he used his best motivator. He needed it to do homework.
That ploy worked almost every time but he was careful not to over use it because it could lead to a discussion about his grades. He smiled as he recalled the day they went to Cyclops Computers at Hillside Mall and she put the new motherboard on her credit card. The guy who sold it to them winked at him and grinned when Andrea wasn’t looking and Tyler thought about trying for a new more efficient power supply but he did not like the colour her face turned when she saw the bill for the motherboard.
The monitor woke giving off that weird smell of old electronics and when the IBM booted it grudgingly displayed a colour bar graph showing temperature and humidity readouts over time in lab seven, the grow room next door. The readouts were for the three dishes of agar growing version x. He could see the last dish in the row was showing a temperature decrease of .07 degrees. He read back through the trace and it showed a sine wave of variation over time which he knew matched the refrigerant compressor cycling on and off in the bar fridge. It looked like every time the fridge cycled the last dish would lose a percentage of heat and the losses were adding up. This was unfortunate because he did not want to lose any of the variations of this generation. He checked to make sure the fridge was not cycling at the moment then turned the switch to start the agitators in the solution tanks.
He thought about writing a subroutine to automatically shut the fridge down during agitation but he was afraid it would have little effect and would require him to leave the computer running, which would use up any electrical savings. He could not hear the agitators vibrate but he saw the voltage drop by the usual amount. He counted to fifty while they vibrated and as he was watching the last dish lost another full degree.
Hazen Michaels
Zen sat with her legs up and ankles crossed on the kitchen table eating an apple trying to force herself to concentrate on reading the first section of her homework assignment. She was bored senseless, her mom was away working, and there was no one around to talk to. She called her friend Becka earlier but she could not talk because her mom answered and said she was expecting a call. She could not understand why Becka did not have a cell phone like everyone else on the planet.
She stared drearily out the kitchen window and sighed, she was supposed to rake the leaves before her mom got back and she craned her neck to see if the maple was finished dropping them. She knew from experience there was no point in starting until they had all fallen.
The kitchen window looked over Tyler’s house next door and she wondered if he was at home. She could go and hang out with him for a while but he was not much of a talker unless you wanted to talk about science or television shows and she was not sure she was that desperate. They grew up next door to each other and their moms were good friends and like a lot of single parents they helped each other out by babysitting each other’s kids. Her mom was a long distance trucker and until she was old enough to stay on her own when her mom was working she basically lived with Tyler and Andi.
When she turned thirteen, her mom said she was old enough to babysit Tyler while Andi was at work in the summer and she and Tyler spent a lot of time together. She got up and stretched her arms to take the kink out of her back from sitting and she noticed she was almost tall enough to touch the ceiling fan if she stood on her tiptoes.
She was sick of trying to make sense out of the French Revolution and closed the textbook in disgust. What was the point of learning about it when even the French couldn’t make sense of it, she thought. She was desperately in need of amusement; she already flipped through all the television channels at least five times and turned it off in disgust when she could not find anything to watch.
She
That ploy worked almost every time but he was careful not to over use it because it could lead to a discussion about his grades. He smiled as he recalled the day they went to Cyclops Computers at Hillside Mall and she put the new motherboard on her credit card. The guy who sold it to them winked at him and grinned when Andrea wasn’t looking and Tyler thought about trying for a new more efficient power supply but he did not like the colour her face turned when she saw the bill for the motherboard.
The monitor woke giving off that weird smell of old electronics and when the IBM booted it grudgingly displayed a colour bar graph showing temperature and humidity readouts over time in lab seven, the grow room next door. The readouts were for the three dishes of agar growing version x. He could see the last dish in the row was showing a temperature decrease of .07 degrees. He read back through the trace and it showed a sine wave of variation over time which he knew matched the refrigerant compressor cycling on and off in the bar fridge. It looked like every time the fridge cycled the last dish would lose a percentage of heat and the losses were adding up. This was unfortunate because he did not want to lose any of the variations of this generation. He checked to make sure the fridge was not cycling at the moment then turned the switch to start the agitators in the solution tanks.
He thought about writing a subroutine to automatically shut the fridge down during agitation but he was afraid it would have little effect and would require him to leave the computer running, which would use up any electrical savings. He could not hear the agitators vibrate but he saw the voltage drop by the usual amount. He counted to fifty while they vibrated and as he was watching the last dish lost another full degree.
Hazen Michaels
Zen sat with her legs up and ankles crossed on the kitchen table eating an apple trying to force herself to concentrate on reading the first section of her homework assignment. She was bored senseless, her mom was away working, and there was no one around to talk to. She called her friend Becka earlier but she could not talk because her mom answered and said she was expecting a call. She could not understand why Becka did not have a cell phone like everyone else on the planet.
She stared drearily out the kitchen window and sighed, she was supposed to rake the leaves before her mom got back and she craned her neck to see if the maple was finished dropping them. She knew from experience there was no point in starting until they had all fallen.
The kitchen window looked over Tyler’s house next door and she wondered if he was at home. She could go and hang out with him for a while but he was not much of a talker unless you wanted to talk about science or television shows and she was not sure she was that desperate. They grew up next door to each other and their moms were good friends and like a lot of single parents they helped each other out by babysitting each other’s kids. Her mom was a long distance trucker and until she was old enough to stay on her own when her mom was working she basically lived with Tyler and Andi.
When she turned thirteen, her mom said she was old enough to babysit Tyler while Andi was at work in the summer and she and Tyler spent a lot of time together. She got up and stretched her arms to take the kink out of her back from sitting and she noticed she was almost tall enough to touch the ceiling fan if she stood on her tiptoes.
She was sick of trying to make sense out of the French Revolution and closed the textbook in disgust. What was the point of learning about it when even the French couldn’t make sense of it, she thought. She was desperately in need of amusement; she already flipped through all the television channels at least five times and turned it off in disgust when she could not find anything to watch.
She
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