Bahador knocked and entered the room; Nasim had taken to leaving the door half open to spare him the formalities.
‘We’re getting a strong demand surge from the south-east Asian arcades,’ he said. ‘We’re still below critical latency, but it’s tight.’
‘Okay.’ Nasim gritted her teeth. ‘If you have to, just . . . kill all my stuff.’
‘Will do.’ Bahador departed as quietly as he’d come.
You could have argued with me, Nasim thought irritably. At least gone through the motions, before accepting the inevitable. She watched the progress bars from her half-dozen tasks inching towards completion. Normally she would have been delighted that so many Indonesians and Malaysians were starting their weekend with an hour or two in Zendegi, but the racetrack drives she was sharing with these gamers were the only place she had to hold the intermediate results of her calculations. If Zendegi needed the storage there was no question of saving what she had in an offline back-up; writing that much data to holographic dye cubes would take hours. She’d simply have to hand the space over immediately, tossing a day’s work into the void.
The HCP had scanned the brains of more than four thousand subjects in unprecedented detail; most of the scans had been done on cadavers, but diffusion tensor imaging, which tracked the flow of water molecules along living nerve fibres, had also been employed. The full data set included equal numbers of males and females, but for the kind of composite model Nasim was trying to build it was worth analysing the sexes separately, removing at least one source of variation; the more alike the brains’ anatomy and organisation, the clearer the final picture would be. She’d started with the males, because she knew that if she’d chosen females for the demonstration everyone would have demanded to know why. But the model-building algorithm needed to generate temporary data for every possible pair of scans. Even using just the male subjects meant dealing with close on two million pairings.
One task reached its endpoint, saving its results and freeing up its working storage and processor allocation. Go see a movie instead, Nasim begged the teenagers of Kuala Lumpur. Just for tonight.
She brought up a latency histogram. It was flickering at the edge of critical, with a small proportion of customers experiencing minor, sporadic delays between their actions and the changes they wrought upon the virtual world. Mere head movements were handled locally, within the ghal’eha; no amount of congestion within Zendegi’s servers could disrupt the relationship between the user’s gaze and the image rendered in their goggles. But the object descriptions being fed to the castles needed to be updated rapidly enough to maintain the illusion of a fluid, responsive world. A tranquil stroll across a Martian desert might not suffer from a few extra milliseconds of latency, but a game of virtual table tennis could go downhill very fast. And while the brain was good at filtering out brief perceptual glitches, once they crossed a certain threshold all it could do was encourage you to stop indulging in risky behaviour for the sensorially confused - preferably after getting rid of the suspect contents of your stomach.
A second task finished. A third. Nasim peeked at one of the high-load games, looking down on a group of six hundred Indonesians who’d come together on a single, crowded battlefield to take on an army of leering demons. Along with their implausible rippling physiques, most of the good guys had magic charms and special powers - hard-won in gruelling quests, or stolen in battle, or maybe just bought with real money on the side. But nobody had signed up to play the spawn of the underworld; the enemy was entirely simulated. The game’s designers had the mechanics of a certain style of swordplay down pat, and Zendegi’s framework made the demons’ motions anatomically plausible, but aside from threats to tear out their opponents’ hearts they weren’t much good at repartee.
Perhaps none of the boisterous young men and women playing Minions of Eblis really wanted an opponent who was anything more than a robotic caricature of evil - and encouraging the beheading of more empathetic characters was not on any sane person’s wish-list. But in other games there were Proxies playing comrades and team-mates, guides and mentors, humble massed extras and world-shaking deities. Expanding the Proxies’ repertoire far beyond the range of these glowering, tongue-poking puppets would see players flock to Zendegi just as surely as if their competitors’ worlds had faded to black and white.
Nasim’s fourth task finished. It took all the self-discipline she could muster not to message Bahador to hold off regardless, to give her ten minutes more, no matter what havoc it caused. Even a few dozen customers with nausea or vertigo would be too high a price to pay; word of such incidents spread quickly, even when it was all down to idiots who couldn’t grasp the fact that they really were jogging after filling their stomachs with food.
The fifth task completed. Nasim glanced again at the Minions battlefield; the ground was soaked in green blood, the enemy almost vanquished, but if she remembered rightly, some of the demons had a habit of rising up and reconnecting their own heads. If she’d been feeling sufficiently ruthless she could have sought out the hidden levers that would keep these monsters down - but if news of her intervention ever got out, the stench would be worse than any number of ghal’eha full of vomit.
The sixth progress bar hit its endpoint and vanished. Nasim was dazed; she hadn’t expected her luck to hold out. Now that the neural model had been rebuilt and safely stored, the vast digital scratchpad needed to create it was no longer required. She could test the end product at her leisure.
Bahador appeared in the doorway and asked hopefully, ‘May I—?’ He must have been watching the race as closely as she had.
