Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  In the office, an administrative assistant sighted their collection of identifying documents and perused the registration form, ready to pass it through a scanner.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Seymour,’ she said, ‘you haven’t written anything for the child’s religion.’ She raised her pen, ready to correct this omission.

  ‘He has no religion,’ Martin replied. ‘If the computer won’t accept a blank, you’ll have to write “atheist”.’ He saw a flicker of panic cross her face, but she recovered her composure rapidly.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I think you misunderstood the question. What it means is the religion of his paternal grandfather . . .’ She gave Martin a frank, appraising look, then decided it was definitely worth adding, ‘or great-grandfather, or so on, as far back as necessary.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Martin had no wish to blow the matter out of proportion, but it would be good to know whether there was an official policy defining atheists out of existence, or whether he was just facing a flustered individual who didn’t know how to handle this minor anomaly.

  ‘When we ask if children are Kurdish or Arabs,’ the woman replied, ‘the fact is, they are all Iranians, and we simply mean the ethnic group of their ancestors. So it is completely logical and consistent to apply the same reasoning to the question of religion.’

  Martin had to admire the ingenuity of her argument. Most likely this woman had no discretion in the matter and she was simply trying to spare them all from the bureaucratic hell that would arise if the computer rejected their registration.

  ‘My son’s paternal ancestors were Christian,’ Martin conceded. The woman looked relieved and recorded his answer on the form.

  ‘Which denomination?’ she asked.

  Martin honestly had no idea. ‘The Church of Saint Coltrane,’ he said. The woman started writing; when she paused halfway through he added helpfully, ‘Kaf, vav, lam—’ She looked up. ‘I know how to spell Coltrane. I was just wondering whether you meant John or Robbie.’

  As they walked away from the office across a small playground, Javeed asked, ‘Why did you make that lady angry?’

  ‘I don’t think she was angry,’ Martin replied. ‘We just had to decide the right thing to put on the form.’

  Javeed looked sceptical, but he let it drop. ‘Where’s my grandfather?’

  ‘My father died before you were born. And my mother too.’ Javeed flinched a little; Martin had told him this many times, but it was starting to cut a little deeper. ‘They had very happy lives, so you shouldn’t be sad for them.’

  ‘What about Mama’s father?’

  Martin steeled himself. ‘He’s still alive. He’s living in Tehran.’ Again, this was old news, but each repetition carried new weight.

  ‘So why don’t we visit him?’

  ‘Because he’s angry with Mama.’

  Javeed pulled a face, part incredulous, part anxious. ‘Still?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And her mama? She’s still angry too?’

  ‘Yes.’ That seemed to sting even more. Martin put a hand on Javeed’s shoulder. ‘I know, it’s hard not to be sad about that, but Mama’s very brave about it, so we should be too.’

  Javeed turned to Martin, suddenly tearful. ‘If you get angry with me, will you leave me alone?’

  ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh.’ Martin lifted him up and held him in his arms. ‘That’s never going to happen. Never ever.’ Martin carried him all the way to the car, ignoring the growing twinges in his back. ‘Come on, no more crying. Remember what I promised you today? We’re going to Uncle Omar’s shop.’

  Javeed recovered instantly, all thoughts of abandonment forgotten.

  As they walked from the car together Javeed tried to break free and run ahead, but Martin kept an iron grip on his hand. Ahead of them, three motorbike riders were pushing their way through the pedestrian throng, and though they never had a chance to build up much speed they were easily arrogant and inattentive enough to knock over a small child. As they passed, forcing Martin aside and almost into the gutter, he drew Javeed close to him and resisted the urge to stick his elbow into the face of the nearest rider.

  Once the shop door had closed behind them he relaxed, and Javeed ran to embrace Omar gleefully. Then Omar’s son Farshid started wrestling with him, lifting him over his head and turning him upside down. Javeed screamed with delight.

  Martin greeted Omar. ‘Javeed just registered for school,’ he explained.

  ‘Ah, so you’re a big man now? Big scholar? Big sportsman?’ Omar threw some punches at Javeed’s upside-down torso; Javeed flailed back at him, emitting strange martial arts noises from one of his computer games. Omar turned back to Martin. ‘How’s business, Martin jan?’

  ‘Not bad. You know Iranians; they’re never going to stop buying books. How’s the shop?’ Martin could only see half-a-dozen customers browsing the aisles, but whenever he’d been here at lunchtime the place was packed.

  Omar gestured proudly at a new display of cyber-ketabha: two-hundred-sheet e-paper bundles with the look and feel of paper-backs. Each device could store a million volumes’ worth of text. ‘I already sold sixty of these this month.’ He beamed. ‘You’re right, Iranians love books.’

  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.

  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 Engli
sh: 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.