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.
‘Of course,’ Rollo said. ‘And sabotage is not our preferred option anyway. We’ll be campaigning hard to outlaw side-loading everywhere; smearing shit over your customers is just a short-term tactic. Eventually you’ll find a way to block us out, and even if Zendegi and Eikonometrics go bankrupt in the process, your intellectual property will just end up with someone else. But we’re starting early, outside the law, because it’s the only way to nip this atrocity in the bud: to slow the growth of the practice by making it clear – from the start, to everyone – that doing things this way will attract a penalty.’
‘Atrocity?’ Nasim scowled. ‘If you’re such a warrior for the rights of conscious beings, stop pissing around with Zendegi and go derail a massacre somewhere.’
The lights on the Ferris wheel snapped on; some of the Proxies beneath them clapped and cheered.
Rollo looked back at Nasim calmly. ‘So you’re happy with your games modules; your conscience is clear. Fine. But do you really think it will stop there? If there is no law, if there is no line drawn, what makes you so sure that it’s not going to end with software that even you’d call conscious? With no rights and no freedom. It might not require anything that sophisticated to churn out shoes or notepads, but what about aged-care services? Or child-minding?’
Nasim’s skin crawled at his use of that phrase, but she still didn’t believe that he knew about Martin.
‘Every time you attack us,’ she said, ‘we use tens of thousands of side-loads as part of the defence. How does that grab your conscience?’
Rollo betrayed no surprise or anguish, but his icon wouldn’t necessarily display every emotion that crossed his flesh-and-blood face. After a while he said, ‘That’s disgusting, but it’s not going to change anything.’
He looked down at the Proxies. ‘How long will it be before the process is so cheap and simple that you’re using side-loads in every crowd scene? Computers are never going to rise up and enslave us, like the idiots in Hollywood portrayed it – or rescue us, like the idiots in Houston believe – but you’d happily send our most human-like mind-children straight into a hell of meaningless servitude and fragmented consciousness that we built for them all by ourselves.’
Nasim said, ‘The only thing that’s going to come close to hell for side-loads is if we have to keep using them to screen out your shit.’
Rollo met her gaze. ‘These are our terms: you can keep Virtual Azimi and anything else that’s limited to vision and motor skills, but you have to announce an end to the use of all other side-loads. If you don’t make the promise within seven days, and honour it within another seven, the attacks will resume.’