding on the screen, there was, in retrospect, something inevitable about it. The uploading advocates who’d sold Churchland on an imminent digital resurrection hadn’t lost their critical faculties entirely, but their penchant for finessing away any ‘mere technical problems’ that might stretch out the timetable was, nonetheless, intellectually corrosive, to the point where the next step probably didn’t seem like such a great leap any more: hand-waving all practicalities out of existence, transforming the cyber-eschatologists’ rickety scaffolding of untested assumptions into a cast-iron stairway to heaven.
Fitzwaller cleared his throat. ‘Mr Churchland, it’s not entirely clear to me how that matter is pertinent to the business of this committee.’
Churchland said, ‘Rather than trust humans to perfect the brain-mapping technology that we’ve been discussing, I am leaning towards putting my fate in the hands of an artificial God, for whom such problems will be trivial. The Benign Superintelligence will rule the planet with wisdom and compassion, eliminating war, disease, unhappiness, and of course, death. I am told that it will probably disassemble most of the material in our solar system in order to construct a vast computer that will exploit all the energy of the sun. Perhaps it will spare the Earth, or perhaps the Earth will be reconstructed, more perfectly, within that computerised domain.’
The camera caught Fitzwaller in the transition from bewilderment to revulsion. ‘ “Rule the planet”? Am I to understand that you’re contemplating funding a body that advocates overthrowing the lawful government of the United States?’
Churchland required more oxygen before replying, ‘Keep your shirt on, Congressman. There’s no point fighting it, and the alternative would be far worse. Imagine if one of our country’s enemies did this first. Imagine the kind of despotic superintelligence that Al Qaeda would create.’
‘Mr Churchland,’ Fitzwaller said evenly, ‘does it not occur to you that most people on the planet would prefer not to have their affairs dictated by an artificial intelligence of any kind?’
‘That’s too bad, Congressman,’ Churchland retorted, ‘because I am coming to the view that we probably have no choice.’
Judith stormed into the conference room and slammed her briefcase down on the table. For a moment Nasim assumed that she’d been watching the same feed, but then it became clear from her body language that she was oblivious to the sight of half the HCP’s potential funding sprouting wings and flying away. She was livid, but it had nothing to do with Churchland’s deathbed embrace of Bullshit Squared.
‘Whoever’s idea it was,’ she fumed, ‘it really wasn’t funny.’
Nasim said, ‘Whoever’s idea was what?’
‘Can you think of a reason why five sleaze-bags would have hit on me this morning in Reagan Airport alone?’
‘New perfume?’ Mike suggested. Judith picked up the whiteboard eraser and hurled it at him; he squirmed sideways but it clipped his shoulder.
Dinesh spread his hands innocently. ‘How could that possibly be our doing? You think we’re paying men to harass you, as some kind of prank?’
Judith took her phone from her pocket. ‘Someone, somehow, has signed me on to… PowerFlirt, or HookMeUp, or whatever the fuck it’s called when total strangers get a message on their phone the moment I walk into sight-’ She must have noticed the growing expression of discomfort on Nasim’s face, because she loomed towards her and demanded, ‘What do you know about this?’
Nasim cringed. She’d thought Christopher in IT would have fixed everything by now, but she’d never got around to switching AcTrack back on and checking if her own problem had gone away – let alone following up the whole question of whether Murmur had made its system less prone to bizarre cross-infections. ‘I should have told everyone sooner,’ she confessed, flustered, ‘but I put the rabbit in the park and I just forgot about it.’
Judith stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
Shen said, ‘Phwoar. Isn’t it called Phwoar? That’s what I heard.’ He was sitting next to Nasim, and through the floor she could feel his chair resonating with a dull mechanical vibration.
7
Crouched in the dark recess behind the freezer-truck’s compressor, Martin was wishing that he’d brought some music for the trip. He was wearing earplugs, but the relentless thumping of the compressor still seeped into his skull, and he was beginning to hallucinate snatches of songs emerging from the noise. In principle that might have been entertaining, but the songs were all terrible: soppy Bollywood love duets with doleful heroes and squeaky-voiced heroines; monotonous aerobics-class remixes of undeserved hits of the eighties; vapid punk-metal droning by airheads sporting novelty contact lenses. If he’d known before he’d left Tehran that there was so much bad music buried in his skull, he would have shoved a screwdriver up one nostril and done his best to scrape it all out.
Behrouz was wedged behind the other side of the compressor, and though it probably would have been safe for them to yell at each other while the truck was moving, Martin suspected that bellowing pleasantries and idle observations wouldn’t have done much to help them pass the time. And being caught at a checkpoint playing ‘Twenty Questions’ would just have been embarrassing.
Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.
With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar – on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody – so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable – a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.
The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the engine. Refuelling, or yet another checkpoint? Under the emergency decrees all Iranians now required a permit to travel between cities; that had always been the case for
