Zendegi

When Nasim arrived home she walked out to the balcony and peered into the bird cage; the four finches were sitting firmly on their perches, fast asleep. Clearly the local Tehrani subspecies had evolved to be oblivious to the sound of traffic. Their water tray was speckled with dead insects; it seemed unlikely that this would bother them, but she changed the water anyway, moving carefully to avoid disturbing the birds.

The lights had been out in her mother’s apartment as she’d come up the stairs; it would have been nice to sit and talk with her, but it was after eleven, too late to disturb her. Nasim had eaten at the office a couple of hours before, but she couldn’t face trying to sleep yet, so she sat in the living room and had her notepad stream a news summary to the wallscreen.

If she lost Zendegi, what would she do? It was not as if she’d be unemployable; the company was a household name, and even if it went down in flames people would understand the market forces involved, they wouldn’t write off the technical staff as incompetent. The question was: could she face something new?

Zendegi was the fifth job she’d had since returning to Iran, and the only one that had really suited her. She’d stuck out her first position – Online Outreach Director with Hezb-e-Haalaa – for almost six years, but in the end she’d finally had to admit that she was a bad match for politics. Everyone who’d been abroad in 2012 had suffered from martyr envy, but she’d lived through enough of the aftermath’s mundanity and compromise to get over it. Iran was a democracy now, wobbly and imperfect but probably not doomed, and she’d lost any sense that she was personally responsible for shoring it up. If Zendegi was a frivolous indulgence, well, it was there alongside every other beautiful, forbidden thing that her contemporaries had risked their lives to regain.

‘… has been tipped as a possible Nobel recipient for his work on bacterial colonies…’

Nasim gestured rewind-and-replay. The story was just a superficial thirty-second filler, but her knowledge-miner had correctly identified its subject as one of her former colleagues.

She watched Dinesh’s smiling face as he deflected accusations of personal genius and attributed everything to his wonderful team. It wasn’t news to her that HETE had been successful, but at some point she’d stopped paying attention. ‘Good for you, Dr Bose,’ she muttered, sincere but still envious. She wasn’t jealous of these snippets of fame; she just wished she could have steered her own life half as well. Dinesh had made good use of his personal obsessions – which might otherwise have been merely neurotic – by harnessing them to an admirable goal. Nasim couldn’t believe that he’d spent a single day in the last ten years feeling bored and unfulfilled or guilty and self-indulgent. That was enough to make anyone want to smack him across the head.

A truck’s horn blared close by, followed by a long, teeth-gritting squeal of brakes. Nasim went to the balcony and looked down at the highway; a near-miss this time, not a pile-up. It was enough to wake the birds, though. She stood in the dark listening to them chatter, wondering what they made of the strange racket that had roused them.

Back in the living room, the notepad had detected her absence and paused its display. Nasim made a throat-cutting gesture that blanked the screen, but instead of heading for the bedroom she sat down again.

She’d kept her gaze averted from another scientific endeavour, though it had attracted far more media coverage than HETE. If she was serious about exorcising jealousies and regrets, she might as well go for the big one.

Nasim cupped her right hand beside her mouth to let her notepad know that she was addressing it and not just babbling dementedly to herself.

‘Human Connectome Project,’ she said.

The map of the brain that appeared a heartbeat later was multicoloured and translucent, the familiar shape woven from a tangle of fanciful cables. Nasim had seen the emblematic image a few times before and dismissed it as eye candy, but now that she was actually paying attention she suspected that it was based on genuine regional connectivity statistics, with the glossy conduits rendered thick or thin in proportion to a tractographic count of nerve fibres between the different areas they linked. Like a schematic drawing of a metro system, it told something truthful in bright colours, even if it wasn’t an engineering blueprint for the real tracks and stations.

She laughed softly; this wasn’t so painful. Two months before, when the news of the first draft’s completion had edged into her peripheral vision, it had filled her with a sense of uselessness and stupidity. If she hadn’t succumbed to the naïve fantasy that her homeland needed her, she could have been popping champagne in Cambridge or Düsseldorf and cheering for the cameras; just one face in an anonymous white-coated crowd, but still basking in the glow of her small part in the collective achievement.