In Nika's dream, Robo was flicking drops of ice onto her face from the rim of a glacier. When she drifted into the dawn of waking he vanished, and the glacier became a green rain forest. Monkeys howled, parakeets screeched, and a creeping clamminess pimpled her skin like a cold sweat. She stirred in the sheets and awoke to a gentle pulsing from the holographic alarm raising goosebumps on her body.

"Lose the jungle," she mumbled. "Give me something dryer...maybe Western."

The dark interlacing trees collapsed into an avenue of long trailing clouds over a dusty canyon. In the bed, she jiggled with the rhythm of a trotting horse. Sagebrush tickled her nostrils. "Okay, that's enough. I'm awake."

Her blurry eyes made out a familiar nightstand and reading lamp, two chairs, a closet, and a dresser. She wriggled in the rumpled sheets and rubbed her eyes. Yawning until her jaw ached, she shook her black curls. Five hours sleep was barely enough. She made herself get by with short stretches of slumber, since time was precious, but she had to peel open her dark eyes and stretch her brown legs before shrugging off the covers. 

A brightness dappled her face from the smartglass on the far side of the room. She stumbled from her bed to the dresser, picked out some underwear, draped it over a chair, and threw on a toweling robe. A tonne of sludge was gathering in her stomach. Another day at the photon lab. The satisfaction of decrypting the intricacies of brain cells obliterated by the pressure of the development program. Another day toiling to meet her paymasters' demands, searching for the elusive patterns that would make crystal balls obsolete.

With a barely perceptible whoosh Robo bustled in, his brushed aluminum torso flashing before her eyes. He whirled around to face her.

"It's Freestyle Monday, so how about golden waffles smothered in black cherry mascarpone, with honey and kiwi fruit pate..?"

"Don't make me queasy," she croaked. "Sausage. Give me sausage."

"Lab meat or bootleg?"

"Don't be funny--only googs buy lab."

"Oo, you saucy carnivore." He gave a disapproving pout and sashayed on skinny legs back to the kitchen. 

She smiled to herself and tuned in to her ajna. Neuronet fluff drifted into her brain, most of it social crap she quickly discarded. The few wisps she glanced at were work-related. She briefly lost herself, gawking at photons captured from the brain of one of her students, and finally settled on a pattern deep inside the girl's hippocampus that foretold a significant negative event.

Poor Phlox, she's going to have an accident, or maybe break up with her boyfriend. Should I warn her?  

She let the thought float in her mind as a slew of fresh data buffeted it, like ocean waves slapping the prow of a boat. One particular item caught her attention, concerning Yuke Corrigan the Second. The party boy she suspected of plagiarism had filed a complaint accusing her of sexual harassment. She was formally notified that the Triumvirate, the three senior professors who sat in judgment at faculty hearings, had received the allegation against her. Yuke claimed she had pressured him into acts of sexual intimacy in return for better grades. 

She laughed out loud. Her closest contact with Yuke was when he shoved his body against her desk, jolting her and her chair to the wall, and jabbered in her face that his social life wasn't eating up his research time. She had to tell him to back off.

So why did he copy Dong and Vishnu's reports and claim they were his? He should've had ample time to write up his own data. Douchebag. 

She teased out a tangle of curls with her fingers, shrugged off her robe, and shuffled into the bathroom. The barkwood walls curved around a tall slab of black granite, behind which sat a hollowed-out block of polished marble. She squatted on the latter. Her business completed, she sprayed her posterior with the warm scented water that spurted from its rim.

Her shower, under a steamy flood gushing from the tall granite slab, restored some of her vigor. She clapped once, and the flood dwindled to a trickle. After drying herself in a gust of warm air exhaled by the slab, she drifted back to the bedroom, rummaged in her closet, and picked out garments that gave her the look of a golden wood nymph. Glancing in a long oval mirror framed with abalone shells, she nodded in approval at her choice. 

A piercing cry of gulls rang from the smartwalls whose color changed from Devon cream to Bahama blue as she slouched into the kitchen. She flopped down at the whitewashed wooden table. Robo trundled up and, with a flourish, laid before her a dish of potage du matin, heavy with sausage garnered from illegally-slaughtered pigs. The savory smells reminded her of breakfasts in Maui. Lost in thoughts of ambling down to the ocean and wading in, she sniffed the wisps of steam from the dish. 

"You've outdone yourself, Robo. No breakfast will ever look and smell this good again. You're fired."

"Wait till you've tasted it." He barely glanced in her direction. 

She sipped a spoonful of the potage.  "Outstanding. Okay, I want you back--for now." 

Robo clattered back and forth, while she slurped the aromatic soup. He fetched her a pitcher of papaya juice infused with juniper berries.

"Here's your diuretic, madam," he intoned.

"Pour some into my jug." She chewed on a morsel of hot sausage.

He filled her tumbler nearly to the brim, and she lifted it to her mouth. The tumbler gleamed like spun silver and twinkled with tiny stars. She drank deeply, washing down the sausage. 

Scraping her bowl clean with a fork, she felt a twinge of concern. Something was going on in a part of her mind she rarely observed, involving a person in trouble struggling to get her attention. It was like peering into a dark hole where someone was mewing like a lost kitten.

I don't know anyone in that kind of distress. It could be someone from my past. I'll have to give it some thought.