Brains peered at the tangle of optical connectors and sighed . Even running pure titanium OCC connectors the data loss was a fraction over 0.002. Unacceptable. There was no question about the build – working for IR meant that he had the best available. A Grumman synthcore fed the Northdyne A.I with the synthetic feed supplied by Oestwerk. State of the art gear , brought up to more than manufacturer spec by himself..
A stream of the latest Indonesian soap played in the background. He told Jeff that it was white noise and helped him to focus. Secretly , though , he held a bit of a torch for the actress playing the maid.
He paced for a while . It didn't help. So he took himself off to his array . He tapped in to the Oort Observatory and let himself drift off. He imagined himself on board the Japanese-Russian vessel . In reality the remote craft was controlled by a laboratory in Osaka gathering data on the Oort cloud . It was a mass of arrays , sensors, solar collectors and telemetry offsets and was catching very unhealthy ( for a human ) doses of the solar wind.
Virgil had his Mozart. Brains had the stars. He had , of course , been a passenger in Three, sweating at the cavalier flying of Alan. He wanted the impossible – to be…out there…with no metal surrounding him. Just him and the stars. The whole sky rotated slowly. Of course…..
He sat bolt upright. What a melon! He ran back to his lab with the solution in his mind, nearly knocking Virgil over in the process.
" Head in the clouds!" thought Virgil. He was close.