Music of the Spheres Read Online Free Page A

for more than just the
chance to be in space.
    At the Earth-Moon Lagrange 4 point was Canada Station Three,
among the Kordylewski clouds. Lunar Lines always had a one-day stopover there
before heading to their ultimate destination, and it was Justine’s only chance
to see Alex Manez.
    She worried about him; he seemed to become more pale and
sickly every time she visited him. The last time she had stopped there, over
two weeks before, he had been significantly more tired than usual and had cut
their visit short.
    This time around, she hoped to get a word in with someone in
charge of the Quantum Resources labs, and find out what they were doing to help
him. And if she didn’t get satisfaction from them, she would just have to call
in a few more favors.
    The apartment’s home-unit computer system sounded a chime on
the main holoslate, indicating there was a vehicle in her driveway.
    “Identify,” she said out loud.
     Hucs informed her. Number 3419; the driver’s name is Tomas Salenko, four-year taxi license holder.>
    “Oh, he’s early. Thank you. I’ll be a just another minute.”
    
    Justine hurried back to her bedroom and approached the bed.
Resting on the sheets were her two travel bags and a specially developed harness.
    The optical recognition scanner on her optilink fed her
brain rudimentary spatial data. It allowed her to navigate between one room and
the next, and even gave her the ability to discern the difference between a
fork and a spoon. It didn’t have the capability to show her color, texture or
patterns. She could detect the frame of a painting hung on a wall, but she had
no way of telling whether it was a blank canvas or a Van Gogh.
    Meeting people was just as challenging. It was as if she
were face blind. Until someone spoke, Justine had extreme difficulty telling
one moving biped from another, unless they had very distinct physical traits.
    Optimedia Labs, the company she had originally purchased her
optilink through, was also the company who had invented the Virtual Tourist.
    A few months back, they had released the next generation in
recognition software. Intended for the digital mock-reality entertainment
industry, the Personal Environmental Recording Suit—PERSuit, as it was
trademarked—was a step up from their Virtual Tourist Camera.
    It recorded and interpreted over ten million coded shapes,
sounds, smells, colors and textures. Thousands of micro-sensors in the fabric
of the harness constantly scanned all audio, video and olfactory data within range.
    Contestants on game shows or adventure shows would wear the PERSuit
while participating, and then viewers could download those episodes into their
septaphonic masks and experience those events for themselves, as if they were
there in the contestant’s place.
    While the downloads were relatively inexpensive, the harness
itself was pricey, and getting the techs to integrate the PERSuit sensors with
her optilink required signed affidavits that she would not sue in the event of
a sensory overload. Combining her body’s natural senses with the artificial sensors
was not recommended by any of the company’s medical staff.
    The result was more than she had hoped for, and while she
wore the specifically tailored harness, it was as if she had her sight back.
There was a major drawback to the garment.
    Within a few days of wearing it, Justine began to feel the
effect that the company had feared: extended exposure caused her to develop
severe migraines. She couldn’t wear the harness for more than twelve hours in a
day before the pain became unbearable—her mind just couldn’t process the
enormous amounts of data.
    Through experimentation, Justine had also found that if she
wore the harness four days in a row, the headaches would start as well.
    As a compromise, she never wore the harness at home—she had
memorized every nook and cranny in her apartment and didn’t need it anyway—and
she rarely wore it in