mDuo13

Ah, sleep. One of the great mysteries of life. A state in which we spend a third of our time, doing seemingly nothing. A necessity and yet the first thing to get trimmed from our schedule when push comes to shove. Wild plans exist for those who want to do more with less. But nothing can do away with this essential dead spot in every day.

I think it was about 4 or 5 years ago, around my freshman year in college, that I noticed how my sleep schedule worked. No matter what time I went to bed, if left unattended, I spend about 9 hours, including the time it took to fall asleep and to get out of bed. If I cut that short with an alarm and something to do, it would come back later. I would get out of class feeling hazy and end up dozing off for just about long enough to make my total sleep time 9 hours. I read that the best way to reduce wasted time sleeping was to stick to a consistent schedule, but with the dorm experience, that was not particularly viable. There was one up-side to this, however; I discovered that when my sleep schedule is broken and insufficient is when I have the most interesting and memorable dreams, a fact that remains true today. (Last night's, or rather, this morning's humdinger involved a huge condor, nearly getting attacked by a wild tiger, $5 gas, and a prototype 17-inch iPad. Go figure.)

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Missing Cycles starts here.

The video was a snowy mess of noise. Axalis suddenly felt himself with a splitting headache. Text began to appear unbidden in the view of his mechanical eye:

Cymanager override complete.

Firmware compatibility confirmed.

Beginning data merge.

Axalis blacked out.

* * *

Jordan Burk checked the time on his watch. 20:15. He realized he should call his wife and let her know he would be missing dinner again. He desperately did not want to do so, but he forced himself to withdraw his handheld PC and press the buttons to dial his wife's handheld. After a couple rings, her face appeared on the screen. Jordan's wife was attractive, a light blonde with big eyes and soft features. But right now those features were glaring at him.

"I suppose this isn't to let me know you're on your way?"

Jordan hesitated, then finally bit the bullet and said it. "No. We're under pressure to get the case wrapped up before the election, especially with the jumper yesterday, but there's not enough evidence to close it. I need another few hours to look into some more of these loose ends. You should eat dinner without me."

"You know, Jordan, some of us manage to finish our work within the normal eight hours and come home for dinner. Maybe you would make more progress if you took some time to relax?"

"I'm sorry, it's... just this one case. I promise when it's done I'll take a long vacation and we can spend the whole two weeks together."

"I'm not asking for that much, Jordan. I just want you to have dinner together sometimes."

"I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Look, I'll tell Mags to put your portion in the fridge. You can flashheat it when you get back. At this rate, I'll already be asleep by then."

"Thanks," he said downtroddenly, and sat there as his wife ended the call. Finally he returned to his work rig and began reviewing the facts of the Morse Biotronics case again.

To be continued...

Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin, or just Occult Academy, is a recent series by Aniplex studio A-1 Pictures, part of their "Anime no Chikara" project that also includes So-Ra-No-Wo-To and Ichiban Ushiro no Daimao, with the goal of creating quality original anime series (not based on manga or other works). Set in 1999, follows Kumashiro Maya, heir to a school that specializes in the occult, and Abe Fumiaki, an ex-psychic who has been sent from 13 years in the future to search out and destroy "Nostradamus's Key", the artifact that will cause an catastrophic dimensional rift on the 21st of July. Aside: I like how the time travel in this show almost becomes 12 Monkeys and Back to the Future - two competing models for cinematic time travel - at the same time!

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The following are (more-or-less spoiler-free) patch notes for K-ON!!, the recently-finished follow-up to Kyoto Animation's wildly popular series K-ON! about high school girls who usually don't play music. Those looking for advice on the series should first ask themselves the question, "Does a series need to have a plot for me to watch it?" If the answer is no, then familiarize yourself with the first season before upgrading.

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Now that I've finished watching Asobi ni Iku yo!, I figured I may as well continue in a previous vein and summarize what made the show amazing for those who've got too-good taste to actually slog through the whole thing. Overall, Asobi ni Iku yo! was a pretty fun watch: it never made me mad, nor bored, nor upset, and it did make me laugh. The second half wasn't quite as hilarious as the first, but the show found its rhythm and balance between action and fanservice, and managed some trite but successful character development on a few characters, while further fleshing out its improbably-convenient setting. The only real disappointment about the second half was the general lack of Uncle Yuuichi. Warning: the rest of this article contains major spoilers for episodes 6-12 of the show!

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Missing Cycles starts here.

Axalis really wanted to pop the memory chip into his wrist socket and see what it contained, but he had no idea where it came from, so that would be a great way to get a backdoor inserted in his cymanager, or worse. Instead, he pocketed it and started walking.

The streets were busy today, like they were every day. Axalis kept to the slow side of the pavement, while to the side of him various autocars hurled by at breakneck speeds, and above him the jetpod channels were themselves growing congested with traffic. Everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere. Axalis himself strode purposefully, though he had no destination in mind, and finally, spotting an shady-enough-looking establishment that he'd never before patronized, ducked behind a heavyset man wearing a thick coat into a black-light-illuminated... café, apparently.

Giving up on his earlier determination to start boozing at this hour, Axalis decided to kickstart his critical thinking with the strongest coffee this place offered, and found a seat near the darkest corner of the building to sort things out. He declined the server's offer to drop reflective sugar flecks into his drink, and, barely even sipping at the bitter black concoction, set to work on deciphering his situation the way he knew best.

First, he dug into his bottommost inside pocket and withdrew a handheld PC. This was an unpopular model, designed for the declining majority of people who didn't have a cymanager and some sort of network access incorporated into their person through implants. This handheld only had enough power to perform the lowest common denominator of tasks -- making calls, locating people and places, ordering groceries, and playing primitive games -- and it was poorly-designed enough that even these tasks were a chore for most people. This clunkiness, while it had done very little for sales of the model, served a purpose for Axalis, which is that it made this model an unlikely target for carpet-bombing hackers. Its designated functions were of little impact anyway, and he had loaded the little device with programs of his own design. He used it as a sandbox and a dummy for interacting with unsavory people and unchecked software. To that end, the model had one feature that was ideal: its battery was very easy to remove and put back in.

Axalis fished around in his pocket until he found the miniscule chip, and clicked it into the memory socket on the handheld PC. He was lucky it was one of the mainstream formats that this handheld supported; then again, if it had been his in the first place as Gladerice had suggested, that was by design, not luck.

Nothing happened visibly on the handheld when he inserted the chip, which was a good sign; he ran a quick analysis using a tool he'd written for this handheld, and it failed to detect any autorunning code or illegally-formatted data blocks that might be used to buffer-overflow his cymanager. He would have Baskerville inspect it thoroughly later, just in case, but for now he was satisfied. The only thing that seemed to be on the chip was a simple video, using only a tiny fraction of the memory chip's capacity. It was in a format designed for playback in ocular implants, so finally he plunged the chip into his wrist socket.

Axalis took another sip of the decidedly spine-tingling coffee as his cymanager picked up the video. Resting an elbow on the table, he covered his organic left eye as, in his other one, playback began.

Continued in Missing Cycles - 5...