Description
From the commissioner:
Madeline enjoys a little frolic in a gentle snowfall on Christmas day.
That might be the end of the description, unless you happen to know that Madeline is a quadriplegic amputee who permanently resides in a life-support capsule. However, she is hooked into the computer system of the starship "Phoenix", of which she is one of the crew as a Systems Controller. From there, she can control holographic simulations of herself (pre-accident) with which she interacts with the other crew. The drawback is that this equipment is limited to a holosuite and a couple of secondary projectors elsewhere, and can only be present as a voice elsewhere. Two of her crew-mates, the Faleshkarti named Presaith and Loander, decide to give her a surprise Christmas present in the form of a self-contained mobile holo-projector that projects her image around itself, with binocular and binaural pick-ups that give a more realistic sight and sound experience. For the first time, she is free to go wherever she wants that is within the reach of the control signal, and in a moment of giddy glee, she dashes out of the house where the Christmas get-together is being held, and relishes the freedom she has been lacking for years. Some of the snow falls through her image, but it's not enough to spoil the moment for her.
The winter clothing is only for show - she cannot feel the cold. A slight error in the picture that I did not notice earlier was how her boot is displacing the snow, which of course an image cannot do. This gorgeous art was done as an illustration for my story - "A Phoenix Christmas" - by foxenawolf
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