Nasim walked past the protesters in silence. For the first few days she’d tried taunting them, hoping to get a violent reaction recorded on the building’s security cameras that would force the police to intervene and move them on. But she had to admit that they were disciplined; even her suggestion that their favourite mullah belonged on the same bonfire as all the rest had raised barely a snarl. They’d studied 2012 and they’d learnt from the winning side: the only route to popular respect was through restraint.
The crowd outside Zendegi’s offices grew larger every day; this morning Nasim reckoned it was close to a hundred. Shahidi had found out about the Faribas and had wisely shifted his focus to them; by going quiet about Virtual Azimi he was no longer asking anyone to make the impossible choice between football and piety.
His supporters had adopted a curious slogan, repeated on all their placards: OUR SOULS ARE NOT FOR THESE MACHINES. A prohibition, rather than a flat-out denial of the possibility. Why couldn’t they simply have scoffed at the prospect of machines ever possessing ‘souls’? That was the current Vatican position, which left their amateur philosophers with no controversy to fret over. Shahidi himself certainly hadn’t said anything implying that Proxies modelled on fragments of human brains should be seen as human, but nor had he explicitly denounced the ambiguous slogan. He wanted it both ways, benefiting from the sly nod towards the most backwards, superstitious notions that would classify the Proxies as a form of forbidden ‘sorcery’, while at the same time declining to make the claim – no doubt preposterous, and even blasphemous, in most of his colleagues’ eyes – that a piece of software ever could have a soul.
Martin arrived for his ten o’clock solo session. He was punctual as always, but he was looking increasingly frail. He was no longer working in the bookstore, and Nasim had managed to persuade him to accept payment for his time here; though Zendegi would not be mining his scans for fragments to incorporate into games, there was still the possibility that their research would ultimately lead to commercial benefit.
As Nasim fitted his EEG skullcap, she said, ‘Do you think you could come for two hours tomorrow?’
‘Of course.’ Martin hesitated. ‘So there’s a problem?’
‘The network’s not converging as quickly as I’d hoped,’ she confessed. ‘More data can only be a good thing.’
‘Okay.’ Martin met her eyes in the mirror. ‘Two hours is fine, starting from tomorrow. Make it ten hours a day if you have to.’
Nasim smiled. ‘I promise you, you’d go crazy long before ten.’
When he was in the scanner, she went to her office to monitor the start of the data collection.
Martin’s sessions with Javeed were crucial, but they did not yield anywhere near enough data. Even his current interactions with his son relied upon neural circuitry that could not be clearly resolved during the events themselves; for the Proxy to have any chance at all of handling a decade’s worth of future encounters, the side-loading needed to have a much wider base.
So when Martin was alone, Nasim fed him a barrage of words, images and micro-scenarios to reach the places that no amount of children’s Shahnameh could reach. Scripting hours of hand-tailored stimuli every week would have been impossibly labour-intensive, but Nasim had set up an automated feedback process that started with some not-quite-random imagery and then homed in on material that was seen to activate the regions that required more detailed mapping, shining spotlights into those corners of his skull from which the Proxy most needed to pick up extra cues. There was nothing so crude and literal as questionnaires about Martin’s values and opinions, or rehearsals of imaginary conversations with an older Javeed; for all that Martin would have tried to respond sincerely, it would have taken superhuman self-control for anyone to behave naturally under those conditions. If he had wished to leave behind a video message for his son to view on some future birthday, he could have done that easily enough; the whole point of the side-load was to burrow deeper. The best way to do that was to deal in fragments, resolving Martin’s mental landscape with the finest granularity possible before trying to recreate it in the Proxy’s responses.
Nasim watched the images Martin was currently seeing, captioned for her with source information: shops in Islamabad, a Pakistani taxi, a Karachi street stall selling newspapers and cigarettes. Amputee children in a refugee camp in Quetta. Nobody could yet make video transcripts of dreams or memories, but the feedback process wallpapered these sessions with a kind of photo-library substitute for a visual autobiography.
Mahnoosh’s face appeared; it was the same photo of her that had been on display at the funeral. When Nasim had explained the process to Martin, he’d insisted that she include his wife’s image in the initial set and let the software decide if it was useful. Apparently it was.
Nasim closed the window, discomfited by the sense that she was intruding, even though Martin had more or less given up on the idea that anything in his skull could remain private. The neural activation map from the MRI showed that the process hadn’t gone off the rails: the data being gathered was certainly more targeted than anything they would have obtained from Rorschach blots and white noise, or random imagery and audio fragments. Whether it would be sufficient to reach their goal remained to be seen; at this stage, if she’d dropped the Proxy into any kind of test scenario it would have made the first Dickens reading seem like a triumph of sophistication.
