There was a soft tapping on her door; it opened before she had a chance to respond. Her chief software engineer, Bahador, slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. ‘Sorry, Nasim, but the boss told me to make myself scarce. He said I looked untidy.’
‘Untidy?’ By any ordinary standards Bahador was perfectly well groomed, but perhaps the mere presence of the Giorgio Omanis was enough to render any less-tailored mortal shabby by comparison. Nasim gestured at the chair opposite her desk. ‘You’d better sit down and wait for the paranoia to pass.’ At least she had an office of her own, so she could close the door and draw the blinds; if she’d worked in the open plan area, she herself probably would have been banished to the ladies’ toilets.
‘So how’s the tour going?’ she asked in a low voice. ‘Did you hear anything?’
Bahador nodded and leant forward. ‘When they came out of the ghal’eha, one of them said, “There’s nothing new here. We’ve seen this all before.”’
Nasim absorbed this news glumly. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t asked to choose the demo suite; at least I can’t get blamed for that.’
Bahador scowled. ‘Screw them. We have better lighting effects than anyone else, better facial interpolation, better gait dynamics. Then they come here and complain that we’re not hosting completely different games. No developer is going to write exclusively for us; the question is: does the game look better, does it feel more natural, when it’s running in Zendegi?’
‘That’s true,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but it’s starting to look pretty marginal. So long as Cyber-Jahan has more customers, developers are going to release there first. And for anything with a strong social component, sheer force of numbers is going to make the experience better.’
Bahador didn’t reply. Nasim wished she could have said something to boost his morale, but she suspected that only a massive marketing campaign could save them now. Any advances in mere technical excellence would be like decorating the ballroom as the ship went down.
‘If we had better Proxies,’ Bahador mused, ‘the numbers wouldn’t matter so much.’
‘We do have better Proxies,’ Nasim protested. ‘We have the best biomechanical models in the world.’
Bahador nodded impatiently. ‘But as you said, that kind of advantage is marginal. They look natural enough, but when it comes to behaviour…’
‘Behaviour is a game-specific problem. It’s out of our hands.’
‘That’s my point,’ Bahador replied. ‘Maybe it shouldn’t be out of our hands. If we could supplement the biomechanics with the best behavioural models – and allow developers to leverage the whole package for free – it wouldn’t matter that Cyber-Jahan had the flesh-and-blood advantage. Playing a game with ten thousand high quality Proxies would actually be better than playing in a real crowd, because smart developers could tune all the interpersonal dynamics to suit the real players.’
Nasim said, ‘Okay, that’s a perfectly sensible goal – but we have no expertise in Proxy behaviour. And we’ve looked into this before. The boss sent me on a head-hunting trip a few years ago: India, Korea, the United States, Europe; I went to about fifty campuses and start-ups looking for researchers we could hire, or technology we could license. But there was nothing that was really close to passing for human in anything but the crudest shoot-’em-up.’
‘Was that when you visited the Superintelligence Project?’ Bahador had joined Zendegi a year later, but Nasim must have mentioned the trip to him before.
‘Yeah. No AI there.’ She had spent a day at their Houston complex, curious to find out what they’d done with Zachary Churchland’s billions once his bequest had finally made it through the Texan version of Bleak House. But the sum total of their achievements had amounted to a nine-hundred-page wish-list dressed up as a taxonomy, a fantasy of convenient but implausible properties for a vast imaginary hierarchy of software daemons and deities. The whole angelic realm had been described with the kind of detail often lavished on a game-world’s mythical bestiary, but Nasim had seen no evidence that these self-improving cyber-djinn had any more chance of being brought to life than the denizens of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.
‘That was five years ago,’ Bahador said. ‘The state of the art’s changed; look at the viziers in Palace Intrigue, say-’
‘They’re not bad,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but we’re never going to be able to acquire that technology exclusively for Zendegi. The game developers have no interest in picking a fight with Cyber-Jahan.’
‘So forget the state-of-the-art,’ Bahador suggested. ‘Hire the people who’ll go beyond it.’
‘They’re already working for the game developers! If we tried to poach Proxologists now, it’d mean a bidding war, and we just don’t have that kind of money.’
Bahador raised his hands in a gesture of mock resignation. ‘Okay, I give up. We’re finished. I’ll send my résumé to Bangalore and brush up on my Hinglish.’
Nasim laughed. ‘If you really want to impress them, learn Kannada; that’s the founders’ first language.’
Bahador glanced at his watch. ‘They’ll be taking the guests to the boardroom for tea soon. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.’
‘Maybe Cyber-Jahan will just acquire us,’ Nasim mused. ‘Wait for the stock to get a bit lower, then buy themselves a regional subsidiary.’
Bahador said nothing, but he looked away, his body language suddenly reproachful, even wounded. Despite his own résumé joke, Nasim could tell that she’d crossed some kind of line. The two of them – along with a dozen of their colleagues – had worked like maniacs for the last four years to make Zendegi the most impressive VR engine on the planet. So how could she be so defeatist? How could she even think of surrender?
When Nasim arrived home she walked out to the balcony and peered into the bird cage; the four finches were sitting firmly on their perches, fast asleep. Clearly the local Tehrani subspecies had evolved to be oblivious to the sound of traffic. Their water tray was speckled with dead insects; it seemed unlikely that this would bother them, but she changed the water anyway, moving carefully to avoid disturbing the birds.
The lights had been out in her mother’s apartment as she’d come up the stairs; it would have been nice to sit and talk with her, but it was after eleven, too late to disturb her. Nasim had eaten at the office a couple of hours before, but she couldn’t face trying to sleep yet, so she sat in the living room and had her notepad stream a news summary to the wallscreen.
If she lost Zendegi, what would she do? It was not as if she’d be unemployable; the company was a household name, and even if it went down in flames people would understand the market forces involved, they wouldn’t write off the technical staff as incompetent. The question was: could she face something new?
Zendegi was the fifth job she’d had since returning to Iran, and the only one that had really suited her. She’d stuck out her first position – Online Outreach Director with Hezb-e-Haalaa – for almost six years, but in the end she’d finally had to admit that she was a bad match for politics. Everyone who’d been abroad in 2012 had suffered from martyr envy, but she’d lived through enough of the aftermath’s mundanity and compromise to get over it. Iran was a democracy now, wobbly and imperfect but probably not doomed, and she’d lost any sense that she was personally responsible for shoring it up. If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries had risked their lives to regain.
‘… has been tipped as a possible Nobel recipient for his work on bacterial colonies…’
Nasim gestured rewind-and-replay. The story was just a superficial thirty-second filler, but her knowledge-miner had correctly identified its subject as one of her former colleagues.