Zendegi

‘But most aspects of the Proxies will remain the province of ordinary software?’ Caplan pressed her. ‘Biographical details, long-term context, strategic considerations-’

‘Of course,’ Nasim confirmed. ‘Even if we could construct a “whole brain” model that included the neural dynamics needed to support long-term memory, and even if we could figure out how to wire a Proxy’s notional back-story into that model… that wouldn’t just be wildly ambitious, it would be inefficient and highly inconvenient. Developers need to have a simple database of facts about their non-player characters that they can manipulate as easily as the geographical database for the game world. Sure, they want certain responses to the human players to be more natural, but not at the expense of an ability to follow predetermined scripts, or adopt explicitly programmed strategies. Trying to implement too much as part of the neural model would just make those things more difficult.’

‘Hmm.’ Caplan glanced down at some notes displayed on the table-top. ‘You mention reading players’ facial expressions?’

Nasim gestured at her goggles; they’d be invisible to Caplan, but they both knew they were there. ‘In less than a year, these will be replaced by contact lenses. It won’t be long before we routinely have an unobstructed view of players’ faces.’

Caplan said, ‘Sure, but don’t you think human face-reading skills have already been surpassed by micro-expression analysis?’

‘Perhaps,’ Nasim conceded. ‘But it might still be useful to developers to have something less forensic, for those times when they want a Proxy who seems attentive or sympathetic, rather than one who can beat you at poker or deliver a knock-out cross-examination in a murder trial. Anyway, that’s only one skill out of dozens.’

‘Many of the other skills are verbal, though, aren’t they?’ Caplan pointed out. ‘I’m still not quite clear what the deal is with language.’

‘Ah.’ Nasim knew this was her weakest point, but she confronted it head-on. ‘Obviously the HCP data itself will only encode knowledge of English; that’s the nature of the population they scanned. In the worst-case scenario, that could mean that we’d have to restrict our verbal modules to English, which we’d then license to VR providers with a large English-language customer base. Even so, that’s a huge market, so we could expect a decent return in terms of revenue even if we couldn’t use the same modules generally within Zendegi itself.’

‘And the less worse-case?’

‘We could probably exploit English-based modules in non-English scenarios to some degree, just by feeding their input and output through existing translation software – just as we do for players who don’t share a common language. But I’d hope we could do one better than that and train at least some of the modules to be bilingual.’

‘Expose them to huge data-sets and tweak them to give the right responses?’ Caplan suggested.

‘Yes.’

‘While hoping you don’t obliterate the very skills that make these networks more useful than the dumb translator software that gets created the same way?’

Nasim replied, ‘Well, yes. We can only try it and see how it pans out. What else should we do?’

Caplan said, ‘Have you ever heard of side-loading?’

‘No,’ Nasim confessed.

Caplan smiled slightly. ‘You didn’t research me very thoroughly, did you? Just checked that I still had a pulse and a bank balance.’

Nasim felt herself flush slightly, but took some comfort in the fact that her icon wouldn’t betray her response. She said, ‘I’m sorry if I didn’t dig deeply enough. I think I got distracted when I discovered that you owned an island in Cyber-Jahan.’

‘Doesn’t everyone? They’re so cheap.’ Caplan dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. ‘Anyway… ten years ago I acquired a Swiss company called Eikonometrics.’ He slid a document across the table. Nasim glanced down; it was a report on the company’s research over the last fiscal year. A soft blue glow at the edges flagged it as a file Caplan had put into their shared dataspace, rather than a physical stack of paper.

‘They started out in subliminal image classification,’ Caplan explained. ‘They had a plan to harvest the brain-power of internet users by flashing up flowers and puppy dogs and road crash scenes just long enough to get a distinctive EEG signature. It was a very silly idea; some aspects of artificial vision might still be inferior to the equivalent human skills, but software caught up with the kind of results you could get on the cheap like that a long time ago.’

‘So why did you buy them?’