Lombax of the Future written by Geia Akyama
Chapter four-Earth
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Sean Connell sighed and rubbed his burning eyes with the heels of his right hand. He was onto something with this new micro processor but somehow the key concept for making it work just slipped away just as he picked up his drafting pencil and put it on the page! Irritated and more than a little upset the twenty year old man threw his finely sharpened pencil on his faux teak desk and rocked his folding chair back on two legs.
Brilliant sunlight streamed through the high windows of his friends La Jolla home and filled the vault-like room with warm, welcoming light. Off white walls reflected the life giving rays of the sun into carefully cut glass prisms hanging in the middle of the room and spraying the walls with small rainbows that swung lazily across the room as time went by.
Striking chocolate brown eyes stared at the wallpapered ceiling with a dreamy lack of focus while spiked brown hair moved with the air currents caused by a standing fan; a smile crossed the boys sun tanned face. That girl. Ever since he met that strange girl he'd been driven to work on his project to get hired into one of the big computer companies, like maybe Microsoft or even that Japanese company Sony.
Though Sony didn't even make computers he was sure they'd love his idea for a laptop or something that ran alternately on solar energy, electrical power, and battery power. Imagine a PSP you could play and charge in the day and have it last through the night! You'd never need to plug it into a socket and all those go green fanatics would be that much happier with the reduced electricity use and acid waste from used batteries, maybe.
All four chair legs thumped nosily on the ground and the young man abandoned his blueprints and concept drafts to pad into the kitchen for a can of Coke and leftovers from last night. Always leftovers. He never had enough money to make it through from payday to payday. Hell he couldn't even afford to live in San Diego for that matter but it always paid to have friends in high places.
Tan board shorts slapped against well muscled legs as the youth tramped into his roommates living room and plopped down on the overstuffed couch with his Vanilla Coke and pizza. The brightly colored Ocean Pacifica shirt blended well with the couch and hid any tomato stains from previous pizza meals though nothing could hide the surfers build. Sean snorted around his lunch and flicked the wide screen TV on to catch the last part of the Padres game before trying to capture the last of his thoughts for the day.
Heshala. That girl popped up out of nowhere over a month ago asking questions, listening to his answers, and unlike all the other girls, she cared about what he had to say. All those other women saw him as Adam Lazzara's San Diego friend and tried to get close to him just to get closer to Adam. Sean wasn't that stupid, he knew a raw deal when he saw one.
Sean scoffed around his bite of pepperoni as the referee called a strike on an obviously bad pitch before that petite woman with the strange hat floated back into his mind.
A month ago he'd been struggling with his idea. Wanting to give up while at the same time desperately praying that somehow he'd get everything he needed to make his dream a reality. Where had he been? Oh yeah! He'd been bingeing on Starbucks coffee when this tourist walked up to him asking about something, couldn't remember what.
Didn't matter at all. That girl had turned his life around. he'd found a temporary job at Jamba Juice to pay his rent, started actually studying at Santa Barbra, and forged ahead with his pet project.
Two cans of coke and three slices of day-old pizza later lasted Sean to the end of the game and well past afternoon. The Padres has managed to pull a win in the last inning, thank god!, and Sean looked desolately at his little den of a room. Time to get back to the drawing board, again...
At least that was until the bell rang and a familiar voice sounded from the front door.
"Sean? Are you here? It's Heshala. I must tell you something important..."