Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The only way to get this thing to anyone’s attention was to move it up the food chain, one step at a time. They had to show it to each person’s superior, convince that superior of the idea’s logic, and then get that person to get his or her superiors to come down and have a look for themselves.

This was the third showing of the sim, each time to a slightly larger and more prestigious audience. None of the lower ranks seemed interested in clearing out, once they had dragged their bosses down, with the result that it was getting more than a little crowded in the sim tank. The air conditioning was not quite able to hold its own. That in and of itself tended to degrade the authenticity of the presentation. Outer space was not supposed to smell like a locker room.

The lights came up a bit so that everyone could see each other and talk more easily. It worked; the decibel level went up almost as fast as the lights. Sianna looked toward Wally at the controls. Nice touch, knowing that people don’t like to talk in the dark. But then, it made sense that the only insight Wally would have on the human psyche would involve how they reacted to a sim.

Look at him over there. Wally should have been as exhausted as Sianna, but instead he was glorying in it all. Very probably more people were paying attention to him right now, taking him seriously, than at any other time in his life. He was surrounded by a whole mob of researchers who usually paid him just enough mind to make jokes about him, all of them asking questions, making suggestions, in short treating him like a colleague rather than as some lower form of life.

Sianna blinked awake as her head sagged forward. Dammit! Had she dozed off? For how long? A minute? An hour? She peered through the darkness and the clamor of the crowd. Something was happening. A knot of people was standing about the latest arrival on the scene, Dr. Ursula Gruber, director of Observational Research, and one of the most dignified-looking women Sianna had ever seen. Her iron-grey hair was done up in a bun, and pulled back tight. She was in a stiff white lab suit, and her grey eyes had a firm and steady gaze.

Gruber was surrounded by her own subordinates, and seemed to be in the midst of a spirited conversation with them, judging by the expression on her face. Sianna could not hear much of the discussion, but at last Gruber raised her hands and spoke in a louder tone. “All right. Settle down so I can make the call.” Gruber pulled her phone from her pocket and punched in a code.

Gruber was far enough up the food chain that it might be Bernhardt’s office she was calling, and that Bernhardt would take the call. Gruber was gesturing toward the simulation, clearly talking about it.

At last Sianna couldn’t take it any longer. She ventured close enough to hear what Gruber was saying.

“Yes, yes, we are all here in the Simulation Center. In the tank. I have just seen it. It has some real internal logic. It might well be significant. What? I am sorry, they are all talking here. Oh. That Wally Sturgis fellow is running it. Yes, Sturgis. No, I don’t think he—I’m sorry, please say again. What was that?” She waved her hand, gesturing for silence, and then covered her free ear up with her hand and listened for a moment. “One moment. I will ask.” Gruber hit the mute button on her phone and looked around the room, a rather sharp expression on her face. “Which one is Colette?” she called out. “Sianna Colette?”

Sianna felt a sudden cold lump in the pit of her stomach. She stepped forward, and was all too aware that the people around her were stepping aside, making way. Suddenly she was alone in the middle of a circle of eyes. Behind her, the simulated Dyson Sphere went on building itself out of the rubble of a ruined imaginary Solar System.

“I’m Sianna Colette,” she said, her voice sounding a bit high and squeaky, even to herself.

“Dr. Bernhardt wants to know if this is your idea?” Gruber asked. She gestured at the simulation, at the highlighted image of what everyone was already calling the Lone World. “Did you think of this?”

There was no use denying it. Not when she knew half this crowd of people, and she and Wally had called them all in to see her clever new theory. “Yes ma’am. I did,” Sianna admitted, feeling very much the way she had back in school when she was caught red-handed doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Having you dead to rights was never enough. They always wanted you to admit it as well.

Gruber nodded, raised her phone, and spoke into it again. “Yes, it was Colette,” Gruber said, and then listened for a moment longer before nodding to the voice on the other end of the line. “Very well,” she said. “I will tell her.” She shut off the phone and dropped it in her pocket. “Dr. Bernhardt wishes me to tell you he will be down right away.”

And the cold lump in Sianna’s stomach turned into a solid block of ice.

The waiting seemed an eternity to Sianna. Would Bernhardt fire her from MRI? Order her public expulsion from Columbia for misuse of institute facilities and wasting people’s time? Or would he merely humiliate her, give her a public dressing-down in front of everyone and leave her to draw her own conclusions about her future prospects?

The crowd stood around her, a mass of irresolute faces. All the talking had died out, and the excitement seemed to have drained out of the room.

Sianna looked toward Wally, still sitting at his precious control board. She caught his eye, but he just looked at her in bafflement and shook his head.

At last the main doors of the sim chamber swung open, and in walked Wolf Bernhardt, Yuri Sakalov once again in tow. Sianna stood, alone, in the center of the semi-darkened room. She braced herself for what was to come, even as a wave of exhaustion swept over her.

Bernhardt was coming closer. She felt sure that she was going to faint. Her knees turned weak, and the room got a bit wobbly. He was almost to her—but then he marched right past her without breaking stride. Maybe his eyes weren’t adapted to the dim illumination and he hadn’t seen her. Maybe he didn’t recognize her. Or maybe she was utterly beneath his notice.

Sakalov saw her, though, and gave her a completely unreadable look as he walked past.

The two of them walked right over to Gruber, who was standing over Wally at the control center. “Now then,” Bernhardt said. “Dr. Gruber tells me there is a new theory that might provide certain insights. I wish to know more.”

“Shall I, ah, run it, ah, the ah, simulation, for you, Dr. Bernhardt?” Wally sounded even more hesitant and nervous than usual.

Bernhardt looked down at him in cold annoyance. “I do not, Mr. Sturgis, need to look at pretty pictures in order to follow an argument.” He looked up at Dr. Gruber. “Frau Doktor Gruber. Please summarize for me, if you would.”

“Certainly.” Gruber, Bernhardt and Sakalov went off to one side of the room. The three of them spoke in low tones for five long minutes, Bernhardt mostly listening, nodding now and then, Sakalov asking an occasional question in a voice too low for Sianna to hear. Bernhardt had no reaction at all to what Gruber said, but Sakalov seemed to grow more and more agitated.

At last Bernhardt had heard enough. He nodded one last time, gave Gruber a pat on the shoulder, and turned toward Wally. “Perhaps I will have a look at the simulation after all. You will transmit a recording of the finalized run to my office within one hour. In the meantime, I will speak to you, Miss Colette, and Dr. Sakalov out in the corridor. Miss Colette? Come, if you please.”

He turned, rather abruptly, and walked out into the hall without looking to see if any of them were following.