And in the center of everything is a chair. It’s perfectly positioned to be able to reach all screens and touch panels easily.

I climb the rest of the way into the room and settle into the chair. It’s comfortable, kind of a bucket seat.

“Pilot detected,” the computer says. “Angular anomaly.”

Pilot. Okay.

“Where is the anomaly?” I ask.

“Angular anomaly.”

HAL 9000 this computer is not. I look around at the many screens for a clue. The chair swivels easily, which is nice in this 360-degree computer pit. I spot one screen with a blinking red border. I lean in to get a better look.

ANGULAR ANOMALY: RELATIVE MOTION ERROR

PREDICTED VELOCITY: 11,423 KPS

MEASURED VELOCITY: 11,872 KPS

STATUS: AUTO-CORRECTING TRAJECTORY. NO ACTION REQUIRED.

Well. That means nothing to me. Except “kps.” That might mean “kilometers per second.”

Above the text is a picture of the sun. It’s jiggling around slightly. Maybe it’s a video? Like a live feed? Or is that just my imagination? On a hunch, I touch the screen with two fingers and drag them apart.

Sure enough, the image zooms in. Just like using a smartphone. There are a couple of sunspots on the left side of the image. I zoom in on those until they fill the screen. The image remains amazingly clear. It’s either an extremely high-resolution photo or an extremely high-resolution solar telescope.

I estimate the cluster of sunspots is about 1 percent the width of the disc. Pretty normal for sunspots. That means I’m now looking at half a degree of the sun’s circumference (very rough math here). The sun rotates about once per twenty-five days (science teachers know this sort of thing). So it should take an hour for the spots to move off the screen. I’ll check back later and see if they have. If so, it’s a live image. If not, it’s a picture.

Hmm… 11,872 kilometers per second.

Velocity is relative. It doesn’t make any sense unless you are comparing two objects. A car on the freeway might be going 70 miles per hour compared to the ground, but compared to the car next to it, it’s moving almost 0. So what is that “measured velocity” measuring the velocity of? I think I know.

I’m in a spaceship, right? I have to be. So that value is probably my velocity. But compared to what? Judging by the big ol’ picture of the sun over the text, I’m guessing it’s the sun. So I’m going 11,872 kilometers per second with respect to the sun.

I catch a flicker from the text below. Did something change?

ANGULAR ANOMALY: RELATIVE MOTION ERROR

PREDICTED VELOCITY: 11,422 KPS

MEASURED VELOCITY: 11,871 KPS

STATUS: AUTO-CORRECTING TRAJECTORY. NO ACTION REQUIRED.

Those numbers are different! They both went down by one. Oh wow. Hang on. I pull the stopwatch from my toga (the best ancient Greek philosophers always carried stopwatches in their togas). Then I stare at the screen for what seems like an eternity. Just before I’m about to give up, the numbers both drop by one again. I start the timer.