Lag Delay полностью

“I’m working on something — a theory of what happened last week,” the older man said as he furiously typed away, not mentioning the word dragon. She knew Pham was a hunt-and-peck typer, but he could output faster than any traditional typist, mostly thanks to his copious use of keyboard shortcuts. “But I’m not quite there yet.”

Parkowski looked at the cubicles, all unoccupied, and took a seat at a computer next to him. “I worked on that this weekend, too.”

He finally stopped to look at her. “I told you to not worry about it this weekend.”

“I know, Jake, I know,” she said, “but you know me.”

Pham laughed. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”

He went back to his computer for a second and then turned to face her. “I’ve got an hour before I have to help Mr. Marx get ready for his mission, but let’s tell each other what we’ve found out.”

Parkowski took a breath. “So, Mike has a VR setup.”

“Like the one here?”

She shook her head. “Nowhere near as nice, but it works.”

Pham didn’t say anything, so she continued. “So, I loaded up a build on his computer, an older one, the one they gave us to play around with a couple of months ago.”

“Do you remember what version?”

Parkowski thought for a moment. “Fourteen, I believe,” she said.

Pham nodded. “That’s close enough.”

“Anyways, I loaded it up and started messing with it,” Parkowski went on. “I started playing with the options and settings, and I found something really interesting.”

“And that would be?” Pham asked.

“If you have multiple displays,” she explained. “There’s a setting called twinning. I had never heard about it before but Mike has. It means that the computer renders a frame once and sends it to both displays. In my case, I had a computer monitor and a VR headset — three renders total.”

Pham nodded. “Isn’t that what we normally do? Why would you do something different than that?”

“If you have a powerful enough computer, and you’ve more than two displays, it might be more efficient to show one display at a higher graphical fidelity and the others at a lower one, or vice versa,” she explained. “At least, that’s what my Google-fu was able to uncover over the weekend.”

The older man smiled. “Got it, or at least I think I do.”

“So, do you remember how I saw the dragon,” Parkowski said, a little unsure, “and you didn’t?”

“I do.”

“Well, hypothetically, if I did see a dragon,” she said. “Regardless if it was real and on Venus or just some kind of glitch, it is possible that I only saw it on my headset and whoever was watching it on the TV screen or streaming it on their computer didn’t see it. There might be different environments.”

The senior engineer rocked back and forth in his chair, deep in thought. “Fascinating,” he said softly. “I never even thought of that. We’d have to check the logs, of course, and talk with the technicians who set the VR stuff up. They’d have to know how we’re configured.”

“Got it,” she said.

“But it makes sense. And it flows nicely into what I’ve been thinking,” Pham said.

“So, what are you working on?” Parkowski asked, intrigued.

Pham waved for her to come around to the monitor, which she did. “Let me explain.”

She nodded.

“So here are the logs,” he said, pulling up a window showing a spreadsheet pulled from the VR environment’s internal logging tool. “I went over them Friday night before I went out to dinner with Gus, and again this morning.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?” Parkowski asked, squatting down slightly to get a better look.

“Nope,” Pham said. “I compared it to Marx’s run that morning, and Mohammed’s run after yours. At face value all three were nominal, save for your temporary loss of contact with the ACHILLES units.”

Parkowski felt a pang of guilt. “That didn’t screw anything up, right?”

“No, they were fine,” the Ph.D. replied. “They’re designed to be able to withstand a comm hit pretty frequently, given the distances involved. No lasting damage, and Mohammed was able to complete all of his objectives before we put the two units in station-keeping mode for the weekend.”

“Phew,” Parkowski said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I was scared for a bit that I had done some damage, but I kind of forgot all about it when I heard that the connection was restored.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pham said. “If there was any danger to the robots, we would have been a lot more worried.” He cleared his throat. “So, again, the logs. While it’s a video game developer…”

“Panspermia Studios,” Parkowski cut in.

“Panspermia Studios,” Pham confirmed, “that made the environment, it’s actually more similar to an aircraft or ship simulator than a simple game.”

“Why is that?”

He laughed. “Standards, mostly. When we contract something like that out, federal mandates force us to include documents like military standards or international best practices as part of the contract for the contractor to adhere to.