The Boeing VR facility turned out to be a chamber fitted with row upon row of open steel cages — perhaps a hundred of them, David speculated. Beyond glass walls, white-coated engineers moved among brightly lit banks of computer equipment.
The cages were gimbaled to move in three dimensions, and each of them contained a skeletal suit of rubber and steel, fitted with sensors and manipulators. David was strapped tightly into one of these, and he had to fight feelings of claustrophobia as his limbs were pinned in place. He waved away the genital attachment — which was absurdly huge, like a vacuum flask. “I don’t think I’ll be needing that on this trip…”
A female tech held a helmet up before his head. It was a hollowed-out mass of electronics. Before it descended, he looked for Hiram. His father was in a cage at the other end of a row a few ranks ahead of him.
“You seem a long way away.”
Hiram raised a gloved hand, flexed his fingers. “It won’t make a difference once we’re immersed.” His voice echoed in the cavernous hall. “What do you think of the facility? Pretty impressive, huh?” He winked.
David thought of the Mind’sEye, Bobby’s simple headband apparatus — a few hundred grams of metal which, by interfacing directly to the central nervous system, could replace all this total-touch-enclosure Boeing gadgetry. Once more, it seemed, Hiram had a winner.
He let the tech drop the helmet over his head, and he was suspended in darkness…
…which cleared slowly, murkily. He saw Hiram’s face hovering before him. It was illuminated by a soft red light.
“First impressions,” Hiram snapped. He stepped back, revealing a landscape.
David glanced around. Water, a sloping gravelly ground, a red sky. When he moved his head too rapidly the image crumbled, winking into pixels, and he could feel the helmet’s heavy movement.
The horizon curved, quite sharply, as if he were viewing it from some great altitude. And on that horizon there were low, eroded, hills, whose shoulders reflected in the water.
The air seemed thin, and he felt cold.
He said, “First impressions? A beach at sunset… But that’s no sun I ever saw.”
The “sun” was a ball of red light, fading to a yellow orange at its centre. It was sitting on the sharp, mist-free horizon, and was flattened to a lens shape, presumably by refraction. But it was immense: much bigger than the sun of Earth, a red-glowing dome covering perhaps a tenth of the sky. Perhaps it was a giant, he mused, a bloated, ageing star.
The sky was deeper than a sunset sky, too: intense crimson overhead, scarlet around that hulking sun, black beyond. But even around the sun the stars shone — in fact, he realized, he could make out glimmering stars through the diffuse limb of the sun itself.
Just to the right of the sun was a compact constellation that was hauntingly familiar: that W shape was surely Cassiopeia, one of the most easily recognizable star figures — but there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag.
He took a step forward. The gravel crunched convincingly, and he could feel sharp stones beneath his feet — though he wondered if the pressure points on his soles matched what he saw on the ground.
He walked the few paces to the water’s edge. Ice glinted on the rocks, and there were miniature floes extending out into the water a meter or so. The water was flat, almost still, heaving with a soft, languid slow motion. He bent and inspected a pebble. It was hard, black, heavily worn. Basalt? Underneath there was a glint of a crystalline deposit-salt, perhaps. Some bright star behind him brought out yellow-white highlights on the stone, even casting a shadow.
He straightened up and hurled the rock out over the water. It flew long but slow — low gravity? — eventually hitting the water with a feeble splash; fat ripples spread in languid circles around the impact point.
Hiram was standing beside him. He was wearing a simple engineer’s jumpsuit with the Boeing roundel on the back. “Figured out where you are yet?”
“It’s a scene from a science-fiction novel I once read. An end-of-the-world vision.”
“No,” Hiram said. “Not science fiction. Not a game. This is real… at least the scenery is.”
“A WormCam view?”
“Yeah. With a lot of VR enhancement and interpolation, so that the scene responds convincingly if you try to interact with it — for instance when you picked up that stone.”
“I take it we’re not in the Solar System any more. Could I breathe the air?”
“No. It’s mostly carbon dioxide.” Hiram pointed to the rounded hills. “There’s still some volcanism here.”
“But this is a small planet. I can see the way the horizon bends. And the gravity is low: that stone I threw… So why hasn’t this small planet lost all its internal heat, like the Moon? Ah. The star.” He pointed to the glowing hull on the horizon. “We must be close enough for the tides to keep the core of this little world molten. Like Io, orbiting Jupiter. In fact, that must mean the star isn’t the giant I thought it was. It’s a dwarf. And we’re close to it — close enough for liquid water to persist. If that lake or sea over there is water.”
“Oh, yes. Though I wouldn’t recommend drinking it. Yes, we’re on a small planet orbiting a red dwarf star. The ‘year’ here is only about nine of our days.”
“Is there life?”
“The scientists studying this place have found none, nor any relics from the past. A shame.” Hiram bent and picked up another basalt pebble. It cast two shadows on his palm, one, grey and diffuse, from the fat red star ahead of them, and another, fainter but sharper, from the light source behind them.
…What light source?
David turned. There was a double star in the sky: brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth, yet still reduced to pinpricks of light by distance. The points of light hurt his eyes, and he lifted his hand to shield his face. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
He turned again, and looked up at the constellation he had tentatively identified as Cassiopeia, that bright additional star tagged onto its end. “I know where we are. The bright stars behind us are the Alpha Centauri binary pair: the nearest bright stars to our sun, some four light years away.”
“About four point three, I’m told.”
“And so this must be a planet of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star of all. Somebody Has run a WormCam as far as Proxima Centauri. Across four light years. It’s incredible.”
“Well done. I told you, you’re out of touch. This is the cutting edge of WormCam technology. This power. Of course the constellations aren’t changed much; four light years is small change on the interstellar scale. But that bright intruder up in Cassiopeia is Sol. Our sun.”
David stared at the sun: just a point of pale yellow light, bright, but not exceptionally so — and yet that spark of light was the source of all life on Earth. And the sun, the Earth and all the planets, and every place any human had ever visited, might have been eclipsed by a grain of sand.
“She’s pretty,” Mary said.
Bobby didn’t reply.
“It really is a window into the past.”
“It’s not so magical,” Bobby said. “Every time you watch a movie you’re looking into the past.”
“Come on,” she whispered. “All you can see is what some camera operator or editor chooses to show you. And mostly, even on a news show, the people you’re watching know the camera is there. Now, with this, you can look at anybody, any time, anywhere, whether a camera is present or not. You’ve watched this scene before, haven’t you?”