Chapter 251: I Invent Lazy Studying

Monday, June 20, 2005

I woke two and a half hours later, with Ava still cuddled in my arms. I had barely started extracting myself when, #1: <It's too cold to study naked, and our clothes are in the other room, so let's stay in bed.>

#3: <Huh? What are we going to do for five hours?>

#1: <What do we normally do when we wake up in the wee small hours?>

#6: <Study.>

#1: <So let's do that then.>

#3: <But you just said ... OH! I like it!>

#4: <What?>

#3: <I'll give #1 the honor of explaining.>

#1: <I suggest we study from bed. Why do we need to move our body?>

#All: <Wow!>

#1: <Think how impressed Julia's going to be tomorrow morning, when she wakes up next to us and we tell her we're studying.>

#3: <Oh boy, studying even from the other room.>

#1: <It should work. I think the visual degradation shouldn't be any problem at such a short distance even through the wooden walls.>

#8: <That's the best solution yet for how to avoid clambering over a girl in the morning! I love the idea of being able to stay snuggled up and still study. They'll like it much more too.>

The bed was shoved into the corner of the room to make space for the study desks. I was lying on the outside of the bed so I could get out easily, and I was hugging Ava so facing the wrong way, none of which mattered. Facing the wrong way to hug Ava made it even cooler.

#1 closed our eyes, created a sight blob immediately above our body and looking toward the screens. The room was almost pitch black, as Vanessa has put VERY good drapes in her and Julia's bedroom for security reasons. That made finding the light switch tricky. It would've taken only a thought to make the sight blob radiate some light, as sight blobs are just light blobs dialed down to have zero emissions. Instead #1 tried something he'd been intending anyway, as we already knew this worked. He increased the size of the sight blob from the size we tend to create them at, about half the size of a head, to the normal study size of about six feet across. (There's no reason we create them at the size we do, other than it seems to be the size we think of when we're not really thinking, maybe from playing with balls that size as a young kid). The much larger sight blob immediately 'pulled in' FAR more light.

#3: <Time for some experiments.>

I spent a couple of minutes doing some tests. I didn't have any measuring instruments, but the amount of light I saw with my real eyes or a sight blob seemed to be proportional to surface area, which was logical as the larger the surface area, the greater the chance of it meeting a photon (ignoring the confusing issue that our sight blobs are invisible so by definition can't 'meet' any light). A six-foot diameter sight blob collected a great deal more light than a physical eyeball. Assuming a normal eye had a circular diameter of one inch, then the sight blob was 72 times greater in diameter. Area is a square function, so the larger sight blob collected roughly 5,000 times more light. I have two eyes, so a 2,500 times improvement. I can make sight blobs up to twelve feet across, so capable of collecting 10,000 times more light than my eyes. Why hadn't I blinded myself every time I'd created large sight blobs in well-lighted rooms? Seeing 2,500 times more light than I normally did in a well-lit room sounded like it should blow a fuse in my head. I couldn't think of an explanation, and there wasn't an actual problem, so I stopped thinking about it. It was good that I could see well in the dark though; that might be useful one day, or more likely, one night.

[[In case you think 10,000 (i.e., 1E4) times more light should be blinding us, the human eye can discern images across an intensity range of 1E16, an awesome range! So 1E4 was one-millionth of one-millionth of our possible range. The sight blob would need to be something like a thousand miles wide before we'd be blinded, which would be difficult to squeeze into my study.]]

With a studying-sized sight blob, I could easily see well enough not to need to turn the room's light on, so I didn't. I could see the scrolling keyboard, so each of the seven studying minds sent a fingertip to it. That woke each screen from its dark, power-saving mode, causing the amount of light in the room to increase substantially. I would have been scared of that increase (times 5,000!) but I'd studied before, so knew it wasn't a problem.

Why #1 had put the scrolling keyboard where he had now made sense, as it was in front of the eighth screen, where it was out of the way, but still in the light blob's field of view so there was no problem with the fingertips canceling on us.

#4: <If we're studying from Julia's room, we won't know if anyone enters this room. The door is out of our field of view and we can't hear anything. I don't like the idea of someone opening the door while we are studying, as they'd see weird shit happening. How about we put a little mirror down by the eighth screen, angled so the eighth mind can keep an eye on the doorway.>

#5: <That'd work, or we could have a lock on the door. We can obviously NP the lock from the inside.>

#1: <This door doesn't have a lock, and it's not our house so I'd rather not wedge their door shut. We can easily use a mirror until we move to the mansion. We'll get a lock fitted on the study door there. Okay?>

#All: <Agreed.>

[We subsequently borrowed a little mirror from Vanessa, leaning it against the base of the eighth screen so it showed the door.]

I cuddled with Ava and started studying, enjoying the fact that my superb memory meant I no longer had to take notes, so I could keep my hand on Ava's breast.

