Zendegi

Bahador nodded and leant forward. ‘When they came out of the ghal’eha, one of them said, “There’s nothing new here. We’ve seen this all before.”’

Nasim absorbed this news glumly. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t asked to choose the demo suite; at least I can’t get blamed for that.’

Bahador scowled. ‘Screw them. We have better lighting effects than anyone else, better facial interpolation, better gait dynamics. Then they come here and complain that we’re not hosting completely different games. No developer is going to write exclusively for us; the question is: does the game look better, does it feel more natural, when it’s running in Zendegi?’

‘That’s true,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but it’s starting to look pretty marginal. So long as Cyber-Jahan has more customers, developers are going to release there first. And for anything with a strong social component, sheer force of numbers is going to make the experience better.’

Bahador didn’t reply. Nasim wished she could have said something to boost his morale, but she suspected that only a massive marketing campaign could save them now. Any advances in mere technical excellence would be like decorating the ballroom as the ship went down.

‘If we had better Proxies,’ Bahador mused, ‘the numbers wouldn’t matter so much.’

‘We do have better Proxies,’ Nasim protested. ‘We have the best biomechanical models in the world.’

Bahador nodded impatiently. ‘But as you said, that kind of advantage is marginal. They look natural enough, but when it comes to behaviour…’

‘Behaviour is a game-specific problem. It’s out of our hands.’

‘That’s my point,’ Bahador replied. ‘Maybe it shouldn’t be out of our hands. If we could supplement the biomechanics with the best behavioural models – and allow developers to leverage the whole package for free – it wouldn’t matter that Cyber-Jahan had the flesh-and-blood advantage. Playing a game with ten thousand high quality Proxies would actually be better than playing in a real crowd, because smart developers could tune all the interpersonal dynamics to suit the real players.’

Nasim said, ‘Okay, that’s a perfectly sensible goal – but we have no expertise in Proxy behaviour. And we’ve looked into this before. The boss sent me on a head-hunting trip a few years ago: India, Korea, the United States, Europe; I went to about fifty campuses and start-ups looking for researchers we could hire, or technology we could license. But there was nothing that was really close to passing for human in anything but the crudest shoot-’em-up.’

‘Was that when you visited the Superintelligence Project?’ Bahador had joined Zendegi a year later, but Nasim must have mentioned the trip to him before.

‘Yeah. No AI there.’ She had spent a day at their Houston complex, curious to find out what they’d done with Zachary Churchland’s billions once his bequest had finally made it through the Texan version of Bleak House. But the sum total of their achievements had amounted to a nine-hundred-page wish-list dressed up as a taxonomy, a fantasy of convenient but implausible properties for a vast imaginary hierarchy of software daemons and deities. The whole angelic realm had been described with the kind of detail often lavished on a game-world’s mythical bestiary, but Nasim had seen no evidence that these self-improving cyber-djinn had any more chance of being brought to life than the denizens of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.

‘That was five years ago,’ Bahador said. ‘The state of the art’s changed; look at the viziers in Palace Intrigue, say-’

‘They’re not bad,’ Nasim conceded, ‘but we’re never going to be able to acquire that technology exclusively for Zendegi. The game developers have no interest in picking a fight with Cyber-Jahan.’

‘So forget the state-of-the-art,’ Bahador suggested. ‘Hire the people who’ll go beyond it.’

‘They’re already working for the game developers! If we tried to poach Proxologists now, it’d mean a bidding war, and we just don’t have that kind of money.’

Bahador raised his hands in a gesture of mock resignation. ‘Okay, I give up. We’re finished. I’ll send my résumé to Bangalore and brush up on my Hinglish.’

Nasim laughed. ‘If you really want to impress them, learn Kannada; that’s the founders’ first language.’

Bahador glanced at his watch. ‘They’ll be taking the guests to the boardroom for tea soon. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.’

‘Maybe Cyber-Jahan will just acquire us,’ Nasim mused. ‘Wait for the stock to get a bit lower, then buy themselves a regional subsidiary.’

Bahador said nothing, but he looked away, his body language suddenly reproachful, even wounded. Despite his own résumé joke, Nasim could tell that she’d crossed some kind of line. The two of them – along with a dozen of their colleagues – had worked like maniacs for the last four years to make Zendegi the most impressive VR engine on the planet. So how could she be so defeatist? How could she even think of surrender?