The version of Blank Frank she’d started with approximated far more of the brain than anything she’d built from the HCP scans before – but that didn’t make it any more functional from the beginning, it just exposed all the flaws in the construction process more acutely. It was like the difference between making a toy car out of poorly moulded plastic, and trying to do the same for a ten-thousand-gear timepiece that calculated eclipses and the phases of Venus; the first might actually move, clunkily, straight from the mould, but the second was guaranteed to seize up. It was going to take a staggering amount of polishing and fine-tuning to make all those wheels turn smoothly, let alone adapt their motions to Martin’s private cosmology.
Bahador knocked and entered the office without waiting for Nasim to reply. He said, ‘We’re being hacked.’
Nasim followed him back to the programmers’ room. Khosrow, Bahador’s deputy, was compiling a list based on complaint reports coming in from the arcades. Nasim stared at the summary, shocked and dismayed. It had already crossed the two thousand mark.
A dozen of the screens around them showed specific environments that the intruders had managed to corrupt. One of the senior programmers, Milad, was examining an instance of Minions of Eblis. It had been infiltrated by a squadron of World War I biplanes, which were dropping balloons full of something brown and sticky onto the demonic battlefield.
‘What’s that supposed to be?’ Nasim asked. ‘Napalm?’
‘Hyper-treacle,’ Milad replied, struggling not to smile at the sight of the brown goo dripping all over their customers’ icons. ‘It’s a highly viscous fluid, defined with its own custom equations of motion – which are chewing up resources big-time, because they’re deliberately difficult to compute. It’s been used in other attacks, like Happy Universe in 2023, though obviously this is a refined variant or it would never have been accepted into our object queues.’
‘Great.’ Nobody would actually feel the stuff as it clogged up their virtual hair and drizzled down their faces – unless they got it on their hands – but apart from looking ridiculous in front of their comrades, the players were stuck with the fact that Zendegi was treating it seriously as part of their environment. That was a recipe for kinaesthetic dissonance: if you ran into a patch of hyper-treacle it couldn’t forcibly impede your real feet, but if it glued your icon to the spot while you kept physically running, you either lost all sense of immersion in the game world, or you started to feel as sick and confused as if your inner ears, your visual system and your proprioceptive faculties had decided to go to war over their mutually exclusive theories of your body’s motion. For a few million years prior to the existence of virtual reality, this had been a very good indicator that you’d eaten something you’d be better off without. People were soon going to have some very real fluids sloshing around their ghal’eha.
Nasim said, ‘So why aren’t we pulling it out of the queues?’
‘I’m trying to find a way to automate that,’ Milad replied. ‘On an object level, it’s masquerading as demons’ blood, and on superficial queries the two are completely indistinguishable. It’s only its custom behaviour and appearance when it’s actually rendered that reveal its true identity. So to filter it out, I’m going to need to set up something that works from its final appearance.’
‘Okay.’ Nasim stepped back and left him to it while she tried to make a judgement about the bigger picture. If each corrupted game was going to take ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of programming to deal with, she’d have no choice but to shut everything down for the day, forfeiting several million dollars in fees. Then again, maybe Milad’s filter would be adaptable with some minor tweaks to all the other intrusions – but she didn’t have long to determine how realistic that hope was. Thousands of customers were already signing out and demanding refunds, while the hard cases who hung around pretending they could ‘play their way through’ the anomalies would be a PR and litigation nightmare when their steely dedication turned out to be the perfect emetic.
‘What’s happening with Virtual Azimi?’ Nasim asked Bahador. He pointed to his own display, which showed a football field invaded by sheep. There weren’t enough of the animals to hem the players in and stop them moving completely, but they’d certainly brought the game to a halt. The human players were standing around swearing, or fruitlessly trying to chase the sheep away; the animals were responding with skittish swerves that might or might not have been behaviourally accurate but certainly looked maximally frustrating. Virtual Azimi and the other Proxies were so confused by the whole turn of events that they’d all adopted their emergency strategy of sitting on the grass, holding their ankles and wincing as if they’d been injured.
‘So have you got someone dealing with the sheep?’ she asked.
‘Arif,’ Bahador said. He added, deadpan, ‘His father’s a butcher, he’ll know what to do with them.’
This was the game where they had the most to lose, but there might be a chance to salvage the situation. Nobody would try to run straight through the animals as if they weren’t there, so at least there was no prospect of dissonance and nausea.
They walked over to Arif’s desk. ‘How are things looking?’ Nasim asked him.
Arif was staring at a properties window showing the responses the sheep objects were giving to a list of standard queries. ‘They’re camouflaged as Proxy players,’ he said. Hardly camouflaged to human eyes, but the whole programming environment was based on protocols in which objects ‘told’ Zendegi about themselves, rather than requiring the system to examine them in detail and reach its own conclusions. Zendegi would have ground to a halt if every pebble and blade of grass had to be drawn and inspected to confirm its true nature before being accepted as being what it claimed to be.
