“I knew I’d seen one before,” said Marcus. “Most of the houses in East Meadow had the wall units, all speech- and motion-activated; I haven’t seen a hand remote like this since I was a kid.”

“I have a wall mount at home,” said Diadem, and it seemed she might be willing to make a little conversation. Marcus gave her his full attention. “But the waiting room is so big, and with so many people, the sensors would get confused with only voice or motion controls. It’s kind of funny using these old primitive things, but whatever works, I guess.”

“What you call primitive I call futuristic,” said Marcus, still staring at the remote. “You have a nuclear power plant that gives you more energy that you know what to do with. We have a handful of solar panels that barely keep our hospital running. My friend has a music player, but I haven’t seen a working holovid in twelve years.” He stood up, searching the room for a projector. “Where is it?”

“You’re standing in it.” Diadem stood up and took the remote from him, pointing it at the skylight; one click dimmed the glass, keeping out the glare, and another click lit up a bright holographic mist in the center of the couches, projected down from hundreds of tiny lights in the skylight’s latticed framework. Marcus and Diadem were standing in the middle of the gently shifting photonic mist, different vid icons moving lazily back and forth like sediment in a pool. Marcus stepped out to get a better view, grinning like a little boy as he recognized first one title, then another. He realized with amusement that all the titles he knew were the kid shows—Windwhisper the Dragon, Nightmare School, Steambots—the stuff he barely remembered from just before the Break. Most of the titles were “grown-up movies,” the cop dramas and medical romances and alien invasion gorefests his parents had never let him watch. As he looked through the menu, the other humans were clustering around it as well, as fascinated as he was. Marcus realized that they must have looked ridiculous, a bunch of slack-jawed yokels awestruck by a piece of commonplace technology, and wondered if Diadem had turned on the holovid just to be amused by their reactions to it. Just as quickly he realized that he didn’t care. This was a part of his life that he’d lost, and seeing it again was almost heartbreaking.

“What do you want to watch?” asked Diadem.

Marcus’s first impulse was Windwhisper, his favorite cartoon as a child, but the soldiers were all standing right there, and he felt a little foolish. He searched the shifting mist for an action movie, but before he could find one that looked good, the soldier beside him, the same giant bull from before, smiled broadly and said, “Windwhisper! Loved that show.”