#3: <BUGGER!>

#All: <Huh?>

#3: <I'm hungry! We forgot about breakfast. Our entire "Studying From Bed Plan" ruined because you guys are pigs.>

#4: <I think we should be able to solve this highly important problem. Energy bars for pre-breakfast from now on?>

#8: <Yeah, that'd do. We just need to last until the family breakfast. We should buy a very large assortment of snack bars tomorrow. And we should 'peel' a few of them before we go to sleep each night, so we don't disturb whoever we're sleeping with. That way we'll be able to fly them straight into our mouth without moving a hand.>

#7: <Yeah. I like the idea of studying while I've got a breast in each hand.>

#3: <Let's survive on cookies this morning. Float the cookie jar over to the floor beside the bed, so it's inside our proximity range. That way we'll be able to extract cookies without having to move the eye off the screens.>

#1: <It's a pity we can't have even two sight blobs going at once. Life is tough, isn't it?>

#7: <It's also a pity sight blobs have a range restriction, otherwise we could sit at school next year, and have six or seven of our minds back here studying OSU courses. We wouldn't need the little office and the new computer system at school.>

#8: <If we had no range restriction, imagine how good we'd be as a Peeping Tom. Everywhere in town. Hell, everywhere in America. Anyone want to look inside Jessica Alba's bedroom? Haha.>

#2: <I must admit that Jessica Alba would be MIGHTY tempting, but we haven't even tried to peep within our existing limits. We could easily park outside Chloe's house, for example, or just check out the neighbors around here or at home.>

#3: <Please don't tell any other guys I said this, but it doesn't really appeal. Peeping on Carol's Cuties when they were getting ready for the lineup, at least once when we go to the Aquatic Center, and at least once when the cheerleaders are showering after practice next year - those are obligatory. But otherwise I'm afraid we might be getting mature.>

#5: <Bummer! Is there a way we can stop that happening?>

#8: <And reverse the damage! #3's right though, peeping doesn't really appeal.>

#1: <Unless Jessica Alba came to town.>

#8: <Well OBVIOUSLY then! But for less than goddesses, it's not worth the bother.>

#3: <Time for some cookies, then back to studying?>

#4: <Can we send the sight blob to Julia's room now, to see how bad the range degradation affects our sight, and then try to create NP-fingertips. If we can do it that way, it should work coming back the other way.>

#8: <Good idea.>

I sent the sight blob through the walls and into Julia's room. It was still studying-sized (six-foot diameter), and I could easily read the spines of the books Julia had in her room. That was the most important test passed. Then I tried to create a fingertip in front of the sight blob. It created easily (actually they either "create easily" or don't create at all). I created a few more and used them to push things around on Julia's vanity, to make sure. In the kidnappers' basement and the hospital, I'd often failed to create NP-fingertips at a distance from me, but I was sure that was because of my unfamiliarity with the locations. I was intimately familiar with Julia's bedroom, the study, and their spatial relationship, so I'd been pretty sure I could create fingertips in one room from the other. It wasn't absolutely essential, as I could've created the NP-fingertips where I was and flown them around to the other room accompanied by a sight blob, but this was certainly quicker and easier.

[[In addition to knowing these rooms' spatial relationship, I'd also gotten better at creating NP-points through a sight blob's sight. Similarly, sight degradation with distance had also reduced with practice. Both of those improvements were because my subconsciouses had benefited from the practice of using ki effects, and also because I'd got better at keeping track of spatial geography when following a sight blob's travels. When I'd first sent a sight blob exploring the ground level of the kidnappers' rented house, I'd quickly gotten disoriented, the image quality had degraded and then the sight blob had canceled. That wouldn't happen in such a small house now.]]

3A took a moment to admire the sight of Carol and Julia sleeping together, then we canceled the blob and fingertips.

#4: <Using a mouse from Julia's room will be a pain, like when we end one lecture and want to start the next, or end one course and want to start a new one.>

#3: <True. It's doable, but it'd probably distract all our minds. Changing courses doesn't happen often, but moving on to the next lecture is very frequent, especially with seven screens going at once. Every few minutes one of us is going to need to do that.>

#7: <There are more keys than we need on the scrolling keyboard. I wonder if Logan can program one more key per screen, which does a "Next Lecture" command.>

#8: <Good idea.>

#3: <We sometimes google other subjects, mostly when we hit a problem. That doesn't happen often, but there's no shortcut solution to that because it's unpredictable.>

#8: <The worst that can happen is that we need to get out of bed and go to the study, same as before. Or more likely, the other minds get momentarily distracted by the mind that needs to do something unusual. It's not a big deal, especially because we don't hit a studying obstacle very often.>

#7: <Some mornings we come here from our real home. Then we might as well sit in front of the screens like before #1 invented this lazy way.>

We had another cookie, then got back to studying.

We had to move the mouse quite often, but we got better at doing it with NP, and the other minds learned to ignore the efforts of the mind using it. We'd probably call Logan to write the "Next Lecture" command, but it wasn't a big deal.

[After a successful test that we could read the screens well enough from Julia's room, we did call Logan and ask him about having another key in each vertical column that moved onto the next lecture for the same course. "Easy," he said, emailing the new software to us an hour later, with a note saying it wasn't worth charging us. Computer guys are nearly as nice as soccer players.]

Otherwise we had no trouble studying through to Ava's awakening.

I sensed her waking a few seconds before she was fully conscious so we stopped studying and canceled the sight blob.

The moment she was conscious, I said, "Good morning, Ava. You're looking very beautiful this morning."

"Morning? It's pitch black..."

"Your mask is on."

"Oh yeah, haha." She removed it, then said, "It's STILL dark. How can you say I look beautiful?"

"You looked beautiful when we went to bed last night. You don't get ugly overnight, do you?"

"{Giggle}. I hope not. I thought you were going to study?"

"I stopped a little while ago. I'd rather hold you in my arms when you wake up."

"Aww, that's so sweet. What time is it?"