‘Okay,’ Nasim replied, ‘so they need to be filtered based on their appearance. Maybe you can adapt what Milad’s doing-?’
Arif turned to face her. ‘I’ve got a better idea. Can I use the Faribas?’
‘The Faribas?’
‘They do “what’s wrong with this picture?” almost as well as a human inspecting the same scene. If we use enough of them, we can show them every environment of every game in progress and have them point out the anomalies directly to an automated object filter.’
Nasim thought it over. ‘Some of the fantasy games have all kinds of jokes and anachronisms,’ she said. ‘The people we side-loaded for the Faribas weren’t in on the jokes; they would have classified them as anomalies.’
Arif gazed at her in disbelief. ‘At this time of day, that’s less than one per cent of what’s running! We can shut those games down and give people refunds. It’s no reason not to salvage all the rest.’
He was right. Nasim said, ‘Okay, go ahead and try it.’
As Arif set to work, Bahador said quietly, ‘It’s disturbing, isn’t it?’
‘Being invaded by sheep?’
He shook his head. ‘The prospect of spawning a few thousand slaves like that.’
Nasim didn’t reply immediately. The truth was, she shared his disquiet to a degree, though it didn’t make much sense. She’d convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with the Faribas popping in and out of existence all over Zendegi, whispering advice to the scripted Proxies in dozens of games, whenever the Proxies’ behaviour was too difficult to humanise by other means.
‘They’re not slaves,’ she said. ‘They’ve learnt how to do a microscopic part of what a human does. If a factory worker guides a robot arm through a sequence of moves, does the robot become as human as the worker?’
‘No,’ Bahador replied, ‘and I don’t think the Faribas are human either. But it’s still eerie, churning them out by the thousands.’
Nasim said, ‘What difference does it make, whether it’s one or a thousand?’
Bahador spread his hands in an admission of uncertainty. ‘Maybe none at all; I don’t know. If I were sure that I knew the right way to think about this…’ He trailed off, but Nasim could guess where he’d been heading. If he’d been certain that the Faribas were conscious, he would have been out on the street with Shahidi’s followers. If he’d been certain that they were not, he would have applauded Arif’s idea without reservation.
Arif worked quickly; the necessary hooks to the Fariba modules were all in place already, he just had to tie them together with a few other systems. When it was done, he tried out the anomalyrecogniser on an instance of the Virtual Azimi game; the sheep all flashed red, and nothing else was targeted. Then he quickly added code to purge the selected objects.
He turned to Nasim. ‘Can I-?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Arif ran his program. The sheep vanished. The human players began to cheer and applaud; the Proxies looked around, found nothing unfamiliar, and decided to stop feigning injuries.
Nasim said, ‘Launch it on everything.’
Arif was taken aback. ‘Everything? No more tests?’
Nasim glanced at her watch. ‘We’ve lost at least three-quarters of a million dollars already. I’m willing to bet that this is going to make things better, not worse.’
Arif didn’t have personal authorisation to launch so many processes at once, let alone the kind that intervened in every single game across Zendegi. Bahador and Nasim both had to sign off on the move – and an automatic notification of their action would be passed further up the hierarchy.
As she waited to be summoned to the boss’s office to explain what had happened, Nasim took some comfort from checking a sample of the games on Khosrow’s list. Minions was back to its usual uninhibited gore-fest; the biplanes had fallen victim to their own blatant absurdity. Nasim didn’t ask for details of the symptoms that had afflicted all the other games, but as she flicked from environment to environment it occurred to her that some anomalies might have been subtler than sheep or treacle bombs.
Still, if they were subtle enough to be missed by the Faribas, maybe they’d be subtle enough for the players themselves to continue to the end of their session without even noticing that anything was amiss. As various games finished, the corrupted instances would be discarded; Bahador had had three people checking through back-up files, and he was sure they had reliable versions of all the major games. As new groups of players came online, they would start afresh with a safe copy of the program. There were a few games on Zendegi that ran continuously, supposedly 24 hours a day, but their fans were used to occasional reboots.
All in all, they’d been lucky. Arif and the Faribas had saved them from a crippling débâcle that could easily have been ten times worse than the losses in revenue and prestige they’d already suffered.
Nasim’s notepad buzzed; she was wanted upstairs. She knew that the good news wouldn’t be enough when she still couldn’t answer the hard questions: Who had done this and why? How had they broken through Zendegi’s defences and defeated all of the elaborate cross-checks that were meant to guarantee the integrity of every game?
And given that they’d managed to do all that once, how could they be prevented from doing it again?
