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.
‘You first,’ Martin said. Javeed walked straight through the narrow opening; Martin felt compelled to turn and go through sideways. He was glad it was already becoming second nature to treat every obstacle here as if it were real. There wouldn’t be much point entering a maze on any other terms.
The bare grey rock between the dome and the maze sloped gently downwards; Martin was impressed that the platforms beneath their feet could tilt to accommodate this effect so seamlessly, and without the delays and noises he remembered from clunky sloping treadmills in the gym. There were no loose rocks or sudden shifts in height; at ground level at least, the landscape promised nothing that the technology couldn’t deliver. Martin looked up at the clear blue sky and felt a surge of elation – followed immediately by a pang of unease. If Javeed got hooked on this at least he wouldn’t end up as a couch potato. But then, if Zendegi wasn’t even bad for his health, what excuse would there be to lure him away from it in favour of real adventures beneath real skies?
As they approached the maze, Martin saw how finely detailed the mosaic was, with blue and gold tiles as richly hued as any that adorned the mosques of Esfahan. The pattern was a complex system of intersecting grids and stars twisting across the surface. They walked around the building until they came to an opening in the wall – or rather, the mouth of a long passage whose own walls merged with the outer one. The passage was open to the sky; because the walls were so high, Martin hadn’t realised before that the ‘building’ had no roof. This was an outdoor maze, not a claustrophobic warren of tunnels.
There were words set into the tiles near the entrance: ‘Find the fountain, and change the world,’ he read. He laughed. ‘Okay, shall we go in and look for the fountain?’
‘Yes!’
‘Stay close to me. If we get separated, or there’s anything happening you don’t like, just give it the thumbs-down.’
‘Okay, Baba.’
Martin searched Javeed’s face for any hint of anxiety, then caught himself wondering what kind of subtleties might be lost along the way in the imperfect process that was painting the image in front of him. But his son’s voice was being conveyed to him unchanged, and he’d sounded confident enough. ‘Okay, pesaram.’
They walked side by side into the maze. The sun was high enough and the passage wide, to keep the walls around them from plunging them into gloom. Martin kept glancing at the lush patterns of the mosaic, wondering if they might encode some kind of clue. If they did, it wasn’t obvious, but at least there were no images of bull-headed monsters creeping into the design.
They came to their first junction. ‘Raast ya chap?’ Martin asked.
‘We should toss a coin,’ Javeed suggested.
‘Hmm. I wonder…’ Martin reached into his pocket; the gloves interfered with his sense of touch, but from the sensation against his leg through the material of his trousers he was fairly sure he’d gripped a thousand-rial coin. But when he took his hand out, Zendegi was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the coin’s existence. ‘No. Maybe next time we can find out how to get some local currency.’ He put the invisible coin back in his pocket carefully, not wanting to drop it into the sphere and trip up on it later.
‘Raast,’ Javeed decided. They turned to the right.
After a while Martin heard children’s voices, shouts echoing between the tiles from somewhere not too far away. ‘Hey! So we’re not alone.’
‘What if they get to the fountain before us?’ Javeed’s icon managed a near-perfect it’s the end of the world if I don’t win look.
‘I don’t know. Do you want to go faster?’
Javeed nodded enthusiastically. Martin started jogging, and Javeed ran to keep up with him. It was hard to accept, viscerally, that there could be no grazed knees from the rocky ground here – let alone the kind of tearful collisions with the walls that were almost guaranteed in the real world, when Javeed had friends over and they chased each other from room to room. Martin didn’t want to keep fretting about the downside, but he wondered if the mismatch between visual cues and physical consequences might stunt a child’s instincts for dealing with obstacles in real life.
The passage turned left, offering them no choice this time. Martin heard footsteps and saw a child darting across an intersection twenty metres or so ahead of them; he or she was gone in an instant, but the voices were closer, and it sounded as if the child was a straggler chasing a group of friends. Javeed pumped his limbs harder, determined to catch up; Martin felt his own pace switch from effortless to distinctly sweaty.