Alex watched the lightning display for a while, timing the thunderclaps and pausing periodically to swat mosquitoes. He’d never had such a fine naked-eye view of lightning before. Lightning was really interesting stuff: flickering, multibranched, very supple, and elaborately curved. Real lightning had almost nothing to do with the standard two-dimensional cartoon image of a jagged lightning bolt. Real lightning looked a lot more like some kind of nicely sophisticated video effect.