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