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.
21
‘Congratulations, Mr Seymour. Your new liver is ready.’
Dr Jobrani turned his computer screen so Martin could see the photo that had been emailed from the organ bank. Even obscured by a maze of translucent scaffolding and immersed in a yellow-tinged nutrient bath, it looked encouragingly healthy and whole. It was miraculous enough that a slab of meat this large could have been grown from a few dozen cells extracted from his own skin; that the result was also an intricate maze of chemical factories and energy stores was positively surreal. And even if the whole liver-in-a-bottle process wasn’t quite as flawless as advertised, Martin had seen enough scans of what remained of the organ he’d been born with to be pretty sure that this hydroponic version would be a trade-up.
‘Now it’s just a matter of scheduling the surgery,’ Jobrani explained. ‘I managed to get them to pencil you in for a slot early next month. Once you’ve signed the paperwork I can send you to the surgeon for the final checks, and we can make it official.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically, then started pecking his way through his computer’s menus, hunting for the right form to print out.
Martin hadn’t seen his oncologist in such an ebullient mood before, perhaps because this was the first time he’d had anything like good news to offer him. Two weeks earlier, he’d had to tell Martin that the tumour-specific markers in his blood were showing an increase. The cancer was developing resistance to the antibody treatment; that had not been unexpected, but it was happening earlier than they’d hoped. The new liver could certainly prolong his life, but the resurgent cancer would probably still take him within a year.
Martin said, ‘What are the risks? Of the surgery?’
Jobrani stayed focused on his menus. ‘It’s best if you discuss that with the surgeon. Just let me find this form.’
‘I’m not sure about the date,’ Martin said. ‘Can’t we make it a few months later?’
‘Later?’ Jobrani stopped typing and looked at Martin. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
Martin had been preparing himself for this conversation for some time. In his imaginary rehearsals, his white lies had always emerged smoothly and persuasively, and he’d won the day without too much fuss.
He said, ‘I want to spend more time with my son before I risk the transplant. If I die on the operating table-’
Jobrani scowled. ‘That’s nonsense! You know that the state of your liver is the only reason you have no quality of life now. It’s true that you could die in surgery – but if you survive you’ll have ten times as much energy, for at least another six or eight months. Every week after the transplant will be worth ten weeks of the kind of life you have right now – and twenty of what you’ll be like if you push back the date much further.’
Martin looked him in the eye. ‘Forget about quality of life. Can you swear to me that my chances of surviving six more months from today are greater if I have the transplant? That the odds of dying during the operation are less than the odds of dying from the lack of it?’