When Reza left, Martin put an advertisement online for his print-on-demand machine, then emailed the three students who’d worked for him in the past, to see if any of them could come in and do shifts for the closing down sale. He composed some posters on the office computer, then printed out versions proclaiming fifty, seventy-five, and ninety per cent off. He taped the first set to the windows.
Then he found an empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it. Javeed wasn’t going to a desert island, and the weightier Martin made this package, the greater the risk that actually reading the books would seem like a daunting or oppressive prospect.
Would the Proxy have anything worthwhile to say about these works? Martin wasn’t sure that he remembered enough himself to discuss them in any detail. But anyone risked seeming like a lightweight to a teenager who’d just read Solzhenitsyn; it would be absurd to set the bar too high. Martin would be satisfied if the Proxy could share a laugh with Javeed at the mention of Major Major or Milo Minderbinder and bluff his way convincingly through the rest.
He stood by the sales counter and looked around the shop; in a strange symmetry, it had begun to smell of wood and glue, the way it had smelled when the carpenters had first been putting in the shelves.
Was there anything else he should set aside? He already had Mahnoosh’s bookshelf at home, stacked with her favourite works in Farsi; he wouldn’t know what to add to that. He taped up the box and wrote Javeed’s name on it in big letters, to be sure it wouldn’t get thrown out by mistake if something happened to him suddenly.
As he was putting the packing tape back in the storeroom, his notepad chimed.
The message from Nasim read: I think we’ve found something worth trying.
‘Martin, this is Dr Zahedi.’ Nasim stepped aside so they could shake hands.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Martin said. His mouth was dry. Nasim had answered most of his questions on the phone, but he was still feeling anxious.
Dr Zahedi gestured at a chair in the corner of the MRI room, partly hidden behind a movable screen. ‘Take a seat, please,’ she said.
Nasim said, ‘I’ll give you some privacy.’
Dr Zahedi took Martin’s blood pressure and listened to his heart. He gave her the physicians’ access code to his online medical records and she flipped through his scans and pathology reports in silence. It occurred to Martin that Bernard had never logged the injection of his exotic contrast agents in these records – and if Dr Zahedi logged what she was about to give him, he’d have a lot of explaining to do to his oncologist.
‘The drug Ms Golestani has asked me to administer has moderate sedative and disinhibitory effects,’ Dr Zahedi explained. ‘It’s been approved at much higher doses as one component in a regime used for general anaesthesia, but the dose we’d be giving you today would be less than a tenth of that.’
Martin said, ‘So there’s no chance I’m going to… stop breathing, or have a heart attack?’
‘The chances of any adverse side-effects are extremely low,’ Dr Zahedi assured him. ‘Even with your impaired liver function, I’m confident that you won’t be in any danger. But I’ll be here throughout the session, to be absolutely sure that nothing goes wrong.’
‘Okay.’ Having gone out of his way to avoid the risks of surgery, Martin had a claustrophobic sense of his choices narrowing. But he was not going to be paralysed and cut wide open; he was not going to be breathing through a tube. He would be taking one tenth the dose of one component of a general anaesthetic.
‘The other aspect of the protocol that requires your consent is the use of an infrared laser to induce mild pain,’ Dr Zahedi continued. ‘This will be applied only to one finger, and the power will be well below the threshold that could cause tissue damage. There will also be a limit imposed on the number of times the laser can be used in a given period; I’ve been asked not to disclose the details, to avoid the possibility that it could reduce your aversive response. But I’m satisfied that there’s very little chance of psychological trauma.’
Martin said, ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ Nasim had already explained the logic behind the finger-zapping. The drug was intended to make him more suggestible, more responsive to the images he was shown, but at the same time it would put him at risk of wandering off on a mental tangent. Eikonometrics had found that Rhesus monkeys on the same drug could be induced to keep focusing on a barrage of less-than-riveting images by inducing mild pain whenever their attention wandered. If that had got past an animal-experimentation ethics committee, Martin was willing to give it a go.
He signed the consent forms. When Nasim rejoined them and asked if he had any questions, he said, ‘Tell me once more that this isn’t going to make the Proxy permanently stoned.’
Nasim smiled; they’d been over this already. She said, ‘Giving you a drug that changes some activity patterns in your brain means we’re gathering data that’s only directly comparable to the Proxy’s activity if it’s also been subject to the same changes. So we will, in effect, need to “drug” the Proxy while we train it to match your responses. But that’s still going to bring the Proxy’s neural wiring closer to yours – with benefits that will persist when it’s operated normally.’
Martin thought he almost understood, but Nasim, seeing the lingering doubt on his face, took one more shot.
‘Think of it this way,’ she said. ‘A method actor wants to play you in a movie, so he takes you to a bar and gets you tipsy, so you open up more than you otherwise would. All he’s seeing is what you’re like on alcohol, so naively you could say that all he’s really gained is the power to imitate you in that particular state. But of course, it doesn’t really mean he’s going to play you as a drunk in the movie. It just means he’s got some dirt on you that helps him to play you better, sober.’
Martin said, ‘So basically, all this technology is a substitute for Robert De Niro and a bottle of Jim Beam?’
Dr Zahedi administered the injection. After a few seconds, Martin felt… pleasant. Untroubled. He sat smiling faintly while Nasim fitted the skullcap and goggles and led him to the MRI.
Before she flipped the goggles down, Nasim pushed something that looked like a thimble over Martin’s right index finger. She said, ‘If you really can’t stay focused, just take this off. But if you do that, it’s the end of the session.’
‘Okay. I understand.’
When everything was in place, the servo-motor whirred. For the past few weeks Martin had experienced a sinking feeling as he slid into the machine for his solo scans, but the drug certainly took the edge off that.
The sequence of photos that had been interrupted in his last session resumed from the beginning. Martin gazed at the old man in his earthquake-ravaged house; he was sure he’d felt sympathy for his plight before, but this time it was as if a physical barrier that had been standing between the two of them had been erased. Not only was the man’s presence more vivid and compelling, Martin found himself examining the scene as if he genuinely had a role to play, a stake in the outcome, an ongoing connection. Where would the man get food, water, shelter? What had he been through? Who was he mourning?
After a couple of seconds the man was gone, but Martin ignored the image in front of him and kept pondering the implications of the quake. His arm jerked involuntarily, as if he’d touched the edge of a hot plate and pulled his hand away before registering what had happened. Then he felt the painful jab of heat on his finger. He was prepared to believe there was no permanent damage, but the laser certainly delivered more than a tickle.
He’d lost his chance with the second image, but when the third appeared – a young Iranian couple strolling in a park – he gave it his full attention. Immersed in the scene he felt a glow of paternal warmth, as if he might have been standing before Javeed and some future daughter-in-law. Unfortunately, that glow outlasted its allotted time, and he was punished accordingly.
After that, he made an effort to prepare for the cycle: engage, react, disengage. It had to become automatic. Monkeys could do it; how hard could it be? He managed three successful immersions in a row before overshooting and burning his finger again.
Then four immersions, then… it must have been twenty minutes later that he stopped to reflect on how well he was doing. Keeping up the pace had been hard at first, but once he’d got into a rhythm-
Contemplating the task instead of performing it won him another stinging rebuke. Martin didn’t make the
