Layme awoke quickly, with no half-daze in between sleep and waking, and she knew why instantly—her head was trying to kill her. It throbbed dully before she even thought of opening her eyes, and it made the very thought of going back to sleep almost laughable, except for the fact that the idea of laughing was too painful a concept to even try and visualize at the moment. With a groaning sort of sigh, Layme resigned herself with the necessity of getting up, and she rolled herself over to get out of bed—right into someone else.
In her surprise, her eyes flew open, heedless to her headache and its pleas for darkness, and she sat up, scrambling back across the bed. She almost miscalculated the distance she had and fell, but she caught herself at the last second, the jolt of surprise causing her head to send a bolt of white pain into her vision, and her stomach to lurch sickly. She closed her eyes and took a shaky breath, realizing numbly that she was somewhere close to tears. She took another deep breath in the hopes of steadying herself, and then eased her eyes open again, trying to keep some sort of restraint around the ache in her head. She blinked blearily once, twice, and then her eyes focused finally on the figure on the other half of the bed.
It was Milo.
He was sprawled out on his stomach, asleep, one arm hanging off the edge of the bed. The pulse tat on his eye undulated lazily in rhythm to his breathing. The blanket, one side of which Layme held clutched to her chest out of reflex, went from his waist to past his feet. He was shirtless, and there was no way of telling what he might or might not be wearing below that. Layme felt herself shaking, but she forced herself to lower the blanket from herself and look down anyway.
At some point, the outer layer of her dress had vanished, but she was at least partially relieved when she saw that she was wearing both pieces of the biofit layer from underneath. She supposed it was possible that she had taken them off the night before and then put them back on, but somehow she doubted it. She had a feeling that if she had taken off anything last night, it would have stayed off. As if in proof of this, she scanned the room and found that the rest of her dress hung oddly from a light fixture in the corner. Her boots were in completely different places—one beside the bed and one on the other side of the room, by a door that could only lead to a bathroom; there was no room-control panel next to it. She still felt slightly disoriented and extremely uncertain. She had apparently come into this room the night before, and she had obviously been comfortable in it—the fact that she was half-naked was a testament to that—but she had no memory of the place whatsoever. It was as if someone else had taken over her body while she was asleep, walked her here, and then left.
They weren't very nice to my head, then, she thought as it gave another stinging jolt of pain. She took yet another deep breath to try and forestall the nausea which rolled in her stomach, and decided that while it might not end well, waking Milo up was probably the best idea.
What time is it, even? she wondered, and she made the familiar gestures with her hands to call up the time on her conscreens, but there was nothing.
The simple occurrence of an absence of response from her drive brought forth the panic that her unfamiliar surroundings and unideal circumstances couldn't. She felt herself start to breathe too quickly, and it seemed like she had swallowed something thick and foreign as her throat constricted, preparing for tears. Reminding herself to take deep breaths and not freak out completely, she leaned over and shook Milo's bare shoulder tentatively. He barely stirred. She tried again, and he made an unhappy moaning sound. She could only assume his head probably hurt as much as hers, but the absence of her conscreens made her panicked enough not to care. She shook him again.
“Milo!” she said. “Milo, get up.”
He muttered something indecipherable and then rolled over towards her onto his back, his tattoo still spinning lazily in evidence to his lack of consciousness. Still trying to fight a flood of total and complete panic, Layme tried one more time.
“Milo, please?” Her voice cracked, and something in his base instincts must have heard it, because his eyes opened to slits.
“Whozzat?” he muttered, bringing his arm up to block most of the light.
“Layme, Milo. It's Layme. I don't—fuck, I have no idea what's going on.” The tremble in her voice was more pronounced now, as if she could cry at any second, and she hated it. It made her angry... and that made her even closer to tears. Milo, however, seemed to have fully woken up. He sat up and rubbed his face with both hands, like he was trying to wash it without water, then shook his head like a dog who had just gotten a bath. Part of Layme's mind—the part that wasn't either combating the impulse to be sick or trying to remember the previous night—marveled at him. If his head hurt as much as hers did, it couldn't be a pleasant experience. Finally he seemed to be awake, and he turned to look at her, concern replacing confusion on his face.
