Zendegi

Martin didn’t want to dwell on what would happen if VEVAK had uncovered Omar’s role in getting Shokouh out of the country. ‘We could go to the police station, ask there,’ he suggested. He couldn’t think of anything else to try; they’d be hard-pressed to find a lawyer at this hour. Rana repeated this to Mohsen, and he agreed.

The central police station was more crowded than Martin had seen it before, with a queue of anxious relatives spilling out onto the street and halfway down the block. There’d been no mass arrests at the march itself, and the brawls with the Basijis had not been widespread – the only explanation Martin could think of was that there’d been some kind of crackdown in the hours after the march, with hundreds of minor dissidents rounded up. He tried to find a positive spin on that: if Omar had been arrested for nothing more than a few indiscreet comments overheard by informers, the chances were he’d be released within a day or two, uncharged.

When they joined the queue the first half-dozen people ahead of them offered to cede their place to Mohsen; he politely declined, but they kept insisting until he accepted. Martin couldn’t entirely fathom why he wasn’t simply admitted to the head of the queue; it wasn’t as if the dozens of people who were now content to remain in front of him were any less respectful of his status as a veteran. Perhaps it was a kind of trade-off, a gesture that showed respect without overstepping the mark into condescension.

Rana wouldn’t lift her gaze from the ground, and she resisted Martin’s attempts to distract her with small-talk and optimistic prognoses. He was trying to keep his own imagination in check; he knew what went on in Evin Prison, but nobody was going to round up and torture every last Iranian who’d ever stocked contraband action movies. Only if they’d traced Shokouh’s false passport back to Omar would he be in real danger.

Martin spotted a woman further along the queue speaking on a phone, though she was doing her best to hide it in her sleeve. As far as he knew the Slightly Smart phones weren’t illegal, though perhaps they soon would be.

When she hung up the call, she turned and spoke agitatedly with her neighbour. Whatever the subject, it was not a private matter; within minutes Martin could see the news being spread up and down the line. Maybe the authorities had decided to charge Jabari after all; if his resignation hadn’t been enough to win back conservative support, why not pull out all the stops and have a show trial, to prove that nobody was above the law?

But any mention of Jabari always conjured up at least a few wry smiles. Nobody was smiling as they heard this news.

The rumour finally reached Mohsen and Rana; Martin’s Farsi had largely deserted him, but once he had heard Ansari’s name mentioned he could think of only two possibilities.

‘Have they arrested him?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Rana said, ‘he’s been shot. They’ve taken him to hospital, but he’s not expected to last the night.’

6

Nasim hunched over her computer screen, gazing intently at a section of code from her neural map integration routines, blocking out thoughts of anything else.

No two zebra finches sang exactly the same song; no two finches had identical brains. So how could you use partial, imperfect images of a thousand different finch brains to build up some kind of meaningful composite?

On a gross level the same structures within the brain appeared in more or less the same anatomical locations, but as you zoomed in towards the level of individual neurons, the cues that counted most were the cells’ biochemistry and their patterns of connections. The problem lay in keeping the notion of a pattern of connections from becoming meaninglessly vague, uselessly rigid, or maddeningly circular. If ten thousand cells of biochemical type A sent axons to ten thousand cells of type B, that certainly didn’t mean that they were all interchangeable. But if you insisted that only neurons that were wired up to identical neighbours in identical ways could be treated as common features, there would be no matches at all. Worse, if you could only characterise every neuron by first characterising the neurons to which it was joined, you ran the risk of pushing everything down a rabbit hole of endless self-reference. The whole endeavour was like trying to reconstruct the human skeleton from a thousand incomplete – and partly inconsistent – translations of ‘Dem Dry Bones’ into unknown foreign languages. ‘The fifflezerm’s connected to the girglesprig…’