From the depths of silence and darkness a soft breeze approached, painting its own reality as it rustled through a field of tall grass and a trickling stream bordered by a stand of trees. Birds began to chirp, and before Spencer opened his eyes, he could almost feel the sun rising. Content with this, he reached above his head to grab his alarm and opened his eyes as he remained reclined in his coffin-sized enclosure of a bed. A heavy curtain on his right kept the space comfy and non-threatening.

He had scrambled the clock the night before, and now, as it continued to trickle and chirp, he spun it around to see the initial configuration of its six sides. Before he could shut off the sonic reminders of a living earth, he would need to solve the Rubik's cube clock. The tired fuzzy feeling faded from the field of his consciousness and he began to methodically slide and clack each metal facade of a cube swiftly to its relative home surrounding the vaguely understood joints and electronics within.

Within a minute it was solved, and now he spun it around to see each side, re-adjusting his vision settings to its six basic colors. He pulled his overhead computer display down, and its voice filled the new silence, recapping his solution on the screen, stopping once to point out a shorter solution. His eyes memorized this new position and his fingers moved through the steps of the new pattern as the computer coached.

"Well done!", the program informed him, displaying a graph of his long term reduction in solve time and predicting the next few weeks' results based on the most recent pattern learned. With the prospect of good things to come, Spencer swept the curtain back and slid out into the real world.

Eric Ehrnschwender