‘Care to discuss a truce?’

Beneath this curt offer was a link to a site in Zendegi.

Nasim stepped into the ghal’e and watched the walls rise up around her. She hadn’t been inside one of these machines for years; she’d grown used to a God’s-eye-view of the games, not a participant’s. When a voice from the interface told her to flip down her goggles she muttered an obscene reply under her breath; she hated being prodded. She’d go in when she was ready.

She’d talked it over with Bahador and Falaki, and they’d decided to restart just enough of Zendegi to enable the meeting to take place immediately. Everyone else would remain shut out; Nasim and her host would have the system to themselves. If the meeting ran on too long, Bahador wouldn’t let Zendegi bleed money by delaying the full re-launch, but this way some of the tracking would be simpler. There was no guarantee that they’d be able to locate the physical source of the hacker’s virtual presence, but it was worth doing what they could to improve the odds.

Okay, you want a truce? Here are my terms: Zendegi changes absolutely nothing, and you get six years in prison for commercial sabotage.

Nasim flipped down the goggles.

It was dusk. She was standing, alone, in a motionless Ferris wheel gondola, high above an amusement park. She could hear tinny music, and people talking and laughing in the distance below her. The Wiener Riesenrad was not as popular a virtual postcard as the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramid of Giza, but it cost next to nothing to keep it on file.

Below her, people milled around the stalls of the amusement park; all of them Proxies, of course. There was nothing to stop the hacker arriving on the ground among that virtual crowd, but given that the link in the email had pointed specifically to this gondola there didn’t seem much point waiting anywhere else.

‘Nasim Golestani?’

Nasim turned around. A clean-shaven middle-aged man, dressed in old-fashioned Western clothes – coat, tie, fedora – stood in the adjacent gondola, some ten or twelve metres away.

‘I’m Nasim,’ she replied, in English. ‘What should I call you?’

‘Rollo.’ He spoke with an American accent.

‘Pleased to meet you, Rollo.’ Ah, Iranian civility; her mother would be proud. ‘Would you like to join me here? I promise I won’t push you out.’

‘I’m fine where I am, thank you.’

‘As you wish.’ The wind blew gently across the park, rattling the huge machine, but Nasim’s default auditory settings put clarity above realism; she’d have no trouble hearing his voice.

‘I’m sure you’ve already guessed who I represent,’ Rollo said confidently.

Nasim hesitated before replying, but she couldn’t see what she’d have to gain by bluffing. ‘I have no idea. Honestly.’ If he was an emissary of Hojatoleslam Shahidi, he had a strange way of showing his adherence to Islamic tradition, and why anyone from Cyber-Jahan or the Chinese labour unions would be into fedoras and Ferris wheels was beyond her.

‘The CHL,’ Rollo declared.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The Cis-Humanist League.’

Nasim refrained from groaning. ‘Okay, I get it: cis, not trans. I’m not what you’d call a Latin buff, but I did a year of organic chemistry.’

She waited for Rollo to say something more, but he seemed momentarily taken aback, as if he’d been expecting a very different response.

‘So you’re “on the side of humans”,’ she said. ‘You’re… pro-technology? But you’re opposed to the crazies, the transcendence cults?’ He didn’t contradict her. ‘Great. Welcome to the club. I’m quite partial to my own species myself.’

Rollo looked positively wounded now. ‘You haven’t even read our manifesto, have you?’

‘Strangely, no,’ Nasim confessed. ‘Seeing as I’d never even heard of you until twenty seconds ago.’

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The arrogance is breathtaking! You march right into territory we’ve been mapping for decades, and then you turn around and tell me you have no idea who we are?’

Nasim spread her hands. ‘What can I say? Fire your publicist.’ She caught herself; she was letting her hostility get the better of her. This man might be a self-important prick who thought everyone in the universe read his blog rants, but he had just brought Zendegi to its knees. A computer-savvy anti-Caplan. Maybe if she locked them both in a room together they’d annihilate each other.

‘I’ll make it simple for you then,’ Rollo said. ‘Item seven of the manifesto: No consciousness without autonomy. It’s unethical to create conscious software that lacks the ability to take control of its own destiny.’

Nasim said, ‘Exactly what “conscious software” do you have in mind? Do you want Virtual Azimi to have voting rights?’

‘Of course not,’ Rollo replied impatiently. ‘We only targeted that game to hit you in the wallet; it’s obvious that Virtual Azimi can’t be conscious. But that’s where we draw the line: no higher functions, no language, no social skills. You don’t get to clone a slice of humanity and use it to churn out battery hens.’

Nasim was starting to feel off-balance; after steeling herself for the prospect of negotiating with a theologian who solemnly believed in angels and djinn, she was having to do some recalibration to focus on an adversary so much closer to her own philosophical territory.

‘None of the side-loads can be conscious in the human sense,’ she said. ‘They have no notion of their own past or future, no long-term memory, no personal goals.’ Martin’s Proxy would inherit some of his narrative memories, but she was hoping Rollo had no knowledge of that project.

He said, ‘So if I scooped out enough of your brain to give you amnesia and rob you of all sense of identity, I’d be entitled to do what I like with you? To treat you as a commodity?’

‘I’d say the major ethical problem there is that you’d essentially be killing me,’ Nasim replied. ‘But nobody had their mind wiped to make the side-loads. The HCP donors were already dead, and the people we scanned are all still living their own complete, fulfilling lives, irrespective of anything that happens in Zendegi.’

‘And if I copy you exactly,’ Rollo countered, ‘atom for atom, and then mutilate your duplicate, then it’s acceptable?’

Here we go, Nasim thought, hypotheticals about matter transmitters. The golden key that unlocks every philosophical quandary.

‘Nobody gets mutilated when a side-load is made,’ she said. ‘We build them up from nothing, we don’t hack them down from some perfect, fully-functioning virtual brain.’

‘I know that,’ Rollo replied, ‘but the end product is still the same. And you don’t even know exactly which mental processes you have and haven’t excluded! I’ve read the patent applications, with all their talk of functional mapping, but don’t kid yourself that it’s down to some kind of fine art, where you can pick out a subset of abilities precisely – let alone guarantee that they’ll all fit together into some kind of stable entity. If you want to make something human, make it whole. If you want to enable people to step from their bodies into virtual immortality, perfectly copied, with all their abilities preserved and all their rights intact… go ahead and do it, we have no problem with that.’

‘That’s fifty years away, at least,’ Nasim said, ‘maybe a hundred.’

Rollo shrugged. ‘No doubt. But if you want to put humanity into a cheese grater and slice off little slavelets to pimp to the factories and the VR games, well… then you’ve got a war on your hands.’

Nasim looked away. Part of her wanted, very badly, to start blustering about his imminent capture, but she had no idea what the prospects of that were, and in any case a bout of premature triumphalism wouldn’t win her any favours.

‘You might find the factories harder to breach than Zendegi,’ she said. They’d probably go for in-house computing rather than the Cloud. Especially now.