“Lay,” he said, throwing off the covers and moving to sit next to where she did, at the edge of the bed. She was relieved to see he had slept in his jeans. “What's up? What happened?”
“I don't—I... I can't connect to my drive, I have no idea what's wrong, I just can't, I just want to know what time it is, and I can't get it to work!” She
was full-out shaking now, the tremors of panic and fear and emotional stress rattling her from head to foot. Milo wrapped a protective arm around her, and she leaned into his thin and naked chest rather than away, as she might have done.
“Hey, ice, it's okay,” he soothed her, sounding bemused but not repelled, which was a relief. “Did you put your conscreens back in this morning?”
This brought Layme up short. She looked at him, surprised and more puzzled than ever. “What?”
“You took them out last night,” Milo explained patiently, sounding a little confused himself, but not unwilling to help. “You said they told you to take them out, and they're in saline in my bathroom. You req'd it from the building since yours was in your room.”
“I... what?” Layme asked, trying to remember this but failing. At least things made a little bit more sense. Her cons were rigged to blip her and tell her to take them out after twelve hours. She could override the blip, like she had just before the party the night before, and they would blip her every two hours after that, so she wouldn't fall asleep with them in.
“You called up the Dorm req system and asked for a thing of micro-saline. It was tubed into the wall over there—” Milo pointed to a panel on the wall closest to the bathroom door “—just like all in-building reqs are.” He was silent for a moment, watching her press the tips of her fingers into her temples hard enough to bruise them, and then said, “You don't remember, do you?”
“Not a jagging thing,” she agreed, feeling slightly relieved.
“Your head hurt?” he asked, but the question seemed perfunctory. He was at the room panel and was punching buttons before she even answered.
“Like someone whacked me with something. Hard.”
“I'll have shit to take care of that in a minute... yeah, alright, req'd. It'll tube up in a few. Hang in there.” He smiled, and even though she felt sick, Layme managed a watery smile back. He was so nice to her... then that thought made her feel like crying again. She was a sixteen-year-old newbie, and she was sitting half-dressed on the edge of his bed, nearly puking on his floor. How had she ended up like this?
Milo, meanwhile, was giving himself another vigorous, wet-dog-like shake. He stretched, and Layme was distracted by the way his muscles moved across his shoulders. She hated the way her thoughts scattered when her head hurt. What did Milo's shoulders have to do with anything?
With a deep breath that bordered on a sigh, Milo flung himself backwards onto the bed, where he lay still, spread-eagled and smiling. “I fucking love this,” he said.
Layme looked at him like he was out of his mind. “Doesn't your head hurt?” she asked dubiously.
“'Course,” he answered. “Like a father-tragging giant stepped on it.”
“And you're happy about this...?” Layme's own pain seemed content to live as a dull, though all consuming, throb, as long as she didn't move at all. She sat still and nearly rigid at the edge of Milo's bed, taking long breaths and wishing that whatever Milo had ordered to stop her hangover would come up soon.
“Definitely,” Milo replied. He seemed content to lay as still as Layme was sitting, one arm slung over his eyes to block the light again. “Look at it this way—pain like this means you accomplished something last night. It's like a morning-after thing. The hurt measures the party, as some Dragons like to say. The more my head hurts now, the better the time I had last night was. It's as good an indicator as any, especially considering I can't remember some of last night.” He was grinning again beneath his arm.
“I'm sure you remember more than I do,” Layme muttered, her hands clenching a little harder on the edge of the mattress as the part of her brain in charge of memory tried ever harder, and ever more vainly, to dredge up some shards of the previous night's events.
“What do you remember?” Milo asked, and his voice seemed to carry honest curiosity with it.
“Not a whole jag of a lot,” Layme answered between nausea-fighting breaths. “I remember getting to the party, meeting you and Taz and the other two... I sort of remember scanning in, and taking my first alc... The rest is really mixed up. I have no idea how much I drank, and this headache is really not helping anything.”
“Hang
tight,” Milo repeated blearily, as if he was half-asleep. Perhaps he was. “Be up in a minute.”
“What do you remember from last night?” Layme asked him, partly due to honest curiosity and partly to keep herself distracted.
“More than you,” he confirmed. “I remember almost everything.”
“Dammit,” Layme muttered under her breath.
