Read Online Touchstone 1 - Stray by Andrea K. Höst - Free Book Online Page A

becomes. At first it was just me and Sana Dura standing in a colourful room, with her telling me to push buttons which I can see before me. I can’t really describe how I push them. I see them floating in front of me and they activate if I want them to. Then I ‘graduated’ to alphabet and it was a very interactive ‘touch the letter’ game which put 3D movies to shame. It was as if I was in my room, and also this colourful world of floating letters and flowers and cutesy animals, the two worlds overlaid on each other. I find it very disorienting unless I close my eyes to block out reality.
    There are twenty-eight letters in their alphabet.
    Monday, December 24
    86400
    I can turn out the lights! It feels like such an achievement, but so far as I can tell it means that this tutorial program thinks I’m about five now. I can also open the internal doors without having to go poke the locks, and I can make the window go dark like extremely tinted glass. All of it’s extremely simple – it’s just that having run through all these training exercises I’ve had an upgrade to my status so that I can use some of the minor room functions. My injected language has also settled in more – I’m not going to be able to speak it properly any time soon, but it helps my memory during all the infant lessons I’ve been having. Accelerated learning, I’d guess you’d call it, and I’m taking big leaps forward – enough to start asking more complex questions.
    During yesterday’s session with Sa Lents we used my watch to work out how long an Earth year is compared to a Tare one. Fortunately, while they use different squiggles for each digit, their number system is apparently the same as ours. I don’t know how I would have managed if they used binary or base three or something. I’m good at maths, but not that good.
    Even though there’s now a calculator in my head, I find it really hard to think in their digits, so I only used it for the large multiplications and divisions, and did the workings in the back of my diary. Sa Lents said he found the way I write very interesting – kind of like cave-paintings to him, I bet.
    Anyway, one Earth year is worth about three Tare years. Sa Lents is over a hundred Tare years old. Their ‘living day’ is about twenty-six Earth hours long, though neatly divided into ten ‘hours’ of a hundred ‘minutes’ each. What they consider a second is not quite the same as an Earth second, and there’s a hundred of those in each minute. For every five of these days the planet has one solar day (which explains why it stayed dark outside so long). I don’t in the least understand how a planet can have a longer day but a shorter year than Earth’s, yet similar gravity.
    The mind’s eye
    Den = second
    Joden = minute
    Kasse = hour
    Kaorone = ‘living day’
    Kao = day (single day/night cycle)
    So my name is a bit like a reference to time here. That’s better than the Earth meaning by far. Cassandra means ‘she who entangles men’, which has got to be the suckiest name meaning ever, and that’s not even getting into the whole cursed by Apollo and then everyone thinks you’re mad and you know everything’s going to end up a mess and can’t do anything about it part. I’ve never understood why Mum picked it, since she’s usually more sensible about names. I can think of ten million names I’d rather have than one which stands for tragic futility and madness.
    That’s – it sounds circular saying it, but it drives me nuts, thinking that I’m really nuts. I mean, walking through cracks in the world to different planets and having computers installed in your head? The giggling in a straightjacket possibility seems so much more likely.
    And I’m not. I’d know, somewhere deep down, I’d know if this was all imagination. Delusion. I’d never have made up being so sick, for a start, or those blisters. I’m not imagining any of this. I’m not.
    …
    Must sleep more and practice