Zendegi

As the dust settled they saw Shahin tending to the birds. At first Martin thought he was merely untangling them from the rope, but then it became clear that he was releasing them from their harnesses completely.

When Kavus realised what was happening he was outraged. He screamed and gesticulated at the adviser, who approached Shahin and struck him across the face. Shahin froze and stared at the ground.

He said, ‘Lord of the World, forgive me, but we have no food for the birds.’ The strips of meat that had been spiked on the rods as lures were all gone. ‘They can’t carry us home on empty stomachs. The most we can hope for now is that they will hunt for themselves.’

Kavus composed himself. ‘Rostam will come to my aid,’ he declared. ‘Word will reach him in Zavolestan that his lord requires his assistance. He will bring food and wine, fifty slaves, fifty horses, and fifty golden cages for the royal hunting birds.’

Martin said, ‘And that will take… how long?’

Kavus blinked at him in disbelief, too startled even to be angry. For his Master of Birds to address him directly was already a staggering impertinence, but for this worthless apprentice to speak his mind loudly and freely – to question his lord’s understanding of their fate – was like something from a dream.

Martin turned to Javeed. ‘I know you’d like to meet Rostam, but I think he’s a couple of days away at least.’

Javeed looked out across the desert; there was not so much as a wisp of dust on the horizon. ‘We’ll see him next time.’ He gave the thumbs-down, and everything vanished.

Martin lay in the scanner, waiting for the motor to bring him out.

24

Nasim had begun making a habit of spending half an hour with her colleagues in the programmers’ room every morning. Falaki’s investigation had left everyone feeling like suspects, and she didn’t know a better way to raise morale than sitting down with people, asking them to talk about their work, and making it clear that she appreciated their efforts. No one could yet rule out the possibility that the breach had originated in this room, and she would have been negligent to pretend otherwise, but that did not mean the whole place had to descend into paranoia and resentment.

Milad had been showing her a new interface for developers to tap into the social instincts of a set of composite, male, multilingual side-loads – there were so many different types of module now that Nasim had given up inventing nicknames for all of them – when every monitor in the room sounded an alarm and opened a window into the same environment. Every complaint coming in from the arcades now triggered this response; Nasim had decided it was better to be safe than tardy. Most of the alarms were trivial matters that were only passed on when the arcade staff were inexperienced: personal disputes between customers, or basic misconceptions about the way the system was supposed to work. And even the majority of genuine programming glitches had nothing to do with Zendegi and simply needed to be forwarded to the appropriate game developer.

This complaint was not trivial, though, and it could not be palmed off on someone else. In the ballroom of the starship Harmony – home of a popular science-fictional soap opera of the same name – handsome, epauletted, anthropomorphic aliens were turning into excrement. And they were not merely melting into pools of suggestive goo that might have raised a snicker but could have been something else entirely; they were morphing into stick figures built of soft brown cylinders flecked with undigested roughage.

‘Arif!’ Nasim shouted, ‘launch the Faribas!’ Some of the post-colonic gingerbread men were running around the ballroom, trying to embrace people. The thumbs-down escape had been disabled; why every customer didn’t just whip off their goggles, Nasim couldn’t guess – unless it was pure shock – but stampeding partygoers had formed a crush at the exit and the first dreadful hug was clearly only seconds away. Nasim averted her eyes; she was already having trouble keeping her breakfast down.

‘Arif?’ She walked over to his cubicle.

‘They’re not working!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Faribas! I’m showing them the environment, but the modules are just… frozen – unresponsive.’

Nasim said, ‘Grossed out?’

‘What?’