It was after one in the morning when Nasim arrived home. She went out onto the balcony to refill the finches’ food trough and change their water. Her ex-husband had given her the original breeding pair as a kind of joke, after she’d told him she missed her old research. At least Hamid had had a sense of humour. Unfortunately, the same perennially light-hearted attitude had extended to his relationships with other women. Nasim certainly hadn’t wanted someone who’d smother her with possessiveness and earnest declarations of undying love, but with Hamid she’d erred in the other direction.
She sat in the living room, trying to organise her thoughts and unwind enough to catch a few hours’ sleep. The board had held an emergency meeting and approved her plan to bring in an external security consultant to analyse the day’s breach and try to prevent recurrences. Proud as she was of her staff’s response to the crisis, she knew they didn’t have the specialist knowledge required to find the source of the problem and permanently shore up the barricades.
As to whether the breach had been the work of Shahidi’s supporters, Nasim remained openminded. She had already underestimated them once, and it would be too glib by far to assume that they could not have resisted painting self-incriminating slogans all over Zendegi’s landscapes if they’d had the chance. As far as she’d been able to determine, they organised their protests with phone trees, where every direct link involved face-to-face friendships and genuine trust – a strategy that was invisible to SocNet’s analysis, but wasn’t wildly different from some of the techniques that had brought down the theocrats in 2012. Hacking into Zendegi would have taken much more than a dash of resourceful political recycling… but Nasim was making no more assumptions. Let the consultants work it out.
She had her notepad disgorge its latest news summary; she expected to catch still more flak, but before she could switch off for the night she needed to feel that she’d run the gauntlet and taken all the punishment on offer. As it turned out, jokes about the intrusion were still flitting around the globe, but most of them were remarkably gentle. Perhaps that wasn’t so surprising; the pranks themselves had generally been witty and good-natured, and while it was embarrassing to have been hacked at all, the swift response meant that Zendegi hadn’t been made to look spectacularly incompetent. A few hundred customers – out of hundreds of thousands in the affected games – had suffered some short-term nausea; a few dozen ghal’eha had needed scrubbing out. The company’s share price had fallen, but not dramatically.
When she’d fast-forwarded through all the variants of the ‘Sheep Stop Play’ story, her knowledge-miner served up something from a completely different vein. The Wall Street Journal had just published an article on Eikonometrics’ new product range: a set of trainable software modules for automating production lines and call centres.
‘One worker in a semi-skilled job of this kind – and across the globe, there are five hundred million jobs in this category – can teach the software everything it needs in order to take over the work of tens of thousands of his or her colleagues. Of course, we’re not talking about ambulatory robots gathering around your office water-cooler; the work must already be physically constrained, as in a suitable factory process, or entirely computer-mediated, as with call centres. An Eikonometrics spokesman declined to comment on the prospects for software able to climb the next rung up the skills ladder, but a source close to the company indicated that the financial services industry would be the likely next target.’
Nasim had known that something like this would be coming eventually, but she still felt blindsided, and cross that Caplan hadn’t bothered to warn her a few days ahead of the announcement. Five hundred million jobs at stake, and Zendegi had pioneered the technology… That didn’t rule out Shahidi’s supporters as the hackers, but it certainly extended the list of suspects.
Five hundred million? Nasim couldn’t quite process the idea that the methods she’d shared with Eikonometrics might throw half a billion people out of work. There were several perfectly truthful footnotes she could append to that stark claim in the hope of rendering it more palatable: conventional software probably would have automated most of the same jobs within a decade or so, regardless – and someone else would have adapted her finch paper’s methods to the HCP sooner or later if she hadn’t done it herself.
But she was the one who’d made the technology work, and brokered its fusion with side-loading. She’d saved her own job, and those of her own employers and colleagues; she’d reaped the benefits for herself and the people around her. If those on the losing end of the same transformation were angry, what did she expect? That they’d take a suitably stoical attitude and spare Zendegi from any backlash… because someone else almost certainly would have screwed them over in the same way, eventually?
In all her years in exile, what she’d wanted most of all was to join the fight she’d been forced to flee – to spit in the faces of the murderous fanatics who’d killed her father and ruined her country. And ever since her return, she’d been itching for a re-match. She’d wanted the theocrats to stagger to their feet again, for the sheer pleasure of watching them bloodied again, brought down again.
But the war she’d actually found herself in was nothing like her father’s struggle. Perhaps not many people would subscribe to Shahidi’s mediaeval view of side-loading, but there were other reasons to feel disquiet about the process – some of them indisputably solid and real. The killjoy cleric who didn’t want the workers playing football with their hero’s Proxy was enough of a political animal to put that point of contention aside and find common cause with everyone whose job was at risk. This was not going to be a simple matter of watching one more crazy mullah brought down by people with saner priorities.
Nasim switched off her notepad. It was after two, and she knew that if she didn’t get four hours’ sleep she’d be useless in the morning. She had an appointment with the security consultants, and she needed to be sharp or they’d have her signing off on all kinds of expensive placebos.