‘And this implant will keep me healthy?’

‘It should keep you conscious, and a notch above bed-ridden; it substitutes for some of the liver’s functions, but not all of them. It’s what we would have used if you’d reached this point and there hadn’t been a perfectly good organ waiting for you.’

‘How much will that cost me?’

‘Five million.’

‘Rials?’

‘Tomans.’

A toman was ten Iranian rials. Five million tomans was about ten thousand US dollars; Martin still had enough of Mahnoosh’s life insurance to cover it. He’d wanted to leave that money for Javeed, but his own policy would pay out soon enough.

Martin said, ‘How soon could I have it done?’

Jobrani struggled with his notepad’s interface, frowning and cursing under his breath. ‘If you can pay in advance, we can do it tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Fine.’ Martin took his own notepad from the bedside table and transferred the money.

Javeed would be in school. Martin called Omar and let him know how things were going; Omar said he’d bring Javeed in to visit in the afternoon.

Martin lay back and closed his eyes for a few minutes, trying to build up the strength for one more call.

He was surprised when Nasim answered; given all the problems Zendegi was facing, the most he’d been hoping for was her voicemail.

‘I won’t be able to come in tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Are you all right, Martin?’

‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘This is crunch time; no more scans. You need to build the Proxy with whatever you’ve got.’

Nasim was silent for a while, then she said, ‘Okay. I can do that.’

‘What sort of time are we looking at?’

‘I’ll do a provisional build overnight,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll test it myself sometime tomorrow. But then I’ll need you to come in and…’

‘Give the final verdict.’ Martin had interviewed his own potential replacements for most of his journalistic postings; if he looked at it that way it might not be so strange.

Nasim said, ‘When will you be able to do that?’

‘I’m in the hospital right now, but they’ll be letting me out soon. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.’

‘All right.’

‘I saw the news,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sorry you’re having a hard time.’

Nasim laughed. ‘Don’t worry about it. Whatever else is going on, we’re going to make this happen.’

When Martin put the notepad down and looked up at the ceiling, violet bruises moved across the white plaster in waves.

Nasim spent the day reading reports from Falaki’s team and passing her summaries up the chain of command. With three days remaining to the first of Rollo’s deadlines, the board had decided to hold off making any decision until it was clear how the investigation in Holland was panning out. An act of capitulation that resolved Zendegi’s problems might make the stock market happy, but a timely arrest could do the same without eroding the value of the company’s intellectual property. The security experts at the FLOPS House were working diligently through the log files Falaki had sent them, as well as their own staff access records, and they were hopeful that they’d soon identify the culprit. Certainly everyone was confident that an outsider could not have done the deed.

The total number of customers using Zendegi was down twenty per cent on the same time slots the week before, but there had also been tens of thousands of people joining up; perhaps they were hoping to witness some entertaining mayhem if there was another attack. The first breach had certainly been more amusing than repellent, so anyone who’d missed the whole punitive escalation angle might be expecting something diverting that would let them hold on to their dinner. Nasim knew that Happy Universe had long included a kind of ritualised breakdown of the usual game-world boundaries, where selected environments could sporadically gate-crash each other just to stir things up. But she wasn’t about to kid herself that the cis-humanists’ assault would lapse into a kind of harmless anarchist theatre.

By the time she’d cleared her in-tray of everything pressing involving the extortionists, it was nine in the evening and no one else was in the building. She went to the tea room and microwaved one of the vegetable lasagnes she kept in the freezer there; she sat eating in the empty room, giving herself fifteen minutes away from her desk and screen. She didn’t feel ready for the task that lay ahead of her, but she knew that if she went home now she’d get no sleep at all, and only have to face the same thing, twice as tired, the following night.

She’d prepared a test environment for the Proxy weeks before: a simply furnished antechamber where in the future – if all went well – the Proxy would be brought up to date with developments in Javeed’s life before it stepped through into a different space to meet him. It would be her job to deliver these briefings, but she would not enter the environment through a ghal’e; her own sense of immersion was not important, and software could move her icon for her while her webcam supplied facial data.

Back in her office, she set the test in motion.

A wide-angle view of the antechamber appeared on the screen. The walls were panelled with oak, and two plush red sofas stood on either side of each of the two doors. The Proxy entered through one door, emerging from a world of featureless whiteness resembling the inside of a closed ghal’e. Its icon was being moved for it involuntarily at first, but as it woke to find itself in mid-step it took the reins easily enough. It was using the same form of puppetry Martin had used when he was lying in the MRI, but starting it flat on its back would only have encouraged it to brood on its strange condition as it struggled to recall how to get its icon upright.

Nasim’s icon was seated on one of the sofas by the second door. The Proxy turned to face her, smiling in recognition, and the screen switched to her point of view.

‘Nasim?’ the Proxy said. ‘What are you doing in Zendegi? Where’s Javeed?’

‘You’ll see Javeed soon,’ she said. ‘I’m just here to bring you up to speed.’

The Proxy frowned slightly, but then it seemed to grasp what she meant. It waited patiently for her to say more.

‘It’s 2030,’ she said. ‘Javeed’s nine years old now; his birthday was last week.’

‘Okay.’ The Proxy beamed at her, apparently unperturbed by the realisation that he must have been woken more than a hundred times already. Certainly the neural activity maps in the corner of the screen revealed no stress, no fear, no hostility.

‘His icon’s been updated,’ Nasim continued, ‘so don’t be surprised by how tall he’s become.’

‘No, of course not.’ The Proxy gestured at the door. ‘What’s he into now? Still the Shahnameh?’

‘Close: elephant racing.’

The Proxy laughed. ‘How? How can he sit on an elephant in Zendegi?’

‘Most of the ghal’eha now have something like a retractable mechanical bull,’ Nasim explained. ‘There’s a geodesic frame to support it, and it folds up out of the way when it’s not needed. The shape’s variable, so you can feel like you’re riding almost anything: a motorbike, a horse, an elephant. Or you could just be sitting on a motionless chair.’

‘That’s amazing,’ the Proxy said. ‘Elephant races! Javeed will be over the moon.’

Nasim said, ‘Does the situation bother you?’

‘What situation?’

‘The fact that Martin’s been dead for more than two years,’ she said bluntly.

The Proxy’s face showed nothing but sympathy. ‘How’s Javeed coping?’

‘He’s all right,’ Nasim replied.

The Proxy said quietly, ‘I hope I’ve been some help.’

Nasim wasn’t comfortable responding to that. ‘What’s your relationship to Javeed?’ she asked.

‘Relationship? I’m his father. Javeed is my son.’ The Proxy’s expression was mildly quizzical; the neural maps still showed no distress, no anxiety.