Greg Egan - Zendegi

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.

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.