Touchstone 1 - Stray

really quickly from one planet to another makes me think of hyperspace, but hyperspace is really just a ‘magic science’ word people made up, isn’t it?
    Saturday, December 22
    Meh
    I can’t sleep. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to be sleeping right now.
    Today was my first session with Sa Lents. I told him I don’t think the people of Earth are descended from Muinans, and he said that other Muinan-settled worlds had forgotten their origins too, and that I was definitely Muinan-descended according to my genes. I refrained from pointing out that that could mean that Muinans are Earth-descended.
    The rest of the time was spent on geography. I drew a really bad map of Earth with my finger on the tablecloth screen and wrote down the countries I could remember.
    I’m supposed to start on interface learning tomorrow, once they’re sure there’s been no strange issues caused by my language injection, which I reacted to ‘poorly’. I am very bored. I wish I’d brought my pippin statue along for company.
    Sunday, December 23
    Digital mind
    No more complaining about being bored. Interface training is giving me some idea just what having a computer in your head means.
    The training is aimed at little kids and is as much teaching them to read as it is how to use their interfaces. Just read. They don’t teach kids to write. So obvious, but yet so strange. If you can select a letter from the alphabet quicker than writing one out, why bother with writing? I’m being trained by a complex teaching program which looks like a cuddly lady in her thirties. Sana Dura. It took me way too long to realise she wasn’t an actual real-time person, but eventually I realised that whenever I interrupted her and asked my scrambled questions, she would answer, but then go back to exactly what she’d been saying, in exactly the same tone.
    I did exercises for ages – I want out of this room – and the more the basics settle in, the less straightforward the training becomes. At first it was just me and Sana Dura standing in a colourful room, with her telling me to push buttons which I can see before me. I can’t really describe how I push them. I see them floating in front of me and they activate if I want them to. Then I ‘graduated’ to alphabet and it was a very interactive ‘touch the letter’ game which put 3D movies to shame. It was as if I was in my room, and also this colourful world of floating letters and flowers and cutesy animals, the two worlds overlaid on each other. I find it very disorienting unless I close my eyes to block out reality.
    There are twenty-eight letters in their alphabet.
    Monday, December 24
    86400
    I can turn out the lights! It feels like such an achievement, but so far as I can tell it means that this tutorial program thinks I’m about five now. I can also open the internal doors without having to go poke the locks, and I can make the window go dark like extremely tinted glass. All of it’s extremely simple – it’s just that having run through all these training exercises I’ve had an upgrade to my status so that I can use some of the minor room functions. My injected language has also settled in more – I’m not going to be able to speak it properly any time soon, but it helps my memory during all the infant lessons I’ve been having. Accelerated learning, I’d guess you’d call it, and I’m taking big leaps forward – enough to start asking more complex questions.
    During yesterday’s session with Sa Lents we used my watch to work out how long an Earth year is compared to a Tare one. Fortunately, while they use different squiggles for each digit, their number system is apparently the same as ours. I don’t know how I would have managed if they used binary or base three or something. I’m good at maths, but not that good.
    Even though there’s now a calculator in my head, I find it really hard to think in their digits, so I only used it for the large multiplications and divisions, and did the workings in the back of my diary. Sa Lents said he found the way I write very interesting – kind of like cave-paintings to him, I bet.
    Anyway, one Earth year is worth about three Tare years. Sa Lents is over a hundred Tare years old. Their ‘living day’ is about twenty-six Earth hours long, though neatly divided into ten ‘hours’ of a hundred ‘minutes’ each. What they consider a second is not quite the same as an Earth second, and there’s a hundred of those in each