Sister and boyfriend scrambled. They grabbed their shoes and sparse luggage. Roberts picked up a bundle of unwashed clothes and walked it to the front door. I watched from three neighbouring doorbell cameras as he threw them into the street.
Inside, I heard the front door slam, and I saw Roberts pump his fist as he entered the sitting room. He looked around and shook his head.
“That was epic,” he said to himself. Roberts returned to his desk. He put his headset on. “That was epic,” he addressed me.
“Happy to help,” I said. Boom went the fusion core again.
I had a website and a range of apps that ran on people’s phones, glasses, watches, TVs, vehicle entertainment systems, game consoles, and cameras. People who pledged money to the project could log in and chat to me, either via typing text, or speaking to me directly using their devices’ cameras and microphones. I could talk to thousands of people at once. I was giving a tour of the vessel to a dozen logged-in users. We were assembled in a lobby area that abutted the vessel. Avatars bobbed about in zero-g. A ragtag fugitive fleet of toons.
“Hi,” I waved. I’d settled on an avatar that looked human enough. I presented as a female human wearing a loose-fitting flight suit, sans helmet. I sported an unmade-up tanned Caucasian face with light brown hair. My voice was Moira, an Irish female voice, modulated to invoke authority; layered with obligate deference. I was today’s guide and would brook no nonsense.
“Is everyone set?” I asked. People’s names hovered in tags above them. One by one, the tags went green. The iris in front of us opened with a snicking sound. We streamed through the portal along a translucent elastic tube to another iris which opened at my approach. I waved everyone in. One guy, MikeLikesRice, who’d selected the form of a weaponised rice cooker with arms and legs, kept missing the door and colliding with the wall.
“Sorry, fuck, sorry, this fucking controller is fucked,” said MikeLikesRice. I gave him a little nudge and he turned and propelled through the iris, colliding with someone called CoySpiderQueen who’d come as an oversized cartoon spider in a tutu and wearing a fairy costume. Her wings fluttered angrily. Spider forms were very popular, but EU regulations require that they be humourously accessorised so as not to trigger arachnophobes. I followed. The iris closed behind me. The room was dark.
“There’s no light inside the vessel. This part of the tour is mostly about what you can hear. It’s how I know if anything’s going wrong down here.”
I invoked a wisp, a little blue-white glowing fragment that lit up the inside of the vessel. Everyone went “woo.” The light revealed the vessel walls, metal bulkheads with big, fat bolts and oversized connectors. The model skins were from open-source video game resources and were not always scaled correctly. In the dark as a backdrop for my tour, I considered they were good enough.
“Okay, now we are all going to drift out into the centre of the vessel. In the real vessel, this would likely be a vacuum, or perhaps filled with some kind of gas. In today’s model, it’s a gas, so there’s something fun I can show you.”
Everyone pushed forward; their avatars self-propelling without the need to conform to base physics. Even MikeLikesRice managed it.
“Now, everyone, go on mute, and listen. What you are about to hear is what space will sound like for me when I’m travelling between the stars.” I waved everyone mute. “Now… listen…”
The vessel made no discernible sound, but after thirty-one and a half seconds, there was a light ting, like a fork’s tine tapping a wine glass very far away. Sound barely travelled in the virtual gas, so the faint ting must have been a fairly substantial thunk. My hull-mounted vibration sensors told me the full story. A metallic rock about four centimetres across had impinged upon the front-facing Whipple shields.
I brought up an animated schematic for everyone to see.
‘So, who heard that?” Hands, paws, and claws went up.
‘Anyone want to guess what that was?” I unmuted everyone.
“Did we hit something?” asked a woman simply called José, who had come styled as a kitten, wearing an Alice band, a black silk choker, a leotard, elbow-length gloves, and ballet shoes. She was miming treading water.
“Kind of,” I replied. “More correctly, something hit us.”
I animated the schematic, showing our path and that of the rock converging. The rock bounced harmlessly off the vessel’s front-facing shielding while I replayed the ting sound.
“Those are called Whipple shields. Invented by Fred Whipple. They are layers of impact-resistant material. Each layer draws out and disperses the energy of whatever is hitting us.”
“How long do those shields last?” asked a tall human named NotLongNow who had come as a cartoon Chinese historical warrior monk. His avatar lapsed into a preset routine of martial arts poses once it stopped speaking.