Zendegi

Javeed laughed and ran towards him; Martin felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. The icon approaching him wasn’t perfect – its gait was a little stilted, its facial expression not quite natural – but Martin felt more inclined to rub his eyes, as if his vision might be blurred from dust or tiredness, than to perceive the flaws as external. If not for the fact that his son appeared before him without goggles, he would have sworn that the whole thing was being done with cameras hidden inside the spheres. Well, no doubt there were such cameras, helping, but the overall feat went far beyond any kind of simple video link.

He took a few steps towards Javeed, and the knowledge that they were both stuck inside their separate treadmills – the spheres turning around them as they walked, like omni-directional hamster wheels – receded into irrelevance. Javeed reached out and grabbed at Martin’s legs, then showed an astonished face very close to the most extreme he’d recorded; Martin felt nothing, of course, and saw his son’s hands not quite making contact. Curious, he tried to lay a hand on Javeed’s shoulder; just before he reached the fabric of the shirt the haptic glove produced a strange sensation, as if he were pushing through treacle. But the glove could exert no force to stop him, and when he persisted he understood why Javeed had looked so startled. As his real hand descended past the point where it would have made contact, his icon refused to portray his true motion; the result was a sudden, alarming conviction that his body was reeling forward uncontrollably. Martin retreated, and exchanged a knowing smile with Javeed. The lack of physical restraints made it easy to puncture the illusion if you wanted to, but that would defeat the whole point of being here.

Javeed held up his hand. Martin reached down and took it; the glove gave him the sensation of contact with skin, and its cues helped him avoid closing his hand too tightly – even though he was really holding nothing but air. And though there was no machinery to bear any of the weight of his son’s arm, whatever Javeed was feeling seemed to prompt him to make the extra effort to keep his arm raised. It was a light, tentative grip that they shared, but unlike their other attempts at contact it was close enough to the real thing to be compelling.

‘What now?’ Martin wondered. As he spoke, the bright wall of the dome began to take on patches of definite colour, as if the translucent plastic was being pressed very close to something. Or rather, close to many things: the patches of colour sharpened into dozens of separate windows, looking out onto different scenes.

‘Shall we go and take a look?’

Javeed said, ‘Yes,’ but he did not rush ahead. He kept his hand in Martin’s as they crossed the dome, both of them working to maintain the delicate link.

The windows were tall and thin, and low enough for Javeed to see through easily. The first one they reached showed a grassy field at the edge of a forest. Children were running excitedly across the field, all of them boys, most at least a couple of years older than Javeed. The longer the two of them gazed at the window, the more sound from beyond flowed through, but even as the boys’ shouting grew stronger, their words remained indistinct. With a shock, Martin realised that some of them were carrying spears. What was this, Lord of the Flies?

A winged tiger swooped down over the field, snarling and snatching at the children. Martin turned to Javeed. ‘I don’t think this is for us.’ It was one thing to watch your character chased by a stylised monster in a console game, something else to flee breathlessly across the grass with a clawed beast bearing down on you.

Javeed looked hesitant rather than disappointed, as if wondering whether to argue just for the sake of it, but then he replied, ‘Okay.’

They moved on to the next window. Some hundred metres away across barren terrain sat a low, sprawling building, its walls decorated with colourful abstract mosaics. There was no one in sight, and all Martin could hear was a faint buzz of insects. As he peered through the window, a caption appeared on the glass in both Farsi and English: The Labyrinth. Javeed tried sounding out the word, but both versions defeated him.

Martin told him what it meant, and Javeed said excitedly, ‘This one!’

‘Are you sure?’ Martin wished Omar had told him more about navigating the system; presumably there was some way to discover in advance whether there was a Minotaur lurking in this maze. ‘You think it will be fun?’

‘Yes,’ Javeed insisted; he was growing impatient. ‘If we don’t like it, we can just use our thumbs.’

‘That’s true. So how do we get out?’

Javeed slipped free of Martin’s hand and placed both of his palms against the window. There was a sharp click, as if he’d released the catch on some mechanism, and the window swung up like a garage door; at the same time, the section of the wall below it slid down until it was flush with the floor.