After showering and performing his other daily ablutions, Ahava walked back into the bedroom to get dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. This was his standard dress attire for a casual Friday, and in fact, any other day he could get away with it. He enjoyed wearing casual clothes and only dressed up if it was required or, as was more often the case, if his wife encouraged him. She often did this by affectionately saying she would not be seen with him in the clothes he was in.

He kissed his wife before leaving the bedroom. The bedroom was in the second story of their house, with the kitchen and living rooms downstairs. Ahava went to the downstairs to prepare for work. Generally, on a workday, Ahava was always quick in leaving the house, as he liked to be moving to the next thing without any periods of waiting. Ahava found himself generally impatient to be placed or doing some activity. Boredom was not something that he enjoyed, but being overstressed was also something that he hated. On a date with his wife, before they had been married, they had done four different activities in one night. This was largely because at the end of each activity, Ahava had asked, ‘What do you want to do next?’ In hindsight Ahava was sure that this must have been exasperating for Kate by the end of the night.

Packing his laptop bag for work with his wallet, keys, and tablets he walked the kitchen to grab breakfast. Recently he had started trying liquid breakfasts. Ahava found them not as appetizing as regular food, but at least they had a certain simplicity. Chris and Sam were both already awake in the living room. As Ahava walked by he noticed that they were both either playing games on their laptops or watching an animated TV series on the computer.

“Morning,” Ahava said to his two sons. They both grunted an incoherent reply, without looking up from their screens. This was not an unusual response from his sons at this time in the morning and he waved as he walked off. Last, he picked up his phone, put it in the laptop bag and started moving toward the front door.

He had just walked out of the front door toward ‘the large red car’ (as he called it on his Trans Perth parking application) when his phone made an unusual notification sound. Beep. Beep. Beep. Ahava looked around, bemused, as this was not the normal notification sound that he had set for his phone. He fished the mobile phone out of his bag and checked the screen to see what application was causing the sound. On the front of the phone was:

Initializing the History System, 1% complete.

Nothing else was on the screen and the background was the same blue color as the dreaded Windows error screen, now a remnant of old operating systems. Puzzled, he tried to flick to another screen on the phone but got no response. Pressing buttons to escape the application caused nothing to happen, except now the one percent on the display increased to two percent. Finally, he tried to turn the phone off, but it was still unresponsive. The same message now showed it was at three percent. Thinking that he would definitely fix his phone when he arrived at work, Ahava put the phone back in his bag. As he opened the door to get into the car, he noticed that in the far corner of his vision he could see what appeared to be some type of moving symbol. It looked to be an egg timer moving around in a circle once per second. Ahava blinked rapidly to clear his eyes. The symbol remained. Closing his eyes, the symbol was still there, right in the corner of his vision. Shaking his head did not remove the slowly rotating hourglass either.

“What the heck!” Ahava muttered out loud. As he expected, there was no answer back from the general world. Another “What the heck!” was also met with no answer. As he slowly got into the car he remained sitting, perplexed about what was happing. Ahava could not think of anything to do about the strange circling symbol except wait. He decided, as with his phone, that this problem would have to be sorted out later, maybe when he got to work.