Excerpt: Lucid

The sun beat down relentlessly, grating the already peeling, scabbing flesh on the child’s shoulders. Shade absent, the dry soil forsaken, and demons at every possible angle. InuYasha looked from side to side to side, hoping for a way out. The monsters gnashed their fangs in anticipation for what was soon to be a shredded, mutilated half-demon corpse in their gnarled maws.

He gave in. The vile, murderous savage within him took hold, and with... Uh, wuh, with... with, with, with, with, with... Full stop.

The alarm clock was about to turn.

Iyasei took reluctant note of this fact as his eyes darted from the LCD monitor before him to the red, blinking digital lines on the clock’s rectangular face to his upper-right. Irritated enough as it were, he carelessly whisked his brown hair from out of his eyes, only to find that the moment he moved his hand away, his tousled bangs rushed back into place. It didn’t obstruct his view terribly, and he’d put up with it for a while longer. Iyasei figured that he’d have to get it cut sooner or later, although he preferred later over sooner.

He saved his document and allowed his attention to flit back to the clock. It could have been like any other digital alarm clock if not for two peculiar features. The first of these was that it had three sections: one for the hour, another for the minute, and the third for the seconds. This being the case, it was far more stretched out than a typical digital clock would be. The second property that made this clock unlike any other was that its hours, minutes, and seconds weren’t really hours, minutes, or seconds at all. They were bolded, red lines that, when put together in the correct way, made hours, minutes, and seconds, but instead, they flashed and changed positions erratically, from creating upside-down “L”s to sideways equal signs. The lines would carry on in this illegible and sporadic fashion until it was precisely five hours, fifty-nine minutes, and thirty seconds, at which time each line would connect in an order so as to appear as normal, European numerals, as they were about to at this very moment.

Each of the red lines flashed in unison, the face went black, and when they returned, the numbers appeared. Iyasei nodded to himself and spun in his chair to make a quick mental sweep of the room. Then, without any further distractions, he pulled his very special eight gigabyte USB drive from his pants pocket and placed it, quite aptly, into his computer’s USB port.

05:59:42

A window appeared on top of his document, and after two clicks of his mouse, another window opened up on top of the previous one.

05:59:47

He copied the document he’d been so avidly working on, titled IYO, into this window. A thinner, rectangular box appeared alongside a crudely drawn maze within a human brain. Inside the thin window, a green loading bar inched on very, very slowly.

05:59:53

Iyasei glared angrily at the loading bar. This seemed to frighten the loading bar as he unconsciously intended because it had gone from being fifteen percent complete to ninety-eight percent in about a second and a half.

05:59:54

Finally, in the home stretch. The loading bar and the brain maze disappeared in a blip, and Iyasei shut down each of the windows on the screen. Then he turned off the monitor and placed his wireless mouse on the charger.

05:59:56

He pulled the drive out of the port and fumbled with the drive’s cap before getting it to snap into place.

05:59:59

Putting the drive back into the pocket from whence it came, he waited for .13 seconds. Then he woke up.