“I’m a little nervous too,” Luke says, and laughs a little, like a jackass.
All the Obbers are nervous. They are two weeks away from landing the crew. The tension in the lab has manifested in a panoply of physical ailments. Luke keeps getting into minor bike accidents. “You are literally,” Nari says, “trying to take one for the team.” It is the same, Luke hears, in Mission Control. On the one hand everyone is a little bit of a wreck, and on the other, even linear-active individuals are greeting each other with hugs.
Luke, at the bike rack now, kicks it a little, knocking some snow to the ground. Not vengefully, just to propel himself forward by applying a very mild pain.
Mireille has on a red sweatshirt. From the background—some kind of insulated wall—Luke guesses she is on a break at the studio where she is shooting a video game. It touches him that she has messaged him on a break. Mireille loves her job, she’s always happy doing it. For her to message now might mean she’s not seeking comfort, or an audience, but wishing to share happiness.
“I was always more nervous at landings than launches,” Mireille says. “Sad at launches, and terrified at landings. Which would you pick: being sad or being scared?”
“Scared,” says Luke.
“Scared is incapacitating, though.” Mireille plays with the zipper of her sweatshirt. Her face and neck, her chest, are still faintly dotted by whatever sensors they stick on her when she’s working.
“Sadness can be incapacitating too,” Luke says.
“True.” Luke heads toward the X-4 building. He hasn’t been on the roof of X-4 since before Eidolon started. He remembers looking down, and seeing Helen in a yellow shirt. Nari wearing binoculars. Remembers his own sense of finally, for the first time in his life, seeing some kind of hope for himself and the other humans of the planet.
On screen, Mireille strokes the side of her neck, exactly in the same way Helen had adopted in Red Dawn.
“Do you know what it felt like?” Mireille says. “Like a storm that was always coming, but never arrived.”
“I’m sorry?” Luke has lost the thread.
“Eidolon. The past seventeen months. It’s like I couldn’t figure out how to prepare for what’s coming, and I knew I needed to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what that was. I wanted the storm to just hit already so I could stop worrying. But it never did.”
“That sounds very tiring, Mireille.”
“Well.” She shrugs. “I was doing it to myself. I think it will be easier when it happens for real.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that.” Luke can practically see his words transcribed as he says them, inoffensive, neutral, correct. What would he say if he was not bound by any constraints? Nothing. It was the constraints that had created the situation. This was perverse human nature, not quite corrected even in the humans that had access to better information than their own feelings.
“For one thing, I won’t be wondering what it will be like when she goes.” Mireille laughs and runs her hands through her hair. “And I won’t be so alone because the whole world will be watching. And getting to share some of the experience. Her experience. It’s going to be her, right? I mean, they’ve passed this part of the training? It’s been a success?”
Luke pushes open the door of X-4.
“Sorry, sorry. I know you can’t say. Hey, where are we right now?” She squints at the screen.
“I’m taking you to the roof of one of our buildings,” Luke says. “There’s a great view of the mountains from up there.”
“Oh, cool. You can’t see them from there, can you? I mean, you can’t see Red Dawn?”
“No, no.” In fact, there’d been a rumor around Prime a while back that Red Dawn’s location had been moved. No one had seen any of The Shadows—the team responsible for maintaining the Primitus and Red Dawn sites—for months.
He flips his screen so Mireille can see the San Rafael Swell, dusted now in parts with snow.
“Wow,” she says.
“Yeah.”
? ? ?
PRIME’S VR TEAM had brought in sim glasses for the Obbers last week and let them spend ten minutes looking at Mars from space, the way the astronauts had looked at Mars from space two days before landing on the planet.
Ten minutes. Areocentric orbit. Nearly a year ago, Luke had watched the crew looking at this very thing, listened to them talk to each other about what they were seeing, point out surface features, occasionally laughing or falling silent, or saying something like, “Gosh.” When he looked at the sims himself, he understood the laughter and the silence, the soft “wow.” Virtual reality experiences of Mars had been available since he was a kid, but they had never affected him as powerfully. This didn’t feel like a game, or speculation, or even merely cool. It was personal and vast—not just himself, or even the crew, but humanity approaching, for the first time, another planet.
And this was just a dress rehearsal.
Could any person be shown these things—not just shown—could any person experience them, and still be filled with wrath and violence and selfishness? Yes. Okay, yes, probably. But could a person continue to act on those feelings? Could a person still believe those feelings justified violence or cruelty or neglect?
Yes. Probably, yes.
We’d had an Enlightenment that had fundamentally changed the way many humans viewed themselves and the world. And that had been Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now it was possible to do a thing globally, virally, virtually. It was time for a second Enlightenment.