Milo laughed his familiar small chuckle. “Mmmm. You didn't do anything too terrible, don't frizz.”
“'Too terrible'?” Layme repeated, horrified. Milo laughed again.
“Ice it down, Layme. You were fine. No tear-filled confessions, no bizarre antics, no narfing...” He hesitated for a moment, seemingly trying to decide whether to list one more thing or not. “No wild sex,” he finished, and it was as if his words became solid and burned across her very exposed skin. She literally felt the flush rising from her shoulders to her face, and then through the rest of her. She was very, very glad that Milo had his eyes shut. Still, accompanying the blush was a sense of relief so strong it probably would have buckled her knees if she hadn't already been sitting, and she had to resist asking Milo if he was sure. For the first time she was grateful for the mandatory birth control that all girls took from the age of thirteen to whenever they signed the conception papers necessary to have kids, and she recognized the irony—she hadn't even put them to use, not really. She thought that maybe that made her more grateful, because she had a chance to view them as a saving grace without actually using them that way.
Why weren't those meds up yet? She hated the way her mind worked when she had a headache!
There was a ding from the room's sound system then, as if something had either planted the thought in her mind or granted her prayers. It saved them both from the awkwardness that had hovered seconds from them, and Milo practically sprang up to the wall panel and punched the eye-scan button. A moment later, his room accepted his retina print and he came back to the bed with a tray full of stuff—two English muffin-and-egg sandwiches, two glasses of ice water, two purple gel-beads of some sort of medicine, and two slim champagne-style glasses filled with green liquid. Layme purposefully avoided looking at the sandwiches. Just the thought of eggs made her feel nauseous. The gel-beads were her priority, with the ice water coming in a close second. She hadn't realized it until she saw the condensation rolling down the outside of the glasses, but she was thirsty. She grabbed a bead without even thinking to ask for it. The pain was in charge.
“Does it dissolve?” she asked, and Milo nodded.
“Drink of water and the entire thing is liquid. You're not allergic to acetoprin, are you?” Layme shook her head. “Go for it then. You'll feel better.” Not hesitating another second, Layme tossed the small purple sphere into her mouth and chased it with a long drink of ice water. She was sure it was a placebo effect—you know it's going to make the pain stop, and so the pain doesn't seem to hurt as much—but as soon as the outer gel layer dissolved and the tasteless purple liquid washed through her mouth, she was certain she felt better. The pulse in her head didn't feel as thick, and the nausea faded to an ever-present fact rather than an active threat. She was decently sure that in ten minutes, maybe fifteen, nearly all of the effects of her hangover would be gone. The sandwich on the tray suddenly seemed much more appealing. She turned to look at Milo over her shoulder. He was washing his own gel-bead down with almost an entire glass of water. She smiled at him and he smiled back.
“Better?”
“Yeah, definitely. This trag works fast.”
“It should,” he laughed. “Another Dragon exclusive. It's like five times the strength of the strongest normal meds you can req from the building. That's why it took longer. I had to requisition them from one of the Chem specs who had some stashed.”
Layme took the opportunity to stretch her sleep-tight muscles now that it didn't feel like any movement she made would cause her head to scream with pain. “You can P2P requisition here?” P2P was an old technology term for trading data, standing for either peer to peer or person to person. The data traded was usually pirated, which made P2P and apt term for direct requisitions. They generally weren't allowed in educational buildings, and they weren't allowed between under-legals.
“Apparently we can be trusted here,” Milo said, shrugging and taking a big bite of his sandwich. “Either that, or whoever is running this place doesn't give a jagging rip what we do.”
“What do you mean, 'whoever is running this place?'” Layme asked, eying the second sandwich warily but giving most of her mental attention to Milo. She was entirely aware of the fact that his long legs, folded Gandhi-style, were scant inches from her own. So was his shoulder. It was as if he was radiating heat like an oven, and she was the only one who felt it. She snatched up the sandwich in the hopes of keeping herself from saying something stupid.
Milo shrugged. “Whoever's in charge of the Dorms,” he said through a mouthful of egg and muffin. “Campus people, Standards people, whoever the hell they are.”