Nasim smiled. ‘Sure. Take a seat.’ Her desktop monitor had back-to-back screens; she switched on the flip-side and set it to mirror the main screen so Bahador could watch from his side of the desk.
Nasim took a few deep breaths. All the awkward manoeuvring with cranes and slings to get the whale into position for each trial took so much time and effort that she sometimes longed for a little more rigmarole surrounding the test itself. But she’d automated everything and now she could invoke the whole complex set-up with a single gesture. She pointed at the icon on the screen and mimed tapping it.
Half-a-dozen windows opened in rapid succession. The largest contained what looked at first glance like a real-time MRI image of a living human brain. A second glance revealed that an awful lot of vital brain tissue was missing, so it was hard to see how the subject could possibly be alive. Nevertheless, regions of the scan were lighting up, displaying patterns of normal, healthy activity that any neurologist would recognise.
A male voice began to speak in English:
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.’
The voice was faltering and flat. It might have belonged to an unenthusiastic, not-too-bright ten-year-old struggling to read aloud for his teacher, putting on a strange accent to amuse his classmates. The text-to-speech feature in the cheapest notepad was a model of perfect diction and clarity by comparison.
But this voice was not powered by a phonetic dictionary and a list of explicit contextual rules, assembled by lexicographers and linguists, then tweaked by comparison with millions of training sets. This voice was the product of nothing but the model-building algorithm’s best guess at the detailed neural wiring of half-a-dozen regions in a hypothetical adult human brain: a brain that was the functional best fit to the two thousand males that had been scanned for the HCP.
‘ “The epoch of incredulity”,’ Nasim echoed. ‘Not bad for a lowest-common-denominator vocabulary.’
Bahador smiled nervously. ‘Can you push it a bit further? See if it stays on track?’ The previous iteration had read as far as the second ‘times’ before it ceased paying attention to the text and began emitting a disturbing, not-quite-random word salad.
Nasim fed in a
nother piece of the sample text. The simulation had no hands to reposition a virtual page, no head to tilt to change its angle of view, but it could move its virtual eyeballs across a paragraph, and it was predisposed to read whatever fell within its visual field.
‘It was the spring of hope,’ the voice continued. ‘It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the super . . . super . . . superlative degree of comparison only.’
‘One stutter,’ Nasim acknowledged. ‘After more than a hundred words. And all this with a skull full of empty space.’ She’d used a library of task-specific activation maps to select the regions of the brain to model - and in his present incarnation, Blank Frank possessed only the bare minimum needed to recite what was put in front of him. He had no ability to ponder the meaning of this quote from Dickens, to reflect on its imagery, to pursue its implications. He would not even recall the words a few seconds later; he possessed only working memory, a rolling present no deeper than it needed to be to parse a sentence. He could read a virtual teleprompter; anything more was beyond him.
As a proof of principle, though, he was spectacular. Every one of the two thousand male subjects scanned by the HCP would have acquired each word in their vocabulary under different circumstances. Over time, those words would have accreted vastly different associations. Hope? Despair? What kind of heart-breaking personal meaning had those strings of letters once carried for each of these men? Yet the algorithm had managed to peel away the tangle of idiosyncrasies and home in on the simplest common ground.
‘So how do you teach him Farsi?’ Bahador wondered. ‘Or Bahasa, or Arabic?’
‘He’s barely ten minutes old, and you want him to be a polyglot?’
‘Won’t he have to be, eventually?’ Bahador insisted gently.
Nasim rubbed her temples, half grateful, half annoyed to be brought down to Earth so quickly. How close were they to impressing a potential investor? Back in Redland’s lab her colleagues would have been awestruck, but winning over the Giorgio Omanis was another matter.
‘How do we persuade a mob of jaded algae-barons - who don’t even appreciate Zendegi as it is! - that a dim, monolingual zombie is the key to the next big thing in VR?’ She thought for a while. ‘Maybe we just need to find the right metaphor. Why not sell this as “strip-mining the brain”?’
Bahador looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t forget that we’re talking about good Muslim boys; they might be partial to the occasional whisky, but any suggestion of grave-robbing is going to give them the heebie-jeebies.’
Nasim scowled. ‘Organ transplants are perfectly acceptable in Islam, so I really don’t see why—’
Bahador fixed her with an incredulous gaze. ‘You really think it’s that simple? I’m not saying that if some cleric was persuaded to consider the matter for a decade or two you couldn’t end up with a favourable ruling, but I wouldn’t take it as given that anyone else will see this as cut and dried the way you do.’
‘The donors all gave unrestricted consent,’ Nasim said stubbornly. ‘That ought to be the end of the matter.’
‘Fine. So if you want an investor, find one who thinks the same way. You must have met a few godless American businessmen who’d think nothing of “strip-mining” dead people’s brains.’
