Parkowski bit her lower lip. She was onto something here but was missing a piece. “Got it. Is it ok if I use your headset?”
“Go for it.”
She loaded up the Venus environment with a nominal scenario: two ACHILLES robots, only one controllable, in the Ishtar Terra region. She selected minimal lag, medium fidelity, and multiple control inputs — she could use DePresti’s keyboard or the VR controllers sitting off to the side.
Parkowski put the VR headset on top of her head. It was significantly lighter than the professional one she used at Aering but was still noticeable. Once the environment was fully loaded, she could control the robots with the keyboard. Parkowski pressed the “W” key and the screen moved forward as the “robot” moved on “Venus.”
She placed the headset over her eyes and did the same thing. The scene in front of her moved forward, just like it had on the monitor.
Parkowski opened up the HUD — significantly easier to use here — and started going through the settings. At work, this was all handled by the techs, here she had to change them herself.
Something popped out at her.
“Mike, another question,” she asked.
“What?” DePresti yelled from the kitchen.
“What is ‘twinning’?”
He poked his head in the office.
“In the sense that you’re using it, it means that the environment is being rendered three times — one for each eye and one for the eternal environment — and displayed on both screens, the monitor and the VR headset.”
“What if I turn it on?”
He thought for a moment. “The computer would have to do twice the work,” DePresti explained. “You’d have to render each frame twice, but I’m not sure why you would.”
“Can I try it out?”
“Sure, you can’t do any damage,” he laughed. DePresti went back to the kitchen.
Parkowski toggled the setting to “on” and was given a new option — graphical fidelity for each display output.
She left the VR headset on “medium” while changing the computer monitor to “low”.
Parkowski went back into the Venus environment, now with the headset on the desk in front of the computer monitor. This time, she could tell a difference between the two. The VR headset looked mostly like what she saw at work, while the computer monitor was extremely low fidelity, more like a video game from before she was born.
They were separate views of the same environment.
She pressed “W” again. This time, the VR headset lagged, taking forever to render the next frame, while the computer monitor’s image moved smoothly forward.
“Getting anywhere?” DePresti asked, eating out of a huge bowl of peanuts.
“Yeah, I am,” Parkowski replied, shutting down the Venus environment. “Pretty sure I figured out why I saw the dragon and they didn’t.”
“Good job. But not the 'why' of why you saw a dragon?”
“Nope. That one is still a mystery.”
“Sorry about your Eagles,” Bert the security guard said to Parkowski as she badged in.
“It happens,” she replied. “I still think we’ll make the playoffs, but I’m not sure about the division at this point.”
“Well, best of luck this week.”
“Thanks!” She headed down the hallway to her work area with a pep in her step.
Parkowski had had a pretty good weekend.
Between figuring out a piece of the mystery on Saturday, to a Sunday lunch double-date with one of her boyfriend’s friends from his unit and his girlfriend, the only thing that went wrong was the Eagles’ loss to the Giants on Sunday Night Football.
She put her phone in her locker and headed into the high bay in her street clothes.
About a dozen people were there, mostly technicians. She looked for her boss but didn’t see Pham anywhere.
One of the other operators, a woman she didn’t recognize, controlled the ACHILLES robots on the raised platform. She was on her hands and knees, seemingly adjusting something.
Parkowski walked over to the TV screen. The robot was down in front of what looked like a small RC car, tinkering with a control panel on top of it.
She shrugged and walked out of the bay to Pham’s office beyond it.
He wasn’t there either.
Parkowski sat down in the other chair across from his desk. Hopefully, he would return soon.
Fifteen minutes later, no sign of Dr. Pham.
She got up and walked back to the high bay, looking closer this time. The woman was now walking as if on a treadmill, much like Parkowski had on her mission last Friday.
Still no sign of Pham.
She asked one of the techs if they had seen her boss. The man nodded. “Check over in the cube farm.”
She thanked him and walked in that direction. Pham was there, huddled over one of the hot-bunk computer terminals.
“Good morning, Grace, how are you?” he said without looking up.
“Good morning,” she replied. “Working with us peasants today?”
“Computer in the office is not working,” Pham said, still buried in the computer monitor. “Had to come out here.”
Parkowski smirked. “Oh, ok.”