“You don't know who runs this place?” Layme asked, surprised. She risked a bite of the muffin and found it was quite good, and also that she was hungrier than she thought. When was the last time she had eaten? Lunch the day before? No, she'd been in Morpho for that. Judging by the sudden growling in her stomach and the angle of the light coming through Milo's window, it had been over twenty-four hours since she'd had anything other than alc in her stomach. That probably hadn't helped keep her from feeling sick, and she was sure it hadn't done any good for her memory at all, which was still pitifully blank in most places.
Milo shook his head. “Not exactly. Who cares? It all boils down to Govlies anyway.” Layme snorted—he had a point. Whether they were official Government people or just Government Liaisons—Govlies—it all amounted to the same thing in the end. Still, the question nagged lightly in the back of her mind anyway. Sure, they were all Govlies. But what kind of Govlies? Who held an interest in teenage geniuses, if that was what the Dragons really were? And why?
“Head still hurt?” Milo asked, bringing her out of her thoughts. Layme thought about it for a seconds and completed what amounted to a mental poking and prodding routine to discover the faintest bit of dull silver pain hovering just beyond the surface of what she was usually conscious of. It seemed relatively harmless, and anyone unaccustomed to headaches would probably have ignored it, but Layme had inherited her mother's inclination towards migraines, and she knew that the little silver slice would probably turn itself into something bigger if given the opportunity.
“Just a tiny bit,” she told Milo. “It doesn't even really hurt right now, but it will later. You know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he agreed, grabbing the champagne glasses from the empty tray and handing her one. “That's what these are for. The Chem specs have been working on those gels for years, and they still can't get them to work all the way. A weak drink to chase them with is the only thing that really knocks the hangover back completely. I know what you're thinking!” he said, holding up one hand to forestall the question he must have seen on her face. “Drinking got us here in the first place, right? So how's this gonna help?” Layme nodded. “Well, I don't know why the hell this trag works, but it does. So how about a toast? To chasing off the hangovers.”
Layme couldn't help herself; she giggled. It seemed to her she had made more toasts in the past twelve hours than she had in her entire life before that. Of course, she didn't really remember any of them specifically. There was just a vague sense of having repeated this gesture again and again not long ago. It was almost closer to a feeling of deja vu than of true memory. She raised her glass to his and relished in the clinking sound they made. Glass striking glass had always been one of her very favorite sounds. The drinks that were actually in the glasses were a middle green, and slightly bubbly. Layme could see the light carbonation clinging to the sides. She took a sip, deciding after the night before that maybe she shouldn't down all her drinks in one gulp. Too late to wish for that now, she thought as the sweet apple taste and the fizz of the bubbles played lightly across her tongue. Live and learn, I guess.
Milo seemed caught up in his own thoughts as well, his eyes unfocused and preoccupied in a peaceful sort of way, and Layme felt no urge to interrupt him. She was content to sit on his bed and just be, and the feeling was so out of the ordinary that it was even more enjoyable. She was used to her brain going a million miles a minute nearly every second of the day. Normally if she was sitting still, she was logged in to her drive, either for school or for the programming and manipulations she did in her spare time. Her side projects were more than enough to keep her brain busy, and if she had been at home on a morning like this, she would have been neck deep in something. Probably her most recent program, a feline figure in shades of warm colors that would prowl Tessa's drive screen whenever she logged on. It was a simple program, isolated—only Tessa would see it, and the interaction it had with her drive would be minimal. Still, Layme was having fun with it. She loved the way she could make it move, and she was in the middle of testing to see if she could override some of the simplest isolated functions on a personal drive. She thought she was close to understanding how to hack the notifications for things like blips and updates, and once she had a grasp on that, she would be able to alter the code on the feline so that it would deliver the blip to Tessa in a more unique way than the standard sound ping and little red pop-up bubble in the corner. She wasn't sure she could pull it off, but ideally the cat would meow and deliver the blip in the form of something else—a dead mouse, maybe, or maybe a bird.
Layme was brought back to awareness when she realized her glass was empty. She'd been sipping at it absently while her thoughts drifted—so much for just being. Apparently not even the peace of the morning was enough to stop her mind. She still didn't feel impatient or overly inclined to go do something, like she normally was; that was something. She was entirely content to sit and meditate on her project
without ever touching it. That was new. She laughed, and the sound roused Milo from his own daydreaming.
“What's funny?” he asked.
