Meanwhile in the next room, Kevin was looking at his present in confusion. Uncle John had sent him a remote with a couple rows of buttons, but so far Kevin didn´t have any idea for what it was. He had accidentally hit two of the buttons, one with two circling arrows much like a refresh-symbol on the computer, and the other showing a speech-bubble like symbol, but so far nothing had happened.
“What is this for?” Kevin mumbled as he fished the box for a manual. But all he could find was a simple sheet of paper naming all the buttons on the remote, nothing else.
The top row on the remote three buttons. On the right was something looking like a “Play” symbol, which was named forwards by the sheet. Opposite of it was the same symbol but mirrored, which was named backwards. Between them was a button showing a square, and fittingly to the rest was named “Stop”.
Below that row was a space with no buttons, before there were three rows of three buttons each. The “Refresh” symbol on the top left of them was named exchange, while the speech-bubble-symbol right to it was labeled simply by speech. The third button in this row was a cloud-like symbol, named as think.
Under the “Refresh” button was a minus button, labeled subtract. The center button was a simple cross, named abort, and the right button was a plus-symbol called add.
The third row started on the left with a stick figure symbol, the middle showed “½” and the last looked like a stick figure of an animal. While the first was explained human, the second was called hybrid, while the last was labeled animal.
Next came a small display, showing “10%” right now. A row with four buttons followed. The left button showed the symbol for volume, the middle left one showed a progress bar, the middle right one had a vertical line with two arrowheads and the last one to the right had an hourglass. They were labeled “Sound”, “Percent”, “Size” and “Age”.
Below them were two rows with five buttons each, the upper with numbers from 1 to 5, while the lower had 6 to 9 and a 0.
Lastly, below the numbers was one single button showing three Z´s, labeled “Sleep”.
Still not understanding what it was for, Kevin pushed “Forward” and waited. Nothing changed, but the percentage slowly raised higher. As he still had no idea what it was for, Kevin hit the stop button when the percentage was at “50%”. “Maybe I should go ask Luke if he had an idea” he thought, but after a look to the alarm-clock he decided to go to bed instead and talk tomorrow.
He knows his dad would need to work tomorrow despite it being Christmas, and would be gone all day. He would be alone with his older brother, and maybe they would find out what the remote was for. As he put the remote down on his nightstand, he hit the “Sleep”-button by accident, but didn´t gave it much thought.
Luke decided this all must be some kind of nightmare, and wanted to wake up soon. But instead, he felt tired all of the sudden, and just got onto his bed when he fell asleep on the top of his covers snoring. His last thoughts had been of the hope of waking up normal again.