‘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.’
‘Hmm.’ Caplan glanced down at some notes displayed on the table-top. ‘You mention reading players’ facial expressions?’
Nasim gestured at her goggles; they’d be invisible to Caplan, but they both knew they were there. ‘In less than a year, these will be replaced by contact lenses. It won’t be long before we routinely have an unobstructed view of players’ faces.’
Caplan said, ‘Sure, but don’t you think human face-reading skills have already been surpassed by micro-expression analysis?’
‘Perhaps,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But it might still be useful to developers to have something less forensic, for those times when they want a Proxy who seems attentive or sympathetic, rather than one who can beat you at poker or deliver a knock-out cross-examination in a murder trial. Anyway, that’s only one skill out of dozens.’
‘Many of the other skills are verbal, though, aren’t they?’ Caplan pointed out. ‘I’m still not quite clear what the deal is with language.’
‘Ah.’ Nasim knew this was her weakest point, but she confronted it head-on. ‘Obviously the HCP data itself will only encode knowledge of English; that’s the nature of the population they scanned. In the worst-case scenario, that could mean that we’d have to restrict our verbal modules to English, which we’d then license to VR providers with a large English-language customer base. Even so, that’s a huge market, so we could expect a decent return in terms of revenue even if we couldn’t use the same modules generally within Zendegi itself.’
‘And the less worse-case?’
‘We could probably exploit English-based modules in non-English scenarios to some degree, just by feeding their input and output through existing translation software – just as we do for players who don’t share a common language. But I’d hope we could do one better than that and train at least some of the modules to be bilingual.’
‘Expose them to huge data-sets and tweak them to give the right responses?’ Caplan suggested.