In the morning, my lungs feel completely better, but I’m still not fully satisfied with my fake window. I seek out Tenoch for their help. I’ve accepted the impressionistic style of my wall painting, but I am not at all pleased with the lights. Tenoch comes along to my room and looks at my handiwork. “You want them to flash? You want them to be many colors?” they ask after inspecting the bulbs and wiring.
“No. Did you live in a city back on earth?” I ask.
“For a time.”
“I want the faint glow that always comes through the windows at night.”
Tenoch thinks for a moment. “The glimmer of distant lights.”
“Yes!”
They review all the hardware here and then give a shake of their head. “These artificial lights are not going to provide the kind of glow you are looking for. You want the glow of… Natural light is what you’re looking for, I think.”
My first instinct is to rail back that they should not tell me what I am looking for. But too many relationships in my life have ended that way, and this is a rather low-stakes matter. I suppress the urge and listen as Tenoch continues, “At night, as long as the lunar cycle is sufficiently bright, you may get a similar feature. If we can get natural light piped in, which…” Tenoch begins sketching out a diagram.
It is a cool idea, I’ll grant them that. It’s not what I was going for in my own room, but it will be great to get some natural light into Data Haven. Tenoch’s proposal will get sunlight down here below ground during the day, too, which would be fabulous. Their plan is to take advantage of the air vents already in place—by using some mirrors and side branches that I don’t exactly follow—to bring the light through around the filters. This approach won’t compromise Data Haven’s structural integrity as much as just flat-out installing windows would. Still… “I understand that nobody is in charge here, but this is something we can just do?” I ask them.
“Of course.”
“Nobody’s going to care that we might damage the filters?”
“Well, no, not as long as we don’t. And this won’t damage the filters,” they insist.
I spend the next several hours lugging around plexiglass and mirrors for Tenoch to install, so it’s a good thing my breathing is back to normal. It’s mainly just physical labor for me; Tenoch handles all the tricky parts. I catch my own reflection in one of the mirrors while waiting for orders from them and spend a while staring at my own eyes again. If I concentrate, I can trigger the purple twinkle that I’ve heard people allude to. It’s like a small pulsing flower blooming around each pupil. It’s weird to actually feel something within my eyes, but I can. Now that I’ve seen it happen, I can map it to a sensation that I realize I’ve been ignoring. I should be able to tell when this is going on in the future. I guess it’s sort of like blushing or tearing up. Those are things you can intentionally do but which might also happen incidentally, and you would feel them even though you can’t see them.
True to Tenoch’s word, they do not break anything during installation. We do attract some attention, though, and passersby ask what we’re doing. “We’re working,” Tenoch answers succinctly.
I answer the implied question, rather than the literal one. “We’re bringing natural light in.”
“Yes, we are working on bringing natural light in. That is true,” Tenoch agrees.
Most of the people who hear this murmur about how nice that will be. Some even talk about growing house plants. Other people grumble a bit, including Cleve’s old friend. When Roze pokes their head out of their office, they groan, “Why is it so bright out here? Ugh! What’s going on?”
“You should borrow Cor’s shades,” I tell them with a grin. Hypercor is decked out properly for these new conditions.