In his mind, he planted a flag. Here is down. He told his cerebellum a beautiful lie: You are still. The universe is what spins. And suddenly, the chaos resolved. The station wasn't tumbling; it was a fixed stage, and the stars were doing a frantic ballet around it.
The Nexus was a game for parkour athletes and fighter pilots. It was a physics-defying obstacle course set in a collapsing Escher painting. To compete, you needed perfect proprioception—the "sixth sense" of where your limbs are in space. Rohan had none. But his virtual gyroscope gave him something better: perfect certainty .
The problem was the Satya-7 space station. It was a real one, orbiting 400 kilometers above the Earth. Its physical gyroscopes—the massive, spinning metal wheels that kept the station oriented toward the sun—had catastrophically failed. Without them, Satya-7 would begin a slow, fatal tumble, cooking its crew on one side and freezing them on the other. The backup systems were fried. A repair mission would take three weeks. The station had three hours.