A Time Story

Chapter 2 (part B)

[Continued from Chapter 2- part A]

"Move faster whelps!!" a harsh voice snapped Rylan out of her memory. She was now in her next class, which Rylan remembered was called Mobile Regulation. She didn't know what the name meant but she did know one thing. It involved running, a lot of running!

Her legs ached as she ran across the green virtual grid. Every time she reached the end, another part of the grid appeared in front of her. Her classmates were tinted in dark green around her, each having their own grids to run on. Although Rylan couldn't see through her virtual reality googles, she could tell that her instructor was making her rounds. Rylan didn't know too much about her—except she loved yelling, and giving girls electric shocks when they didn't run fast enough. She just shocked the girl in front of her, who flinched slightly from the baton's impact.

"Faster C-109!" she gave the same shock to Rylan. As the searing metal bruised her gut, it conducted a fuzzy pain that buzzed up her spine. Rylan ran as fast as she could and when she didn't receive another shock, she knew her instructor was satisfied. It would be another triple before her class was over. Rylan slowly lost herself in the past, in a time before classes were not so painful.

Rylan's first 20 phases were extremely lonely. Her only company was her reflected-self in the mirror, which really wasn't company at all since she wasn't real to begin with! Rylan always felt tempted to meet the other girls outside, but her fear often stopped her. The helpbot did advise against it after all, and she didn't want to be deducted points for her 'ill-behavior.' What if she did something bad, and made the girls look at her with judging stares? She remembered how that felt back in the concourse, how it made her feel small in the face of everyone else. It was a kind of isolation that she wasn't particularly comfortable with. Her reflected-self would just have to do.

When Rylan needed a tablet, she would morph her sphere into a rectangle that displayed a blue-tinted screen filled with several icons. Somehow the tablet felt solid yet contractable. She could adjust its size by pulling and pushing at the corners, a strange effect that left Rylan entertained for a while. She could tap the different icons with her finger to open different programs, one of which was for Neuro-Retention. She was assigned to learn for a majority of her wake phase. Failure to learn for the required time would result in a deduction of points, which the voice from the tablet frequently reminded her. Rylan felt discouraged by all these threats of losing points, something she didn't even have in the first place. Fortunately, she soon discovered that she earned a steady flow after spending a certain amount of time in Neuro-Retention.

Rylan didn't mind Retention too much because it was pretty easy. She was shown images on the screen with words and sounds associated with them. Soon thoughts about that thing rushed into her head. They came fast but calm, like waves on the ocean, although she never truly knew what a wave or an ocean was. Was came to her seemed to come out from a dream, not like anything she had truly experienced. Animals, oceans, trees—were all part of a world she had never known. Sometimes she wished to be a part of that world, to ride the seas on giant snakes watching dolphins fly in the sky. At least it sounded more interesting than the lonely life she had now.

Her strict schedule forced her to learn cycle time fairly quickly. Although a lot still confused her, she picked up a few things. Cycle time was used to keep track of time. A single was about the time it took to breathe once. A triple was probably a thousand breaths but she didn't bother to check. There were 25 triples in a phase which she kept track of using a clock on her wristwatch. Every tick mark corresponded to a triple in a phase, labeled 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on.

Phases were split into a wake-phase and sleep-phase. Rylan woke up on the 1st triple and was forced to sleep on the 14th. She had to spend 9 triples on Neuro-Retention, leaving her with 4 she didn't know what to do with. She used them to eat of course, but her remaining activities included extra retention or staring at the white sterile ceiling. She tried talking to her reflection a few times but she couldn't really carry a conversation. Perhaps if they were this much alike, it would not be so easy to become friends.