Zendegi

A male voice began to speak in English:

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.’

The voice was faltering and flat. It might have belonged to an unenthusiastic, not-too-bright ten-year-old struggling to read aloud for his teacher, putting on a strange accent to amuse his classmates. The text-to-speech feature in the cheapest notepad was a model of perfect diction and clarity by comparison.

But this voice was not powered by a phonetic dictionary and a list of explicit contextual rules, assembled by lexicographers and linguists, then tweaked by comparison with millions of training sets. This voice was the product of nothing but the model-building algorithm’s best guess at the detailed neural wiring of half-a-dozen regions in a hypothetical adult human brain: a brain that was the functional best fit to the two thousand males that had been scanned for the HCP.

‘ “The epoch of incredulity”,’ Nasim echoed. ‘Not bad for a lowest-common-denominator vocabulary.’

Bahador smiled nervously. ‘Can you push it a bit further? See if it stays on track?’ The previous iteration had read as far as the second ‘times’ before it ceased paying attention to the text and began emitting a disturbing, not-quite-random word salad.

Nasim fed in another piece of the sample text. The simulation had no hands to reposition a virtual page, no head to tilt to change its angle of view, but it could move its virtual eyeballs across a paragraph, and it was predisposed to read whatever fell within its visual field.

‘It was the spring of hope,’ the voice continued. ‘It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the super… super… superlative degree of comparison only.’

‘One stutter,’ Nasim acknowledged. ‘After more than a hundred words. And all this with a skull full of empty space.’ She’d used a library of task-specific activation maps to select the regions of the brain to model – and in his present incarnation, Blank Frank possessed only the bare minimum needed to recite what was put in front of him. He had no ability to ponder the meaning of this quote from Dickens, to reflect on its imagery, to pursue its implications. He would not even recall the words a few seconds later; he possessed only working memory, a rolling present no deeper than it needed to be to parse a sentence. He could read a virtual teleprompter; anything more was beyond him.

As a proof of principle, though, he was spectacular. Every one of the two thousand male subjects scanned by the HCP would have acquired each word in their vocabulary under different circumstances. Over time, those words would have accreted vastly different associations. Hope? Despair? What kind of heart-breaking personal meaning had those strings of letters once carried for each of these men? Yet the algorithm had managed to peel away the tangle of idiosyncrasies and home in on the simplest common ground.

‘So how do you teach him Farsi?’ Bahador wondered. ‘Or Bahasa, or Arabic?’

‘He’s barely ten minutes old, and you want him to be a polyglot?’

‘Won’t he have to be, eventually?’ Bahador insisted gently.

Nasim rubbed her temples, half grateful, half annoyed to be brought down to Earth so quickly. How close were they to impressing a potential investor? Back in Redland’s lab her colleagues would have been awestruck, but winning over the Giorgio Omanis was another matter.

‘How do we persuade a mob of jaded algae-barons – who don’t even appreciate Zendegi as it is! – that a dim, monolingual zombie is the key to the next big thing in VR?’ She thought for a while. ‘Maybe we just need to find the right metaphor. Why not sell this as “strip-mining the brain”?’

Bahador looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t forget that we’re talking about good Muslim boys; they might be partial to the occasional whisky, but any suggestion of grave-robbing is going to give them the heebie-jeebies.’

Nasim scowled. ‘Organ transplants are perfectly acceptable in Islam, so I really don’t see why-’

Bahador fixed her with an incredulous gaze. ‘You really think it’s that simple? I’m not saying that if some cleric was persuaded to consider the matter for a decade or two you couldn’t end up with a favourable ruling, but I wouldn’t take it as given that anyone else will see this as cut and dried the way you do.’

‘The donors all gave unrestricted consent,’ Nasim said stubbornly. ‘That ought to be the end of the matter.’

‘Fine. So if you want an investor, find one who thinks the same way. You must have met a few godless American businessmen who’d think nothing of “strip-mining” dead people’s brains.’