Nasim had almost dozed off when a brief coda to IRIB’s main news bulletin brought her fully awake. ‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari says his research into the drug problem has been misrepresented by malicious elements of the foreign media.’ Nasim thumbed up the volume. ‘Mr Jabari issued a statement in Tehran this afternoon, describing a recent visit he made to an area of the city frequented by drug users, in order to gain insight into this tragedy. Having met one confused young man in urgent need of spiritual counselling, Mr Jabari agreed to drive him to his own mosque, in order to obtain advice from the mullah there. Unfortunately Mr Jabari’s car was involved in an accident, and now his act of charity has been portrayed in some quarters as an act of immorality. Mr Jabari stated that he would not take legal action against the slanderers, as his reputation among honest Iranians has not been affected by these lies.’
Nasim experienced a strange sense of cultural dislocation. This sounded exactly like the kind of story a senator in Washington might try to spin, as an intermediate step between the initial flat-out denial and the inevitable, tearful press conference with spouse, booking into rehab and finding of Jesus. She tried to picture Hassan Jabari standing at a podium with his wife beside him, blaming everything on prescription pills, then announcing that he was off to Qom for six months to get in touch with his spiritual side.
The doorbell rang. Nasim ignored it, hoping it was an easily discouraged Jehovah’s Witness, but the caller was persistent. She muted the TV and walked down the hall.
She opened the door to a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who asked, ‘Nasim Golestani?’ When Nasim nodded, she went on, ‘My name’s Jane Frampton, I’m a science journalist. I was hoping to have a word with you.’
‘A journalist?’
Frampton must have mistaken Nasim’s expression of alarm for some kind of struggle to place her name, because she added helpfully, ‘You might remember me from such New York Times bestsellers as The Sociobiology of The Simpsons and The Metaphysics of Melrose Place.’
‘I… don’t have much time to read outside my field,’ Nasim managed diplomatically.
‘May I come in?’
‘What is it you wanted to talk about?’ By now her mother would have had the woman ensconced in the living room, sipping tea and chewing gaz, but Nasim considered hospitality to be a greatly overrated virtue.
Frampton smiled. ‘The HCP. Off the record, of course-’
Nasim replied firmly, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible. You should direct all your questions to the MIT News Office.’
‘There’ll be no comeback, I promise,’ Frampton insisted. ‘I know how to protect my sources.’
‘I’m not a source! I don’t want to be a source!’ Nasim was bewildered. Why would any journalist go to the trouble of tracking her down? She was all in favour of academic free speech, but a costly, politically sensitive project still awaiting funding was never going to get off the ground if every postdoc who hoped to play a part in it started acting as a self-appointed spokesperson.
When she’d finally convinced Frampton that she had nothing to offer her, Nasim returned to the living room and sat with her laptop on her knees, reading the latest blog entries. Jabari’s statement was already being torn apart by dozens of expatriate Iranians, and even a few in-country bloggers had managed to get their own sardonic responses out onto foreign servers. As Nasim scrolled obsessively through the posts – all of them quoting the same tiny crumbs of information – she knew she was beginning to act pathologically, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t contributing anything to the struggle; she could sit here reading blogs all day, endorsing some views and arguing with others, but nothing she did would change the situation on the ground in Tehran or Shiraz. She should have gone to work, taken her mind off the protests, and caught up with all the news when she came home.
She glanced over at the picture of her father on the wall, impossibly young, frozen in time. What would he have expected of her? Probably not to care about anyone’s expectations. But when she followed her own instincts, ignoring her mother’s sensible example, she ended up sitting here in a masochistic stupor, hitting keys like a trained rat, aching for a reward that could never be delivered.
The doorbell rang again. Nasim tore herself away from the laptop and opened the door this time on a gaunt young man.
‘Can I help you?’ Looking at the hollows of his face she could easily have imagined that he was going door-to-door begging for food, but he was wearing a designer-label jacket that probably cost as much as a small car.
‘Are you Nasim?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Nate Caplan.’ He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, ‘My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it.’
‘Aha.’ Nasim was beginning to wonder if it was possible to overdose on cold remedies to the point of hallucinating.
‘I know I look skinny,’ Caplan continued, ‘but I have no lipid deficiencies that would lead to neurohistological abnormalities. I’ve had biopsies to confirm that. And I’m willing to give up the caloric restriction if you make it worth my while.’
Nasim knew what was happening now. This was why her contact details were supposed to be kept private, even while the Human Connectome Project remained nothing more than a set of ambitious proposals surrounded by a fog of blogospheric hype.
‘How did you get my address?’ she demanded.
Caplan gave her a co-conspirator’s smile. ‘I know you have to be careful. But I promise you, I’m not setting you up. You’ll get the money, and it will be untraceable. All I want from you in return is a guarantee that when the time comes, I’ll be the one.’
Nasim didn’t know where to start. ‘If the HCP goes ahead, the first maps will be utterly generic. We’ll be tracing representative pathways within and between a few dozen brain regions, and then extrapolating from that. And we’ll be using hundreds of different donor brains, for different regions and different tracing techniques. If you really want to kill yourself and donate your organs to science, go right ahead, but even if I took your bribe and somehow managed to get your brain included in the project… you’d have no more chance of waking up in cyberspace than if you’d donated a kidney.’
Caplan replied, more puzzled than offended, ‘Do I look like an idiot? That’s the program now. But ten years down the track, when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution-’
‘Ten years?’ Nasim spluttered. ‘Do you have any idea how unrealistic that is?’
‘Ten, twenty, thirty… whatever. You’re getting in on the ground floor, so this is my chance to be there with you. I need to put the fix in early.’
Nasim said flatly, ‘I’m not taking your money. And I want to know how you got my address!’
Caplan’s previously unshakeable confidence seemed to waver. ‘Are you saying the rabbit wasn’t your idea?’
‘What rabbit?’
He took his phone from his pocket and showed her a map of the area. A small icon of a rabbit wearing a mortarboard was positioned at the location of her house. When Caplan tapped the icon with his finger, an information overlay popped up, giving her name, affiliation and research interests. The HCP wasn’t mentioned explicitly, but anyone in the know could have worked out that she belonged to a group that was hoping to be part of the project.