“Not a lot. Wondering how to re-leash my brain. It kind of ran away from me for a little. I didn't even notice. Sorry about that.”
“Nah, don't be,” Milo said, finishing the last of his drink as well. “I forget not everyone's used to the post-party lull. That's totally normal for a morning like this. An after-effect of the alcs, I think. It's half the reason I love pulses like the one from yesterday.”
“What's the other half?”
Milo's grin was back, and Layme finally thought of the word to describe it that had been eluding her since she first saw it—wicked. There was something wicked in it. Not hurtful, or evil, but something akin to unbridled mischief. It seemed almost the opposite of the nonchalant, serene image he gave off. “The other half is getting to dance with people like you,” he said, and Layme felt herself blushing again, this time in full view.
Just then Milo's room beeped some sort of notification, saving her the trouble of trying to respond. That seemed to be happing a lot just lately, and she was grateful for it. As her father sometimes said, someone somewhere must like her today. Milo made a few gestures with his right hand, as if he was wearing conscreens, which made no sense at all, since he had woken up after Layme and hadn't moved from the bed since. A moment later, her confusion changed to amazement. The blank wall on her side of the bed lit up to display Milo's main drive screen, complete with info-feed. There was a small red bubble in the corner that was apparently the blip which had sent its alert through the room. Milo pulled its info card before opening it. Direct video transmission message, July 1, 13:48:23. Taz 200320 to Milo 131720. Via transmission port 21.522-46518.
Layme felt as if an ice cube had slipped into her stomach. She got up from the bed almost without thinking of it, in search of the rest of her clothes. Taz. She had forgotten about Taz. Surely Taz knew she, Layme, had spent the night in Milo's room. Taz, the fallen idol full of bitter anger. Taz, with the slow fire in her eyes. For burning tweaks, Layme thought disconnectedly, and she was already across the room, pulling her dress down from Milo's lamp, before he even noticed she was up.
“Woah! Hey! What the trag?” he asked, sounding entirely lost.
“Taz,” Layme managed to choke as she attempted to pull her dress on upside down. “She probably knows I was here last night”
“I'm sure she does,” Milo replied, sounding bemused. “Most likely what this blip is about.”
“That's why I shouldn't be here,” Layme tried to explain while pulling the dress off and righting it. She was trembling again, the seemingly imminent doom of her current situation having broken the film of order and calmness that had descended on her since she had woken Milo up. “She's probably upset. I shouldn't be here to hear that.”
“Why would she be upset?” Milo still sounded entirely puzzled, and Layme felt a strange stab of sympathy towards Taz, and angry annoyance at Milo.
“I don't know,” she said, searching for her boots and hoping some of her intended sarcasm would bleed through the cracks in her voice. “Maybe because her boyfriend spent the night with somebody else? A tweak?” Layme bit her lip to keep from crying, though her eyes burned with unshed tears for the second time that morning. There had been more self-loathing in that last word than she had meant for there to be.
There was a second of stunned silence from Milo then, and she was sure the reality of the situation had set in. She felt viciously triumphant for a moment... and then he started laughing. It wasn't his usual quiet chuckle, but a great, loud, full laugh, the kind that came from being completely surprised with something utterly hilarious. Layme was abruptly startled from her seething thoughts; laughter had been the last reaction she had expected. Milo was laying on the bed again, seemingly helpless against the flood of mirth that had overtaken him. He had one hand over his face, as if trying vainly to stifle the sound. The other was swatting half-heartedly at the pillow next to him. There wasn't much force in it. Apparently the laughter had temporarily robbed him of most of his motor control. Layme stood in shock, staring at him, one boot on and partially zipped, the other hanging limply in her hand. Eventually Milo seemed to gain control over himself, and he sat up, wiping at his eyes and still laughing in a faintly breathless way. His face was bright red, and his pulse tat spun and moved as if it, too, was laughing.
“You.... thought...”
he tried to start, but another weak fit of laughter cut him off. He tried again. “You thought... Taz... and I... were dating?” he asked, and his voice was thick with naked incredulity bordering on just plain wonder. Layme said nothing but only stood still in shock and confusion of her own. Milo pressed a hand to his mouth and seemed to finally gain control over himself. He wiped at his eyes again and took a deep breath. “I'm sorry, Layme, I swear I'm not laughing at you, I just... Trag, that's a good one.”
