Now the robot stared out at the street through the knock-off goggles. A dragon-like creature curled in a doorway, pink and bright orange in colour. It blinked sleepily at the robot and blew out fire. An ekans and a raichu played together under a leaking tap. A sad Gojira towered over the street. It leaned down abruptly and swallowed a Zommer just under the robot’s feet. The robot went on as the street filled with creatures it could only see through the goggles. A Namco Pac-Man chased a ghost. A furby waddled after a speeding hedgehog.

The robot came to a gate with a sign that said, Sims Shelter, if no answer use side door.

The robot rang the bell. A tamagotchi chattered at it excitedly. The robot raised its foot and the tamagotchi shrieked and vanished behind the feet of the woman who came out of the shelter.

The robot stared at Mariam.

“Come on,” it said.

“You are here to adopt a pet?” Mariam said. She stared at the robot distrustfully. “You don’t strike me as the pet-keeping type.”

“A bit rude,” the robot said. “Do you work here, too?”

“I fill in sometimes,” Mariam said. “I’m just a volunteer.”

“Of course you are,” the robot said.

“So what do you want?” Mariam said.

“Can you let me in?”

“I suppose. Why are you wearing goggles?”

“To see them,” the robot said.

“The poor things,” Mariam said. She wore goggles too, though hers were more discreet and very slightly fashionable. “They brought the last wild pikachu here a few years back, still running off a decrepit bootleg server in some fallout shelter in Iceland. Oh, come on, then, I suppose. There’s no harm.”

The shelter was in a dilapidated stone building with the roof missing and its rooms and courtyard open to the sky. Without the goggles it was quiet. With them it teemed with virtual life.

A long, long time even before the robot came into existence, an artist named Karl Sims began to breed virtual lifeforms in his servers and, a few years later, others began to print the creatures thus evolved into soft robots. Here in the Sims Shelter all manner of strange, old, simple creatures hopped and hovered and gurgled and giggled and jabbered to themselves, salvaged from who knew were, hosted and kept secure.

Mariam watched the robot uneasily as it walked slowly among them, shunning the attentions of a centuries-old tamagotchi, ignoring a sleeping snorlax and a pack of tiny furbies.

What did it want? Mariam wondered. What was it looking for?

The robot went deeper into the maze of open corridors. It came to the large back yard. It scanned the virtual horizon.