Nasim felt the blood draining from her face. He was going to ask her to adopt the boy.
‘Martin, I-’ She stopped, too flustered to say anything coherent. Mahnoosh had been her cousin, but she’d barely known her, let alone Javeed. If there’d been no one – literally no one else in the world, she might have been prepared to do this, but Martin seemed to be telling her that he wanted to toss aside his loyal and loving friends… just because she had a more Western sensibility?
Martin went on, ‘Last night I saw a replay of the football match in Zendegi between the two Azimis. Each team held the other to a draw.’ He laughed. ‘I was probably the last person in the world to notice what you’ve achieved, to appreciate how amazing it was.’
Nasim was utterly confused now. Was he trying to flatter her? Praising her technical skills as if that had some bearing on her eligibility for this role?
‘But once I saw that game,’ he continued, ‘I knew it was the answer. Javeed’s happiest times with me these days are all in Zendegi. And I don’t think he’d find it strange or frightening; I think he’d just accept it. I think it would make perfect sense to him.’
Nasim said, ‘What would make sense to him? What is it you’re asking me to do?’ She thought she knew now, but having narrowly averted embarrassing them both with her first misunderstanding, she wasn’t willing to take anything for granted.
‘I want you to do for me what you did for Azimi,’ Martin announced calmly. ‘I want you to make a Proxy of me that can live on in Zendegi and help raise my son.’
After forty minutes the owner of the juice bar started giving them dark looks. There were only so many banana milkshakes Nasim could bring herself to order for the sake of staying put, so they walked back to Martin’s empty shop and sat in the small coffee lounge where patrons were invited to flick through their potential purchases.
‘I have some money from my wife’s insurance,’ Martin told her, for the fifth time.
‘That’s not the point,’ Nasim replied patiently. ‘It’s not a question of expense. It’s a question of complexity.’
‘I’m not asking for anything sophisticated,’ Martin insisted. ‘I don’t expect this Proxy to deliver lectures on moral philosophy; I just want him to have the right gut reaction if his son starts referring to women as whores or Arabs as wild animals.’
Nasim said, ‘If it were that simple, I could go back to the office right now and crank out an ordinary, scripted Proxy that flew off the handle in response to any list of triggers you cared to spell out. Do you honestly want something that crude?’
‘Not that crude,’ Martin conceded.
‘So do you really think that a Proxy whose only ability was knowing when to lay down the law – and who became tongue-tied whenever he was challenged to defend his views – would have any impact on your son at all? I’m not talking about high-powered philosophy! I’m talking about debating a six-year-old, or a twelve-year-old, with a more subtle response than “Because I said so”.’
Martin was beginning to look deflated. He said, ‘I’m going to have to go and pick up Javeed from school.’
Nasim said, ‘I’m sorry, Martin. You know if there’s anything else I can do-’
‘Thank you.’
In the taxi back to the office, Nasim felt drained. She wondered how many other people had watched Virtual Azimi tenaciously holding his ground against the original – as if this proved them to be perfectly matched mirror-images – and concluded: This is it, my chance to cheat death. Well, if Azimi was hit by a truck, his widow would certainly receive royalties from the game for as long as it remained popular, but most people could forget about a Proxy preserving their earning capacity, let alone anything more personal. Maybe she should have told Martin that, while the match hadn’t literally been fixed, Azimi would have been crazy to hammer his Proxy’s team into the ground; that might have been good for his ego, but it wouldn’t have helped anyone’s bank balance.
Bahador spotted her as she stepped out of the elevator. ‘Did you hear about the cleric in Qom?’ he asked.
‘No-?’ They walked together down the corridor; Bahador wasn’t smiling, so Nasim decided that this probably wasn’t the opening line to a joke.
‘Hojatoleslam Shahidi. He just issued a statement denouncing Virtual Azimi as an affront to God and human dignity.’
‘An affront? Why?’
Bahador read from his notepad. ‘ “God’s gifts to us should be shared, and taught, and used freely to delight him, but they must not be made into commodities to be bought and sold.”’
Nasim rubbed her eyes. ‘Okay, but does he have any actual followers who’ll boycott the game, or is he just another fat fart in a turban, hallucinating relevance and trying to make a headline?’
Bahador looked around nervously, as if he was afraid someone might have overheard her. ‘I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.’
‘You didn’t SocNet him?’
Bahador fiddled with the notepad. ‘He does have an Ummah-Space page, but it looks like most of his friends are sycobots.’
‘Hmm.’ It had been a while since Nasim’s online outreach job, but anyone who didn’t filter out interest-feigning bots was hardly going to be a formidable organiser. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ she said.
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.