“Is it?” she asked, her voice somewhere between tentativeness and coolness.
Milo nodded, then shook his head, not in contradiction but in more wonder, an I-can't-believe-this sort of gesture. Finally he said, “Layme, Taz is my sister.”
Layme only blinked at him. “She... what?”
Milo rolled his eyes, not in exasperation with her but in another gesture of silent laughter. “Milo Tohls, older brother and sometimes-servant to the eternal bitch queen, Tasmania Tohls.” He made an awkward seated bow to her, tipping an imaginary hat like he had done to Taz the night before. “At your service.”
Layme put her face in her hands and groaned. “You cannot be serious. I feel like a total choke right now.”
“Relax. You're not. You just totally made my morning,” Milo said. “Sit down before you kill yourself in one boot, alright? I'll see what she really has to say.” Layme walked over awkwardly, one leg three inches longer than the other, and sat back down on the edge of Milo's bed again. She pulled the other boot on as Milo opened Taz's blip. She admired his nerve—she never would have been able to bring her drive up on a screen like that for other people to see, let alone open any blips in front of them. It would feel too open, too honest, like walking around with no biofit under her clothes. Milo, however, didn't seem to have a problem with it. He popped the blip to full screen and set it playing.
Taz held some sort of portable camera, or so it seemed from the way the frame wobbled and shook. It took a second before her face even came on. When it did, she looked sharp and sardonic, a smirk etched across her features. A few people Layme recognized from the night before and a few more she didn't stood behind Taz, trying weakly to stifle laughter.
“Miiiilo!” Taz trilled in a sing-song voice. “It's late, tragger. We miss you.” More laughter from her entourage, either because the last statement was meant to be a joke, or because they were anticipating her next line. Somehow Layme thought it was the latter. She was right. Taz seemed to take a second to make sure she held her composure, and then she said in a mockingly admonishing voice, “It's time to stop shagging the tweak and come down.” Shrieks of laughter from the background. Layme realized she sounded like she was probably drunk again. Layme was also blushing, but at least this time she wasn't the only one. Milo had a hand to his forehead as if all this was giving him a headache, and Layme felt better observing that he was faintly red as well. “Come on, big brother. Newbie night is fun, but it's time to come back to the big kids, yeah?” At this point, a girl Layme thought she sort of recognized pulled the cam towards her. She had reddish-orange dreadlocks hanging halfway down her back, and she had Morphed her lips to be jet black. The effect against her pale skin was intense and slightly creepy.
“You know we're more fun Milo. Don't tell me you forgot already!” More laughter, and Taz yanked the camera back to her.
“Get your ass downstairs, anyway.” She sounded less joking now, and she rolled her eyes in accompaniment to her closing line. “Zink wants you.” Then she cut her feed.
Layme risked a glance at Milo from the corner of her eye, and she saw that he had both hands pressed to his forehead now. “My sister,” he hissed from behind clenched teeth, “is a jag. She and all her jag-hag friends. They're idiots.” He shook his head, almost as if he was ashamed, and then looked up at Layme. “Well, whatever. Some people like an infinite buzz better than the post-pulse lull. To each his own, I guess.” He stood up and stretched again. “Personally, I'll take the lull.”
Layme, sensing that this was her cue to leave, zipped up her other boot and got up as well. “I'll get out of your way.”
Milo waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. “Don't even. You're not in my way. Or Taz's,” he added, seeming to sense the need for speaking the afterthought. “You should really go get situated in your own room though. Trag, when I was a newbie I think that was one of my favorite parts.”
“I have no idea where it even is,” Layme admitted.
“Go stick your conscreens in,” Milo suggested, gesturing to his bathroom door. “When you sign into your drive now you'll have access to the Dorm's microsystem. Have it scan you and it'll tell you where to go.”
Layme ducked into the bathroom and slipped her contacts in hurriedly, tossing the saline and the case into the recycler. She had her own in her room with the rest of her stuff. When she emerged, Milo had changed to a pair of red microdenims and a black shirt, and she was suddenly conscious of the fact that she was still wearing her clothes from last night. Getting to her room didn't seem like a bad idea at all. Milo held open the door for her with his usual histrionic flair. “I'll see you later,” he said, and before she had time to process that, the door was shut and she was standing in the wide, blank hallway of the Dorm.
