16

Every day for a week, in two three-hour sessions, Ashkan Azimi, captain of the Iranian national football team, lay inside an MRI machine and daydreamed his way through a thousand fragmented matches. Some recapitulated highlights from his well-documented career; others anticipated games he’d yet to play, challenges he was yet to confront in reality. But whether the fragments struck old chords or required new improvisations, the chance to watch his brain making thousands of crucial split-second decisions illuminated Azimi’s talent in a way that no amount of match statistics, video footage or biomechanical analysis could ever have equalled.

Caplan had sent five people from Eikonometrics’ Zürich office to operate the scanner and supervise the side-loading process. As it happened, Azimi spoke perfect German – having played for Club Hoffenheim for two years – but the boss had insisted that Nasim watch over everything and ensure that there were no ‘cultural misunderstandings’. Nasim didn’t follow football at all, so it was Bahador and three other Zendegi programmers who’d collaborated with the Eikonometrics people on the scenarios to feed into Azimi’s goggles as he lay in the machine. But maybe that was why she’d been chosen to babysit: she was the only member of Zendegi’s staff who wasn’t so star-struck that she’d spend the week begging the poor man for his autographed nail clippings.

Nasim’s contribution had been to build a version of Blank Frank that focused on the cerebellum and visual and motor cortex, to act as a vessel for Azimi’s physical prowess. Of course she only had to whisper his name into a search engine to be drowned in paeans to his leadership, his tactical genius, his modesty, his generosity, his sense of fair play – but those more abstract qualities would have to remain locked inside his skull. Quite apart from the technical issues, Azimi’s management had drawn the lines very clearly: their client’s personality was not for sale. Nasim had actually sat down with a lawyer and a consultant neurologist and negotiated a schedule to his contract that included a list of approved brain regions.

No matter. The prosaic truth was that in the context of a football match, conventional software could handle those ‘higher’ aspects of behaviour pretty well; human players might need to struggle with their egos in order to decide when to pass the ball to their team-mates, but for dumb software it was the easiest thing in the world to quantify and program. Nasim suspected that so long as the Proxy didn’t bite an opponent’s ear off or insult anyone’s mother or sister, most people would simply transfer their impression of the real Azimi to his imperfect clone. After all, their hero had volunteered to stick his head in a fancy machine for a week; the result would be judged inferior to the original, of course, but people would reason that something of the man would have had to rub off. Motor cortex, schmotor cortex; half the population thought a heart transplant could make you fall in love with a dead man’s widow.

Given the nature of the talents they were extracting, it was a shame that Azimi couldn’t even stand on a treadmill and mime interacting with a ball. But no one had yet built an MRI scanner that could accommodate that, and after a seven-figure payment in Euros to their star, Caplan’s budget didn’t stretch to an attempt at being the first. Instead, they’d given Azimi an external view of a virtual body modelled on his own and he’d spent the first day just getting used to controlling its movements with his thoughts. Once that adjustment was complete, driving the puppet activated all of the brain regions they were trying to mimic. It no longer mattered that he was flat on his back; in his mind, he was there on the field.

With Azimi mostly lost in his reverie or chatting in German with the MRI technicians, Nasim was free to watch the side-loading process unfold. Blank Frank had started out with even less hope of kicking a goal than she had; whatever the average donor’s talents had been, her reconstruction had been too crude to retain it. But with the MRI images as a guide, tweaking the connections between Frank’s virtual neurons to bring their collective behaviour into accord with Azimi’s was like reverse-engineering a set of incremental improvements to a known piece of machinery – not trivial, but never entirely baffling either. With Frank already wired up in a generically human fashion, once Nasim had seen activity flash across the two brains she could often guess for herself where the changes would need to be made. The side-loading software could do better than guess, and it could do it a million times faster.

Gradually, out on the virtual playing field, Frank began imitating his mentor, clumsily and imperfectly at first, then with ever greater fidelity.

Azimi could spend only so much time in the scanner or his body would start cramping up and his mind would turn to mush. But Frank could keep re-absorbing the same lessons overnight, letting the software whittle away his imperfections while all the humans had gone home to sleep. Every morning Nasim came in an hour before everyone else and sat and watched ‘before’ and ‘after’ clips, summarising her student’s progress.

She remembered a story her father had told her – a story, or a joke; there was no sharp distinction. A famous actor and a famous singer had been invited to the same party, and people kept begging the singer to perform his best-known song. But he wasn’t feeling well, and he’d drunk too much wine, so he kept turning down their requests. Finally, the actor had taken pity on his colleague, and to spare him any further harassment had given the crowd his own rendition of the song – note-perfect, and indistinguishable from the singer’s best performance.

The singer had turned to him in amazement and asked, ‘Where did you learn to sing like that?’

The actor had replied modestly, ‘I can’t sing at all. But I have a talent for impersonation.’

At the end of the week, Azimi and the boss gave a press conference in the boardroom. Nasim stood at the back and watched. Azimi wore his team uniform, adorned with sponsors’ logos, and enough bling to asphyxiate and dice him if he’d still been under the scanner’s magnets.

The boss announced that Zendegi had sub-licensed Stadium Legends, a Korean developer, to write the first work to make use of Virtual Azimi. They were on a tight deadline; the release was to coincide with Iran hosting the Asian Cup in less than two months’ time.

Most of the journalists were sports-gaming specialists, and they followed the line the PR people had steered them towards in their press release, waxing lyrical about the joy Azimi’s fans would feel when they could put on their goggles and play a match under his virtual captaincy. But then Gita Razavi – a ‘cultural critic’ for Generation 2012 – managed to squeeze a question in, and she seemed to be getting her cues from somewhere else entirely.

‘Mr Azimi, of course you’ve already tasted fame, but I wonder how it feels to be the first person on Earth to achieve an entirely new kind of immortality: a century from now, people might still be playing football alongside your Proxy.’

Azimi smiled. ‘Of course I’ll be honoured if I’m remembered in any way at all after I retire, but I wouldn’t call this computer game a form of “immortality”. I’m not just a football player – I wrote a dissertation on Hafez. I am a son, a husband, I hope to be a father. This game has nothing to do with any of those things.’

‘So how would you feel if a Proxy could capture all those other aspects of your life?’ Razavi persisted. ‘Do you think that might be a good thing – or do you think it should be prohibited?’

Azimi glanced at the boss, but then spoke for himself. ‘As I understand it, that’s not even possible. I’m not an expert, but they tell me they can only copy a very small part of the brain this way. Anything more is too complicated for the technology.’