‘I was a student!’ Nasim retorted. ‘My friends were all students. Not everyone in America is a millionaire.’
Bahador spread his hands. ‘Well, don’t look at me. I’m the one who has to hide when the sheikhs come for tea.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better go keep an eye on the Indian surge if we don’t want to lose the last of our loyal fans there.’
Nasim nodded distractedly. When he’d left, she sat brooding. Personal connections weren’t everything, and it probably wouldn’t be too hard to get in touch with a few technology venture capitalists outside the company’s usual circle of Arab and Iranian backers. Anywhere in East Asia, Europe or North America her track record at MIT would at least get her a hearing. But even if she could find potential investors with no ethical or cultural objections to exploiting the HCP donors this way, how many of them would see Blank Frank as anything more than a novelty act? A digital mosaic of corpse brains that read Dickens would look about as promising to most people as a car engine based on Galvani’s twitching frog legs.
What she needed was someone at least as optimistic as she was about the technology’s potential. Someone who’d listen to Frank’s leaden recitation and picture a whole army of nimble, articulate Proxies rising from the same scans. Someone who’d convinced themselves long ago that the Human Connectome Project was destined to do more than help cure a few neurological diseases.
Maybe she should try the more conventional sources first, though, and leave Caplan as a last resort. She knew that he’d assembled a small empire of niche technology businesses, but she hadn’t really followed his fortunes; she wasn’t even sure that he still had money to burn. He could have squandered his inheritance on legal battles with the Superintelligence Project, trawling the world for homeless amnesiacs willing to swear that they were Zachary Churchland’s love-child.
But the longer Nasim spent turning the options over in her mind, the more it seemed that her reservations were just excuses to spare her pride. She couldn’t recall every word that she’d spoken to Caplan the last time they’d met, but she’d certainly spurned him comprehensively enough to make it awkward to come begging for his help all these years later.
Well, too bad. She couldn’t afford to shunt her best prospect to the end of the list. She had a choice between wasting six months collecting polite, frozen smiles from a dozen cautious entrepreneurs, or going straight to the loose cannon who’d once tried to force half a million dollars into her hands on the strength of a rabbit icon on a map of Cambridge.
Nasim entered the boardroom and took a pair of augmentation goggles from the cabinet near the door. She spent half a minute fussing with the strap, trying to make the goggles fit comfortably; the room was equipped with the technology for the sake of impressing clients, but she rarely had reason to use it herself.
She sat at the empty conference table and waited.
Caplan came online punctually, appearing to be seated directly opposite her. Their two tables were apparently close enough in size for the software to decide to re-scale everything so they were superimposed exactly, which made for less visual fuss. Nasim had deliberately cleared the space where she’d expected Caplan to show up, and he’d shown her the same courtesy, but elsewhere around the table chairs from the two locations intersected haphazardly. The room he was in was a little smaller than hers, so his walls were ghosted around her to remind her not to step through them.
‘You’re looking well, Nasim,’ Caplan said mildly.
‘You too.’ In fact, he barely seemed to have aged since they’d last met. Maybe the caloric restriction program was worth it after all, assuming this wasn’t just vanity and software. Nasim was showing herself honestly enough; routine distractions had kept her from updating her conferencing icon for about eighteen months, but she was quite sure that this small oversight was not enough to make her look twenty-five.
‘I read your proposal,’ Caplan said. ‘What you’ve achieved so far is impressive.’
‘Thank you.’ Nasim’s mouth was dry; she’d already grovelled a little in the email she’d sent him, but she was steeling herself for a certain amount of retributive gloating.
‘If I’ve understood you correctly,’ Caplan continued, ‘the main pay-off you see coming from this work is a set of stand-alone modules that your games developers will be able to call on, to assist them in programming a limited range of Proxy behaviours.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ Nasim replied. ‘There are some aspects of social - and even spatial
- intelligence where humans still out-perform our best algorithms. If we can isolate a set of basic skills from the HCP data, then offer them up as a kind of library that developers can hook into with a minimum of fuss, that will benefit them enormously.’
‘But most aspects of the Proxies will remain the province of ordinary software?’ Caplan pressed her. ‘Biographical details, long-term context, strategic considerations—’
‘Of course,’ Nasim confirmed. ‘Even if we could construct a “whole brain” model that included the neural dynamics needed to support long-term memory, and even if we could figure out how to wire a Proxy’s notional back-story into that model . . . that wouldn’t just be wildly ambitious, it would be inefficient and highly inconvenient. Developers need to have a simple database of facts about their non-player characters that they can manipulate as easily as the geographical database for the game world. Sure, they want certain responses to the human players to be more natural, but not at the expense of an ability to follow predetermined scripts, or adopt explicitly programmed strategies. Trying to implement too much as part of the neural model would just make those things more difficult.’