She signed in to her drive, smiling at the familiarity of the gestures and the view on her cons. The only thing that was different about what she saw now was the option to sign in to the Dorm microsystem along with the Campus municipal and the Federal, just like Milo had said. She scanned in and hit the homing option, hoping her data would have changed to set her room has her default location, and a purple line like the one that had been her guide yesterday lit up in one direction along the hall. She followed it around a corner and down a set of stairs, and she came to a door marked with her call number, 122018. It would have been relatively easy to locate anyway, she discovered: it was the only plain door she had seen. All the others had motion images and scrollers and lights and assorted other eye-catchers along them. Layme felt slightly awed. Was the entire building interfaced? The technology fiend in her awoke right away at the thought. If it was all faced, like Milo's room and the other rooms' doors, it meant she wouldn't need to use a touchpad when she was just hanging around in her room. It also meant she had new parameters to work with when she started new projects. She had no doubt that the Dorm's micro would be a hard one to crack, and perhaps some tech-geek Dragons had already put security measures in place...
A small beep made her jump and startled her from her thoughts. A lot of things seemed to be doing that lately. She wasn't used to being caught unaware. Usually she was the more observant one among people. She was sure it was a case of information overload—there was so much to try and figure out in the Dorms! And alcohol has been known to scramble some thoughts, she thought, smiling, and the small beep came again. Shaking off her thoughts, she realized she was standing in front of the eye scanner for her room and hadn't scanned in yet. It was beeping impatiently, its mechanical lens open and its blue laser waiting. She scanned in, and the door let out a soft hiss as its vacuum lock released to let her in.
She wasn't surprised to see that the layout of the room was almost exactly like Milo's—a window straight ahead on the wall; a bed under that; a bathroom and a req panel on the right wall; a blank wall to the left. Everything, including the seamless floor, was an unassuming cream color, meant to be blank but not sterile. As Layme stepped in and let the door seal behind her, she was already envisioning the changes she would make. Paper lanterns there, chairs there, a music set there—if she could req one, and if she could afford it. Smiling, she turned behind her to examine the thing she really wanted to see: the room's control panel. It was relatively simple. There was another eye scanner for verification and a touch screen that could presumably show her different options. It was blank now except for some calm colors flowing slowly across the screen, so Layme gave it a poke to wake it up. Instead of a general access screen, as she had expected, or even her drive's main page, it proclaimed, Viewing options: optical contact screens, external apparatus, interior display. She recognized the first two: conscreens, and either a touchpad or some sort of projector display. “The third one must be for the wall screen,” she mused aloud absently, thinking of the way Milo's main drive had shown up on his wall. She selected that choice, and the others appeared to folds behind it while a new set of options grew beneath it. Input selection: Soft drive access, media visualization, bulletin display, internal hard drive sectional access.
“The room has a hard drive?” she asked wonderingly, the question being addressed to no one in particular. The idea was old-fashioned. A hard drive, she knew, was the old method of storing data for and on computers. It was isolated except if the particular hard drive had wireless signal access, and data and files could only be transferred over the airwaves if both parties had access. Files stored on a hard drive were limited to that drive; if it wasn't physically in front of you, you didn't have access to what was on it. The invention of modern drives, called soft drives, had made hard drives obsolete. Soft drives were named to follow the term “software,” which meant it was intangible, not a physical object at all. Hard drives were like hard ware: hard. Touchable. An object that could be picked up and moved, generally, and also an object that was easy to sabotage and manipulate. Something as childish as dumping whatever it was into a tub of water would effectively fry the system and whatever information was on it beyond repair. The thought made her shudder involuntarily. To someone whose life was stored electronically, even more than the average person's was, the thought of that information being solid and available for everyone to see was frankly close to terrifying. The lack of structural integrity in a completely isolated system like that also made her cringe. It could be easily broken in to and copied or even stolen if someone else got a hold of it. The room's screen stated that the access to the hard drive was sectional, though, so perhaps it was more similar to her bedroom at home: connected to the house's main basic control system for things like alarms, heating, cooling, lights, water—all the good stuff. Having access to it must mean that she could use it for something. She wanted to experiment, but her mind seemed sleepy and unwilling to grapple with too many new concepts, even if they were tech-related. She chose the media vis option instead, which once again collapsed the other choices and expanded another new set. This one was simple, saying only internal or external source? Unable to think of what sort of external source the system might be asking about, Layme chose internal, and the touch screen went blank. She swore, thinking maybe she had temporarily crashed the system by telling it to access something that wasn't there, but when she glanced around for a reset feature, she realized the blank wall of the room was lit up now, displaying something that looked like it was a media library. The room was equipped with its own default media! Perhaps that was part of what the sectional hard drive was for. Maybe she wouldn't need to req that music system after all.
