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.