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2254-08-23 10:00:00

Your system alerts you. It’s time to get up and get ready for class. You sit up, and the whole room seems to spin around you for a moment. Turning your head antispinward will do that. But no, the vertigo is more than that. You signal your interface to help stabilize your vestibular sense.

You stand up, at great effort. The gravity feels so strong, you may as well be on Earth. Maybe you are just that fatigued. But why? You pick up your terminal and pull up your system monitor. It was last opened to your consciousness tracker. Now you remember--you haven’t slept for over 48 hours. Your system records confirm it. You spent a long time in a dissociative state last night, but not a second below it in any sleep phase.

Despite being awake all night, you can’t remember anything you were doing before the alert pulled you back surfaceside. But your personal log should tell you. Like any good technopath you always keep an encrypted record of your thoughts and memories for just such an occasion. Yet you left no log file for the ætherwalk you were apparently just on. No data exists for it at all except that you were dissociating.

Today you have Programming class. It’ll be hard to focus on something so technical under serious sleep deprivation. You get yourself ready, going through the motions by muscle memory, struggling to hold a coherent thought together. You’re in the elevator before you realize you’ve left your room. Time to get something to eat from the autokitchens downstairs.

Luckily there aren’t many people down here. Having a class a little later than normal is good for that. You’ve connected to an autokitchen, though your short term memory is in such bad shape that you don’t remember walking over to it.

Just as you’re about to > make some food on it, you glance at the chemlab module.