Eager to mess around, Layme searched for a device to control the screen, but she saw none. She was on the verge of giving up—she was tired, and the bed beside her had begun to look very appealing—when she decided to try the interfacing controls on her fingers. They worked on her drive and her cons; maybe they would work on the room's system and its display as well. She pressed her left forefinger to her left thumbnail in the customary circling gesture to activate the controls and made a few experimental gestures with her right hand, and sure enough, the cursor moved across the screen, highlighting different media and playback options. Deciding she might as well have fun with her new stuff, Layme chose to shuffle the audio while she caught some sleep.
The first thing to shuffle on was a mellow post-ban track, and Layme let it play while she rooted around her closet, set beside the req panel on the bathroom side of the room. She'd had enough of the green mesh dress. It had begun to feel like a constant reminder of how different things were from this time the day before. She had been picking outfits with Tessa then... She thought of blipping Tessa, of trying to tell the story of the past twenty-four hours, but the idea of attempting to explain the atmosphere of the Dorms and the feel of the Dragons put a damper on the thought, and when she realized Tessa would most likely try and make her reconstruct the blank parts in her memory, Layme dispelled the idea with a shake of her head. Let Tessa sit there and wonder. Her imagination was probably keeping her amused.
Layme shrugged off her dress and the green biofit and tossed them to the bottom of the closet, where her boots soon followed. As annoying as the outfit seemed, she wanted to keep it, and she had no idea how laundry worked yet. Swapping them for a clean set of bio and a worn flannel shirt that had once belonged to her father and which he had gotten rid of because it was nearly worn through in places, Layme briefly debated on the option of a shower before deciding that she was too tired. The muscles in her legs and back seemed to be shouting for her to go lay down, and she was definitely inclined to agree with them. Laying down seemed nice. She popped out her conscreens and set them on the desk beside the bed before climbing on to the unfamiliar mattress. She felt so calm! It was like the peace she had felt in Milo's room, but better, not sharpened by nerves or panic or disorientation. The music track played on smoothly through the room's integrated system, and the wall screen was down showing undulating and spectrum-shifting colors in cadence with the sound. The bed itself was soft and cool underneath her hot and tired body. She let her eyes slide closed as her thoughts spun out in lazy coils and tangents, somewhere between coherent and dream-garbled.
Her mind seemed to tend towards her programming. The Dorm's microsystem was already proving to be more complex than she had expected. If it was running partially on hard drives, it was bigger than she thought, and it was also something she had never worked with. She hadn't the slightest idea how to hack in to even the most basic of hard drives, which she was sure the Dorm's was not. Even if the Dragons hadn't spiced up the firewalls—but they wouldn't be firewalls, would they? They'd be something else—she was sure the Govlies would have outfitted the Dorm with higher security, either to protect the Dragons or to protect against them. Programming—any tech work, really—was illegal, but so were alcs under twenty-one, and she was sure the people who ran the Dorm, whoever they were, knew it was most likely happening behind their backs anyway. Surely they would guard their systems against intrusions. The thought of a challenge was exciting, and she decided to get up and play around with it a little, at least get a feel of its limits, or its possibilities... but her tired body and her disjointed mind protested when she made the first effort to actually get up. It was a strange feeling—usually excitement in a project would overpower any other feeling in her at a given moment. Everyone has their limits, I guess, she thought tiredly, and gave up on the idea of messing with the Dorm micro for the time being...
Her train of thought slid away from her, and she was adrift now, floating in the music with no real goal in mind. She was wondering vaguely what she should be thinking about to occupy her time when she slid another level down into the lull, and she fell asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment