At a little past two in the morning on August 2, Raj Aubrey’s dreams came true.
Well, at least the foundations to his dreams. The dreams were finally within shooting range. He could see them, off there in the distance.
He ran the installer for the as-of-yet-unreleased iPhone Development Kit 3.2, rebooted twice, and hopped back into Firefox to perform his first tutorial.
“Jesus, Raj,” groaned Beth from the bed, covering her eyes with her arm. “Come back to bed. It’s late.”
“In a minute,” he said, though he hadn’t really heard her. He was importing libraries! Libraries! “Just gotta test something here…”
He ran commands as instructed, but had no idea what they meant. SVN checkout. Sure, why not…
Something started downloading, and whatever it was, it was massive. He checked the tutorial again, and it made no mention of a two-hour wait. He checked the clock: 3:15. He couldn’t stay up until five, just watching things download. He was deranged, but not that deranged.
He read through the tutorial twice more, just to be ready, and then set the laptop down on the table, dimmed the screen, and climbed back into bed. Beth had all the covers.
“You’re an idiot,” she muttered, half-asleep. “What time is it?”
“Not late,” he lied.
“Idiot,” she repeated.
“Don’t worry about it,” Raj said softly, trying to settle. “It’s Sunday. We can sleep in.”
Beth turned her head towards him, eyes narrow and puffy with exhaustion. Her jaw was set in that way it got when he forgot to take out the trash on garbage day.
“No we can’t, Raj,” she said. “The lake, remember? We need to leave at eight to make it in time.”
Raj bit his lip.
“Right. Forgot about that.”
“What a shock. You got the hot dogs, right?”
“Oh. Uh…”
“Great,” she sighed, and rolled away from him. “We’ll pick some up on the way. Now get to sleep before the alarm goes off, will you?”
She was snoring the moment the words left her lips, breathing heavily, sounding angry even in rest. He watched her for a little while, but it didn’t help him drift off. Made him nervous.
The only thing worse than Sam and Laura’s lake party would be Sam and Laura’s lake party on no sleep, so he had to make an effort. He tried counting sheep, but numbers made him think of associative arrays, and that made him think of object oriented programming, and… he wanted so desperately to see if the download was done.
Beth would kill him.
He’d have to leave the app until after the lake. Just a few more hours. His dreams were still within reach, just delayed a bit by Sam and Laura.
He really hated Sam and Laura.
As it happened, he wasn’t the only one.
