Zendegi

Martin was intrigued. ‘So what’s your angle?’ Alice earned her living as a website designer, but she seemed to spend most of her spare time on mildly nefarious projects, like the ‘Groundhog Cage’ she’d constructed that made thirty-day free-trial software think it was always on the first day of the trial. Apparently this was harder than simply lying to the software about the true date; there were exchanges with distant servers to be faked as well.

‘I’m still analysing the system,’ she said, ‘trying to figure out how to game it.’

‘Right.’ Martin hesitated. ‘But if the experts can’t write software that classifies images as well as a human brain can, how are you going to write a program to simulate your own responses?’

‘I don’t have to,’ Alice replied. ‘I just have to make something that passes for human.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘People aren’t all going to react identically,’ she said. ‘There might or might not be a clear majority response to each class of image, but you certainly won’t get the same signal from everyone. Some participants – through no fault of their own – won’t be pulling their weight; that’s a statistical certainty. But the company wouldn’t dare discriminate against people whose brains don’t happen to go aaah every time they see a fluffy kitten; they’ll still get the same rewards. I want to see if I can ride the coattails of the distribution.’

‘So you’d be satisfied with passing as a low-affect psychopath, just so long as you don’t actually come across as brain-dead?’

‘That’s about it.’

Martin rubbed his eyes. Though he admired her ingenuity, there was something about her obsessive need to prove that she could milk the system that felt every bit as crass as the brain-farming scheme itself.

‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tips.’

‘No problem.’ Alice smiled, suddenly self-conscious. ‘So when are you flying out?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Right.’ Her smile stayed awkwardly frozen, and Martin realised that it wasn’t her eccentric head-ware that was making her embarrassed. ‘I’m really sorry about you and Liz,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘How long were you together?’

‘Fifteen years,’ he said.

Alice looked stunned; she’d been their neighbour for almost a year, but the subject had probably never come up before. Alice was in her mid-twenties; fifteen years would sound like a lifetime.

Martin said, ‘I think Liz decided that Islamabad was the last hardship post she was willing to put up with.’ He couldn’t blame her; Pakistan and Iran were not the most appealing locations for Western women with no reason of their own to be there. Liz worked in finance, for a company that didn’t mind where she lived so long as she had an internet connection, but Martin suspected that somewhere in the back of her mind she’d imagined that the years in Purgatory were going to be rewarded with Paris or Prague. Martin’s employers reasoned instead that his time in Pakistan was the ideal preparation for their new Tehran correspondent, and after twelve months slacking off as an online news editor in Sydney, a return to the field was long overdue.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice repeated.

Martin waved her crib-notes in thanks and replied with a parody of a honey-toned late-night DJ from the eighties, ‘I’d better go spin some discs.’

Martin started with the Eurythmics’ Touch. He fussed over the cables and the software settings, checking and rechecking every option, and when he’d finished the recording he played back the entire album to be sure that everything had worked properly.

Annie Lennox’s voice still gave him goose-bumps. He’d only seen her performing live once, in a muddy field in the countryside north of Sydney in January 1984. Talking Heads, The Cure and The Pretenders had all played at the same festival. Unseasonal downpours had drenched the campgrounds and he could still remember queuing in the rain to use the unspeakable toilets, but it had all been worth it.

Martin had been eighteen years old then; he would not meet Liz for more than a decade. In fact, all of his vinyl predated her; by the time they moved in together he’d bought a CD player and now the soundtrack to their entire relationship was already on his hard drive, safely out of sight. These crate-loads of old music would carry him back to the era before her – and with the possible exception of Ana Ng, you couldn’t miss someone you hadn’t even met yet.

It was an appealing idea, and for a few hours he lost himself in Talking Heads, drinking in their strange, naïve optimism. But by late evening he’d started on Elvis Costello and the mood was turning darker. He could have hunted through the crates for something cheerier – there was a Madness compilation in there somewhere – but he was tired of steering his emotions. Even when the music simply made the years melt away, the time-tripping itself was beginning to leave him maudlin. If he kept this up for two weeks he’d be a wreck.