Martin feigned indifference and went to flip through a bin of old Blu-rays, marked down to clear. He lifted a disc out and held it up. ‘You know Vin Diesel’s making a comeback?’
‘Really?’
‘It’s called The Chronicles of Kulos. They’re shooting it right now in the Negev Desert.’
Javeed had managed to get free of Farshid and was now looking around the shop with a determined frown. ‘I promised he could choose something for less than fifty thousand tomans,’ Martin said. Omar scowled, offended. ‘Let him choose anything! You don’t have to pay.’ Martin scowled back; he didn’t doubt Omar’s generosity, but he was struggling to instil some sense of restraint in Javeed.
Javeed was staring at a big cardboard pop-out display of various spin-offs from the
LOLCat Diaries movie. The original lame tagline, ‘I CAN HAZ BLOKBUSTR?’ had been ingeniously amended by the insertion of a caret mark pointing to the word ‘GAME’; layered in front of this was a cut-out image of a dishevelled cat with its limbs splayed awkwardly, one paw on a joystick, bearing the caption ‘IM IN UR CONSOLE MESSING WITH UR WORLD’. The distributors hadn’t bothered trying to translate any of this; half the movie’s dialogue had been dubbed into Farsi, but the rest had been left as a kind of anti-lesson in English. Martin watched with a sense of resignation; having caved in once over the movie itself, he now had nobody but himself to blame.
But Javeed didn’t turn to him and inquire tweely, ‘I can haz LOLCat game?’ Apparently the attractions of a contrivedly cute animal speaking a dialect of TXT from the formative years of the current generation of DreamWorks executives had a limited half-life, even for a five-year-old. Instead Javeed announced, ‘I want to try Zendegi!’
To his credit, Omar said nothing. Martin thought it over. He’d never been in Zendegi-ye-Behtar himself, but he’d read reviews; there was some good content, and plenty that was suited to children. There was Hollywood schlock too, if you really wanted it, but it wasn’t compulsory.
He said, ‘If Uncle Omar’s got time, and there are spare machines for both of us. If not, we’ll come back another day. All right?’
Javeed caught the warning tone in the last sentence. He replied placidly, ‘Yes, Baba.’ Then he stood very still and waited for the verdict.
Omar led them upstairs. Eight of the spherical VR rigs – known rather grandly as ghal’eha, or castles – were inflated and opaque, but two were unoccupied. Martin found it a little creepy that the things blacked out when in use; it gave them an air of private peepshow booths, however innocent the actual content being conveyed. But then, it would have been even creepier to be standing inside one, blind to the world, knowing that anyone in the room outside could observe your every move. As they walked between the rows of occupied castles, Martin glanced down and saw a familiar logo on the base of one machine: a triangle with the letter S for each edge. How could he not love anything from Slightly Smart Systems?
First they had to sign on for the free trial; Omar took them to a desktop computer in a corner of the room and went through the formalities. Martin chose English and Farsi, and gave their real first names as identifiers; there was no requirement to supply a unique nickname.
‘You want to look like yourself?’ Omar inquired. ‘Or somebody else?’
Martin hesitated. Some protective instinct made him wonder if he should disguise Javeed’s appearance, but from what he’d heard that didn’t seem to be the usual practice. Omar showed Javeed a few predefined icons – including the dreaded LOLCat – but Javeed just became confused and indecisive. Martin said, ‘It’s okay, we can go in as ourselves.’ If they were safe together on a public street, why would they need masks to be safe in Zendegi?
Omar had them take turns standing on a mark painted on the floor in front of the desktop; the cameras that snapped them from multiple angles were too small for Martin to see. They had to pronounce a dozen different syllables, then make faces expressing fear, surprise, joy, mirth, sadness and disgust. Javeed hammed it up mercilessly, but this wasn’t like the wind changing and leaving you stuck with your ugliest countenance; the software could interpolate between the recorded extremes, rather than just spitting them back out at onlookers, unchanged.
Omar fitted them for gloves and wraparound goggles; there were small earphones built in, along with microphones and motion sensors. Then, with the goggles’ screens flipped up, they walked to the centres of their respective castles, which looked like huge sheets of bubblewrap draped over the circular bases.
Martin turned to Javeed. ‘Khubi, pesaram?’
‘Balé.’
Omar said, ‘Don’t worry about the menu system, you can learn that later. If you want to get out in a hurry, just go like this.’ He made an emphatic thumbs-down gesture.
Martin said, ‘Thanks.’
Omar grinned. ‘Enjoy the ride.’
There was a faint hissing sound as the castles inflated around them, the limp plastic sheets rising up into a fishbowl shape; the walls had not yet turned opaque, but they already blurred the view. Martin raised a hand to Javeed while they still had clear sight of each other. ‘See you in Zendegi!’
Javeed looked slightly nervous now, but he called back confidently, ‘Hatman.’
When the raised circular rim was about as high as Martin’s shoulders the aperture began to shrink as it ascended; a few seconds later he was inside an unbroken sphere about three metres wide. Near the edge of the circular base there was a thick hoop sitting over the sphere’s translucent plastic; Martin guessed the hoop was held in place magnetically, so the plastic could slide freely beneath it, driven by rollers in the base. So far, the enclosure felt light and airy rather than claustrophobic; the vanished traffic sounds confirmed that the thing was soundproof, but the material wasn’t airtight – they weren’t relying on hidden machinery to keep them from suffocating, and a power failure would not be a big deal. Martin realised belatedly that ‘castle’ probably meant something far less pompous than he’d imagined; the devices were actually very close kin to children’s inflatable castles.
A woman’s voice, speaking in Farsi, asked them to flip down their goggles. Martin complied – and saw an image that he could barely distinguish from the real translucent sphere he’d been looking at an instant before. He held up a hand in front of his face; the gloves were gone, and he could see the lines on his palms. If some crease in his shirt sleeve was improperly rendered he would never have guessed – and as soon as he wiggled his fingers and saw the correct response, the sense that he was occupying the image before him became unshakeable.
The sphere surrounding him began to expand, the floor spreading out and flattening as the wall receded. Then a small, circular aperture appeared in the wall, connecting Martin’s bubble to another one beside him; within seconds, the structures had merged and he and Javeed were together inside a single dome.
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.