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The test required nothing more than to walk a kilometer in a straight line, but Peo had never been less ready to take it than now, as she waited for a signal to start. The line was a girder beam connecting two spokes of the wheel-shaped space arcology, and below the beam one could see the rim of the giant structure - if one looked down. Peo tried very hard not to look.
It was technically not "down" but "out", towards the rim. It felt like "down" because the artificial gravity, created by centrifugal force of the arcology spinning, increased in that direction. Below were two kilometers of emptiness, criss-crossed with lateral braces between spokes, as well as pipes, cables and all sorts of supporting infrastructure. Peo would have to traverse a narrow path over that abyss. Anyone applying to work in Maintenance was required to pass this test. A maintenance engineer sometimes had to go out to the bare infrastructure to repair hard-to-access parts; fear of heights was out of the question for them.
The girder was a meter in width, wide enough not to be difficult to keep one's balance on it. That did not quench the animal fear in Peo's mind, and neither did the fact that around her waist there was a tether whose other end would move along a groove in the beam as she walked; if she fell, she would not fall far. But that was just the rational mind talking, and it was helpless against the amygdala that was flooding her with terror. It was painting images of Peo falling - at first slowly, since she was close to the center of the arcology right now, where gravity was the weakest; then speeding up inexorably, with enough time to understand that she would die but unable to stop it; the insubstantial lace of pipes and beams down below becoming larger, more material, then downright unavoidable until everything went black.
Deep, deliberate breaths were not calming her. A green light blinked in her Augmented Reality glasses, a signal to proceed with the test. She had no choice but to start walking. So she stepped onto the girder. A meter in, her heart was about to jump out of her chest. She could not imagine enduring this for another thousand steps.
If only she could keep her eyes fixed firmly on a distant point, like the Goddess of Wave-Bloom when she spun.
To Peo, the Goddess of Wave-Bloom was never anything other than a corny mythological figure. She was invented not because the Space Diaspora didn't know where it came from (it had historical archives), but because dozens of generations of people who lived without ever seeing a vast, open body of water was compelled to imagine one and incorporate it into its myths. In the legends, it was the Goddess that seeded the Diaspora across the universe when she stepped out of the ocean onto the beach and spun with ecstatic joy. Hundreds of beads of water flew out of her hair out into the vastness of space, and each became a space arcology. She spun endlessly but did not lose her balance, because her eyes were fixed on a distant point.
Would that Peo could do the same and find that stability right now. "Let me see the world through your eyes, Goddess of Wave-Bloom," she murmured.
The view in her augmented reality glasses changed. Gone was the station infrastructure. Instead, sand dunes rose on both sides of her path, and the path itself was not a beige nanocarbon ribbon, but a boardwalk made of wooden planks of weathered brown-gray. She recognized it in the movies about the ancient Earth.
You could not fall off that path, as there was nowhere to fall. Sandy mounds, overgrown with sparse, low, rough grasses, stretched on both sides. Peo started walking along it with full confidence.
She knew there had to be a rational explanation for this. The augmented reality software of her glasses somehow triggered a full, immersive AR overlay. Her animal brain, flooded with a fear of heights, could be calmed just as easily if it was tricked into thinking she was on a stable ground. But surely it wasn't the prayer to the Goddess that flipped on a secret mode in her glasses, she thought. Surely it was the data from the sensors she wore - her pulse, breathing rate, who-knows-what - that indicated extreme fear and caused an emergency calming response. The certainty of it grew as she progressed, because the view of the dunes started thinning out, becoming transparent; the spokes, beams and girders underneath her were clearly visible again, but it didn't matter to Peo. Her eyes fixed on the ocean at the end of the boardwalk, Peo had confidence that she'd reach it.