Hal supine; Pemulis wants to interface — "He loaded the player and turned…"
He loaded the player and turned on the viewer, his knees popping again as he squatted to set the cue to 2350. The huge screen hummed in a low pitch that ascended as it began to warm up, the screen taking on a milky blue aspect like the eye of a dead bird.
Context
The viewing apparatus itself gets one image, and it's a dead eye: the warming screen as "the eye of a dead bird," milky blue. Spectation hardware described as a corpse's gaze in the very scene where the screen is about to show the dead father's work — the simile does the scene's mourning for it.