Yet it fascinates Konstance; she cannot get enough of it. To drop feet-first into Taipei or the ruins of Bangladesh, a sand road on a little island off Cuba, to see the images of face-blurred people frozen here and there in their old-fashioned outfits, the pageants of traffic circles and piazzas and tent-cities, pigeons and raindrops and buses and soldiers in helmets frozen mid-gesture; the graffiti murals, the hulks of carbon-capture plants, the rusted army tanks, the water trucks—it’s all there, an entire planet on a server. Gardens are her favorite: mango trees on a median reaching toward the sun in Colombia; wisteria heaped on a café pergola in Serbia; ivy swarming up an orchard wall in Syracuse.

Just ahead an old woman in black stockings and a gray dress has been captured by the cameras halfway up a steep hill, her back hunched in the heat, wearing a white respirator mask and pushing a baby stroller full of what look like glass bottles. Konstance shuts her eyes as she walks through her.

A high fence, a low wall, and the road thins to a track switchbacking up through mixed vegetation. A silver sky plays overhead. Strange bulges and shadows lurk behind trees where the software pixelates, and as the trail climbs it continues to thin, the landscape growing more desolate and windswept, until she reaches a place where the Atlas cameras went no farther, and the trail peters out at a massive Bosnian pine, probably twenty-five meters high, twisting up toward the sky, like the great-great-grandfather of her sapling in Farm 4.

She stops, inhales: a dozen times she has visited this tree, seeking something. Through the gnarled old branches the cameras have caught a great cavalcade of clouds, and the tree clings to the mountainside as though it has grown there since the beginning of time.

She pants, sweating on her Perambulator inside Compartment 17, and leans as far forward as she can to touch its trunk, her fingertips passing through, the interface breaking down into a grainy smudge, a girl alone with a centuries-old pine tree in the sunbaked mountains of Thessaly, land of magic.

Before NoLight Father comes through the door of Compartment 17 wearing an oxygen hood with a clear visor and a cyclopic headlamp. “Just a precaution,” he says, his voice muffled. He sets three covered trays on Mother’s sewing table as the door seals behind him, sanitizes his hands, and removes the hood.

“Broccoli cacciatore. Sybil says we’re moving to printers in each compartment to decentralize meals, so this might be our last fresh produce for a bit.”

Mother gnaws her lips. Her face is as white as the walls. “How’s Ezekiel?”

Father shakes his head.

“It’s contagious?”

“No one knows yet. Dr. Cha is with him.”

“Why hasn’t Sybil solved it?”

I am working on it, says Sybil.

“Work faster,” says Mother.