Nasim spent the afternoon in a videoconference with a developer who was using the Fariba modules in a new game called Murder in Manolos, a gossipy whodunnit set among North Tehran’s Mall Princess cliques. Unlike Virtual Azimi, the novel technology would not be a selling point for the public; the aim was simply to get a smoother result for the non-player characters, with lower development costs.
There were a few technical hitches in the interface with the modules, but overall the project was going quite well. Nasim watched some demonstration runs; the Fariba-enhanced bit-players seemed at least as lifelike as anyone in an equivalent TV drama. She had added a feature to the library recently that had turned out to be invaluable, a routine called WTFquery(). When one of the Fariba modules generated some potential dialogue, before having the Proxy utter the words you could try out the whole exchange on another (non-identical) Fariba, and see if its neural response classified the would-be contribution as (A) a pertinent observation, (B) witty banter, or (C) a complete non sequitur. Screening out bizarre interjections from the Proxies that would have been the equivalent of stamping ‘idiot robot’ on their foreheads did at least as much for their credibility as anything they actually said.
Nasim woke to darkness, certain that her father was in the house. Was he asleep in the spare room? Or had he got up to use the bathroom – was that what had woken her? She strained her ears, listening for his footsteps.
It took a few seconds for her conviction to fade. She could still see the two of them standing in the kitchen together, arguing about her work on the Faribas. In the dream, his hair had turned grey. That small touch had been enough to keep her satisfied, to make the whole scenario seem perfectly reasonable.
She checked her watch; it was just after three. Her alarm was set for five-thirty. She lay still, trying to clear her mind and let her limbs grow heavy, but after a few minutes she decided that it wasn’t going to happen.
How much had she screwed up her life, she wondered, by trying to imagine her father’s advice, his opinions, his disappointments, his praise? She was sure she would have stayed at MIT in 2012 if she hadn’t felt compelled to return to Iran to prove that his struggle had meant something to her. But the problem hadn’t been some nagging ghost in her head; the problem had been the silence. She’d wanted to live as if he were beside her, to cheat the murderers who’d taken him from her, but she’d never really mastered that act. Her own memories, her own love for him, her own judgement had not been enough.
So how could she leave Javeed to grasp at the same kind of shadows if there was any chance at all of replacing them with something more solid? She’d told Martin that what he’d asked for was impossible – but was that literally true? It would certainly be far more difficult than he’d imagined, but that was not the same thing at all.
She climbed out of bed; the room light came on slowly to avoid dazzling her as she crossed to her desk. It took her half an hour to cobble together a rough map of the brain regions that Martin’s Proxy would need personalised in order to meet his goals. She had estimates of varying quality for the total amount of data required to differentiate each region in an individual from the crude average that Blank Frank represented.
That was a start, but there were still a lot of unknowns. The rate at which the best scanning techniques pulled useful, distinguishing data out of a subject’s skull varied enormously, depending on how well the activity they were performing had been tailored for the region being mapped. It also tended to follow a law of diminishing returns: the better the Proxy became at mimicking the subject, the harder it became to home in on the remaining differences. But she could take the average rate she’d measured for the Faribas as a reasonable first approximation. Martin didn’t know how long he had to live, but what if she assumed that he could manage, say, three hour-long sessions a week for a year?
Nasim re-checked her calculations twice, but she hadn’t made a mistake. What he’d asked of her was not necessarily impossible. That was a long way from knowing that it could actually be done, but purely in terms of the information flows required it would not be like shifting an ocean with an eyedropper. Merely Lake Erie with a teaspoon.
It was afternoon on the US East Coast; Caplan kept strange hours, but he was usually awake by now. She emailed him: ‘Can you spare a few minutes to talk?’
The reply came back within seconds. ‘Sure.’
Caplan preferred to meet in augmented reality, but Nasim wasn’t set up for that at home, so they settled for plain audio. She lay on her bed with her notepad beside her and did her best to explain Martin’s plight succinctly; she knew Caplan wouldn’t have much patience for the details.
As it was, he interrupted her halfway through. ‘Why doesn’t your friend just freeze himself? All cancers will be treatable in a decade.’
Cancers, maybe; Nasim doubted that being frozen to death would be cured so quickly. ‘He has a son,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point. He wants to raise his own son, not come back when Javeed’s an adult.’
‘Well, he can’t freeze the kid,’ Caplan mused. ‘That would be illegal. Unless Iran has much more progressive legislation on these things than we have.’
Nasim struggled to reorganise her tactics. How did you get through to someone whose entire world view had been moulded by tenth-rate science fiction? Empathy for Javeed was out; Caplan probably believed that the only consequence of being orphaned at six was that you tried harder than anyone else to reach the top of your class in space academy.
She said, ‘Why did you buy Eikonometrics?’
Caplan didn’t reply, so she answered for him. ‘To find out how far side-loading can go. You want to know if it can ever be a substitute for uploading: if you’ll ever be able to reproduce the entire functionality of your brain without slicing it up and feeding it through an electron microscope.’
Caplan said, ‘That’s not the only question that makes side-loading interesting. But please go on, if you have a point to make.’
‘This is a chance to find out more about the limits of the technique, ’ Nasim said. ‘You’ll have a highly motivated volunteer, and a project that will force us to push the envelope.’
‘Motivated volunteers aren’t hard to find,’ Caplan replied.
‘Maybe not,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But the people who’d take the bait if you sprinkled some buzzwords around the net are your fellow wannabe-immortals, who’ll expect perfect copies of their minds to wake up in cyberspace. Martin has no such illusions; he understands that the Proxy will have massive limitations. He doesn’t imagine that we can make him live forever; he just wants us to use his brain to craft some software that can do a certain job.’
‘So when exactly did I become the Make-a-Wish Foundation?’ Caplan protested irritably.
‘This isn’t charity,’ Nasim insisted. ‘It would yield valuable information for both of us.’ She was sure Caplan could see that; he was probably just annoyed that she was trying to set the agenda.
He said, ‘What would you tell your own staff, your own management?’
‘That it’s research that could lead to even better Proxies,’ Nasim replied. ‘Which is perfectly true. If this works, Martin benefits, Zendegi benefits, you benefit. If it doesn’t, we’ll probably still learn a great deal just from seeing exactly where things fail. So what’s the downside?’
She waited, wondering if Caplan was going to make her swear not to turn Martin’s Proxy into a transcendent being who would rob him of his rightful place as lord of the solar system.
He said, ‘If it doesn’t work, are you prepared to clean up the mess? To put your botched creation out of its misery?’
Nasim was about to reply scornfully that the Proxy would be immune to any such need, but she caught herself. That was certainly the result she’d be aiming for: a devoted parent who lived in the moment, committed to his son’s wellbeing, but no more capable of contemplating – or regretting – his own nature than Virtual Azimi or the chatty Faribas.
A failure, though, could miss that target in many different directions.
Nasim steeled herself. She said, ‘I’ll spell out all the risks to Martin; in the end he’s the one who’ll have to decide the fate of anything derived from his own mind. But yes, if it comes down to it, I’m prepared to clean up the mess.’
19
