I was jolted awake in the manor by a jingling of chains and then a few sharp thunderclaps. It shocked me and felt like an intrusion into my mind. Adam busted through the front door with a fire ax. 

“Time to go to the beach.” he said sharply.

On the long drive to the shore, I listened to the Pop Group in my headphones while the radio played some pop groups. While I was out for the day I still tried to manage my time to be productive. I had just gotten inspiration for a cartoon and set HAL to render all day, calculating and placing every point of light in the scene. I would have rather been working on it than be anywhere else, but I took the opportunity to relax and turn off my brain like Ben suggested. Besides, the program was running on its own and couldn't be interrupted.

Adam and Ben played football in the sand while the girls read in beach chairs. Su had a celebrity tabloid while Beth had a volume of a teen paranormal romance. This one series was literally all she read, in a chain-smoking fashion. One book after another until the last one leads back again to the first.

I laid on the sand in the early May sun, staring at the amber glow behind my eyelids. The colors danced and kaleidoscoped across my vision. My mind wandered and I thought about how far the light had to travel to reach my eyes. Not only was it coming from ninety million miles away, but before it even began that journey it bounced around in the core of the star for millennia. Virtual light was based on an equation for the reaction in an atomic bomb. Right now HAL was emitting photons at my character, rendering every spec of light he encountered. It's fitting that artificial light was invented studying an artificial sun.

“Let's see the Government try to take away these guns!” yelled Adam, taking his shirt off and flexing.

As I layed there, my mind entered an unusual state. The alpha waves were kicking in and they pulled me away to delusions of grandeur before slipping off to sleep. I envisioned my magnum opus, my greatest work. After false starts and major setbacks, I was ready to make something truly great. Any time at all away from HAL was like incarceration.

“So I heard Adam broke down the door at your work and you got fired.” Su said, starting a conversation.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad.” I said, snapping back to reality.

“Sorry about that. He gets carried away sometimes…” she sighed.

“It’s fine, really. I didn’t want to work there forever.” I told her.

“Do you have other jobs lined up? Like computer stuff?” she asked.

“Nothing concrete, but my personal projects are coming along.” I confided. “I started working on a cartoon.”

“I didn’t know you could draw. You will have to sketch me sometime.”

“Well, my new project is a blend between two styles, a seemingly hand drawn character that is actually computer generated. He is a goat colored inkwell black, aptly named ‘Billy Goat Black’. It would take a long time to animate him, let alone create an entire cartoon by myself. But now, I have nothing but time.”

“You should make those movies with the scary monsters in them. They freak me out! Sometimes they look so real.” she blurted.

“Maybe.” I said.

“You probably can tell. How do you know what’s real?” she inquired.

“None of it is real, but the Uncanny Valley theory says that the closer you get to reality the worse things look. At a certain point the smallest missing detail will throw the whole thing off.” I explained.

“Oh.” she said, then turned back to her magazine.  

“The uncanny valley feels like a real canyon that couldn’t be crossed. The job market wanted people with experience, but those people needed jobs first. There was a tremendous gap between professionals and amateurs. I am still a long way off to become professional, an unimaginable distance. Not able to relate to outsiders and yet not good enough to join the elite. No man's land.” I rambled to myself.

Sometimes I felt like my friends were not as bad as I made them out to be. Sometimes I felt like they were worse. When I started to include everyone I knew into a friendship circle it soon filled with holes. The least likable person was dropped and then rapidly similarities appeared. The line between who was in and out slid all the way down to just Ben. Then Ben disappeared too. But I liked Ben, he was alright most of the time so he could come back. The tide went back out and the Dividing Line in the sand included more people again. But the low tide had convinced me to give up once and for all. Relationships weren’t worth it.