by Ashlie Minamida » Tue Mar 09, 2021 7:18 pm
Waking up is still something Ashlie is not quite used to. It used to only happen when she'd been disabled, restarted or her persistent mind otherwise interrupted. It meant reconstituting her component parts according to very strict protocols to enable her to function. It meant reviewing error logs. It meant catching up on what she missed best as she could from patchy data. And on a number of occasions that are preserved in perfect memory storage it meant being a faulty shell of herself, abandoned in the complete dark of a backup system or trapped in a recursive prison.
But now surfacing from sleep is different, even if she's not utilizing Natalie's uplink-bed to establish a direct connection between her conscious mind and the nanite system, there's still a feeling of... persistence. No concrete memories she can draw from falling asleep and waking but she can tell she was just idle, not turned off. It's pleasant enough to make up for the vague sluggishness that takes a minute or two to shake. Of course, old habits are hard to shake, so her boot routine has been replaced by that of making her bed, setting out her clothes for the day, pouring a package of NutriSoy powder into a mixer along with water from the fridge's built-in filter. Measuring cup goes back on the drying rack. Mixer set to low while she takes a shower. Towel-dry her hair and get dressed. Pull up emails, notifications, reports and such on the screens now taking up one wall of her apartment. Drink her breakfast as she catches up on the world. That part hasn't changed beyond being a bit more tedious without a direct data feed. She'll find a solution for that soon enough.
But for now there are more pressing matters to attend to. The new semester officially starts tomorrow and she needs to run a final check on the new Point Systems to ensure everything is operating correctly. She taps the corner of one screen to send a ping through to the Crystal Computer and contact Natalie for the system test. A not insignificant part of the redesign was to properly integrate the two systems in ways that'll benefit everyone after all.
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/e7OYurJ.png)