Virtual lightning is a standing mode of the holographic sky in which the sky renders a thunderstorm. A gyrealm’s atmosphere separates no charge and produces no lightning of its own, so a storm overhead is an image: the cloud deck, the bolts, and the stroke-lit landscape are all drawn by the sky’s QED emitter array, and the array delivers light alone.

Rendering#

A storm scene is built by the same wavefront reconstruction that produces the sky’s solar disc. Cloud decks are reconstructed at their proper distances — from just above the sky surface to apparent kilometers beyond it — with true depth and parallax, and a bolt is reconstructed as a luminous channel at cloud height. Its brilliance arrives along exactly the bundle of rays a real discharge would deliver to an observer’s eye, so the glare is genuine: a near stroke lights the landscape, casts hard moving shadows, and leaves the same afterimage a real one would.

A storm is also among the sky’s cheapest scenes. Interior illumination is bounded by the habitat’s thermal budget, and an overcast render radiates less power than the clear daylight it replaces; a display runs the illumination plant down, not up.

Limits of the image#

The mode renders what a storm looks like, not what one does. A virtual bolt carries no current and can strike nothing. It is silent — the array emits light and nothing else, so a rendered storm passes without thunder — and it wets nothing and moves no air. The scene is subject to the general constraints of reconstruction: it is visible only within the line of sight of the sky’s emitters and cannot be projected into the open air below them (see physical limits), so bolts appear at the sky surface and beyond it, never in the volume between sky and ground.

Where a display calls for the discharge itself — current, thunder, afterglow — habitats strike one physically between fixed spires; see engineered lightning. The two modes are commonly run together, the sky drawing the storm and the spires striking the bolt out of it.