Resilient - Evolution

Chapter 11: Links and Emojis

She didn't want to, but Nina finally opened her eyes. There wasn't any way of telling how long she'd been in bed. These apartments didn't have any clocks in them, so she just asked in her link, "Hey Ram, how long have I been in bed?"

Ram said, "I'm showing that from the time you entered normal sleep, you became conscious again after about ten and a half hours. It is now 11:26 AM."

"Wow," she said, rolling over and sitting up.

Eric was sitting at the apartment desk and could see her off to the side in the bedroom. He said, "Oh, I guess you did decide to get up today."

"I'm starved," she said. "Do we get room service?"

"If you want, I'll bring you something from the canteen," he said.

"I think some buttered toast and a couple fried eggs ... oh, and some of those sausages that we ate last time," she said. "Just hang on a minute. Let me get a shower, and I'll go with you."

"I just knew you were going to want me to bring some orange juice, and some milk, and maybe some hash browns," he said.

"You know me too well," she said, smiling as she climbed out of bed. "That's why I'm going with." She looked around the apartment and said, "We do have a shower in here, don't we?"

"Use your link," he said.

"Um ... Ram, I think I'd like a shower," she said, not really sure what would happen.

"The lighted space in the corner is where the shower comes down," Ram said. "Your room sensors check to ensure all multiple-use spaces are cleared before reconfiguring."

A cubicle lowered from the ceiling in the lighted square she was watching. It was rounded and looked like one of those cryogenic storage chambers in the science fiction movies. The door slid around the cylinder and showed the interior. It really was a shower ... a small one, but if it worked, what the heck.

"Do I have a towel?" she asked, looking around as she took off what she had been sleeping in.

"Let Ram know when you're done washing, and he's got a surprise for you," Eric said. "You can put your clothes in that bin by the shower."

"They gonna wash my clothes too?" she asked.

"Something like that," he said, grinning conspiratorially. "Try it."

It was just an oversized shirt and her underwear. It didn't really matter if they disappeared. She opened the bin, tossed them in, and climbed into the shower.

"Lady Nina," Ram said, "For control over the water volume, stream, pressure, temperature, and flow style ... use your link as an active monitor and actionable control. The water is recycled in the atomizer and regenerated in the space between floors."

"Well," she said in her link, "how do I get the water to turn on and stuff?"

The link loaded all the information she needed to control everything in the apartment, including the shower.

"That's so cool when you do that," she said, studying the new information. "Okay, here goes."

The water came on, and she adjusted it the way she wanted. "Hey Eric, we don't have to worry about how much water we use," she said through the link.

He grinned an emoji to her through his own link.

"Hey ... I haven't seen that," she said back, searching for her own data on transmitting a picture emoji through the link. That wasn't all she found out, and she sent him a naked picture video of herself in the shower. She might have been a little oversized and cartoonish in certain areas, but he'd catch the humor in it.