Milad had been showing her a new interface for developers to tap into the social instincts of a set of composite, male, multilingual side-loads – there were so many different types of module now that Nasim had given up inventing nicknames for all of them – when every monitor in the room sounded an alarm and opened a window into the same environment. Every complaint coming in from the arcades now triggered this response; Nasim had decided it was better to be safe than tardy. Most of the alarms were trivial matters that were only passed on when the arcade staff were inexperienced: personal disputes between customers, or basic misconceptions about the way the system was supposed to work. And even the majority of genuine programming glitches had nothing to do with Zendegi and simply needed to be forwarded to the appropriate game developer.
This complaint was not trivial, though, and it could not be palmed off on someone else. In the ballroom of the starship Harmony – home of a popular science-fictional soap opera of the same name – handsome, epauletted, anthropomorphic aliens were turning into excrement. And they were not merely melting into pools of suggestive goo that might have raised a snicker but could have been something else entirely; they were morphing into stick figures built of soft brown cylinders flecked with undigested roughage.
‘Arif!’ Nasim shouted, ‘launch the Faribas!’ Some of the post-colonic gingerbread men were running around the ballroom, trying to embrace people. The thumbs-down escape had been disabled; why every customer didn’t just whip off their goggles, Nasim couldn’t guess – unless it was pure shock – but stampeding partygoers had formed a crush at the exit and the first dreadful hug was clearly only seconds away. Nasim averted her eyes; she was already having trouble keeping her breakfast down.
‘Arif?’ She walked over to his cubicle.
‘They’re not working!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Faribas! I’m showing them the environment, but the modules are just… frozen – unresponsive.’
Nasim said, ‘Grossed out?’
‘What?’
She risked a brief peek at the ballroom, then looked away again; brown smears on tablecloths and ballgowns lingered on some fold of her visual cortex that was going to need scrubbing out with disinfectant. ‘How many people could sit staring at that,’ she said, ‘and calmly point out all the anomalies?’ The Fariba modules had included all the basic human visual responses; they would hardly have needed specialised training to acquire this one. Every donor to the HCP would have averted their gaze – and if their eyes had been pinned open and forcibly locked on the nauseating scene, they would have done their best to blank it out, to stare right through it. The Faribas had no power to turn their eyes away, but they could still mentally disengage and refuse to sift through this sewer.
Arif pondered the unexpected obstacle. ‘Maybe I can route all the objects into separate environments and show each of them to a separate instance of the Faribas. Then we can eliminate anything that grosses them out – without them having to spend time telling us exactly where it is in the original scene.’
‘How long will that take?’ Nasim glanced at another part of his screen; six thousand complaints had now been registered. Hundreds of games were affected, including Virtual Azimi.
‘Five minutes. Maybe ten.’
‘Go!’
Arif started typing. Nasim watched him, agonised for thirty seconds, then went to Bahador. ‘Shut us down.’
‘Are you sure?’ He looked at the Harmony window through a gap in his fingers. ‘Oh my God. Now it’s kissing-’
Nasim reached over his shoulder and tapped the icon to start the shutdown. The touch-screen needed both of their thumb-prints; all the confirmatory steps were taking forever. When the ballroom scene finally blanked out, Nasim slumped against a partition.
She closed her eyes and tried to think calmly about the situation. Within half an hour they could restart from back-ups, and Arif’s improved filter would be ready if they needed it. One Fariba per object would cost a lot to run, though. In any case, they’d be refunding all their customers for the outage, and most of those who’d witnessed anything like the Harmony attack would never be coming back.
Nasim composed herself and walked to the front of the room, where she could see all the programmers at once. Arif was still typing, his eyes locked to his screen, but everyone else looked dazed. This was the first time in a decade that Zendegi had been shut down completely.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there was no choice this time; we had to retreat. But this isn’t over. Cyber-Jahan tried to muscle in on us; Shahidi’s tried boycotts and intimidation. But we’re not going to be cowed by anyone-’
Her notepad buzzed.
‘Excuse me.’ She took the device from her pocket – expecting an angry summons from the boss, but half-daring to hope it was a message from Falaki informing her that his supervisor processes had paid off and pinned down the hackers.
The message was from an anonymous sender, and it consisted of five English words:
‘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.