Hieroglyph (11 page)

“I was looking right at the screen—through your eyes—and I could only kind of . . . catch the tail end of things, or . . . I don't know. It was kind of weird.”

“It was called dyslexia. I had dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. Couldn't read, write, or do any kind of math, even though I knocked myself out trying. But—keep going. Call me if you need me, but I think you can handle it. I've waited a long time to show you. Okay?”

“Sure.”

She smiles at someone who I can't see and returns to gesturing.

I am confused. Back then she couldn't even read or write, but she learned how to do all this?

It's weird to be back over a hundred years ago—immersed in it, although I can leave at any moment. I would definitely like to avoid feeling Melody's emotions—they seem too personal—but that's what I'm in for. I guess it's like reading words, where you feel what the characters feel, but a lot more powerful. She thinks I'm strong enough, though. Maybe it will get me my gills, but I suspect the issue has been reframed, and that she even thinks it will change my mind.

If I can drop down the face of a four-ton wave, I can stand this. And that's about what it takes. I close my eyes again.

I grok.

I am Melody Smith. It is 2121, and I am thirteen years old.

I WAS BORN IN
the days when
terror
was a byword, a fear to which everyone in the world relinquished rights, and, in the case of many, blood and life.

I think it surprised everyone when infinitely plastic OPEN ROAD was introduced to the world in one bright flash (so it seems now, despite the years of violence, marches, demonstrations) by a globe-spanning group of people.

No one person pushed a button. It emerged, evolved, changed as connectivity increased, with bottom-up feedback. All kinds of people—neurologists, biologists, cognitive scientists, artists, computer scientists, musicians, and visionaries—had been working on aspects of it, first separately, and then connectedly, for years.

It was an offshoot of research on how the brain works, what consciousness is, what makes a brain healthy, how human children link to and explore the environment, explorations that lay down specific neuronal pathways. Research on what makes people mentally ill, criminal, violent, and otherwise challenged, and how to change that.

It was a time of chaos and glorious growth, a watershed as important as the printing press. How much more dangerous than the atomic bomb the release of universal literacy seemed to the settled, privileged way of doing things. You would have thought that it would be the end of the world, and, indeed, it was a war of power and money that permeated the entire structure of society.

It was the removal of mind-blindness. Literacy enhanced empathy, because it makes people able to experience what being someone else might feel like and stretches the range of emotions.

I was there.

I
AM
THERE.

On the morning of the day that everything changed, I wake in my bedroom, my oasis, in early-morning dark, ready to brave the daily nightmare.

No, that's not right. I'm never ready.

The night before had been very unpleasant. I lie there in the darkness and decide not to bother with going to school today.

I hate to leave my room. I hate even to go into the living room. My two older brothers are always there, sprawled in front of the television—an old-fashioned screen-viewing device, where car crashes and murders pop out into the room in front of it—ready to say something nasty.

When I was six, my parents gave me my room, and paints, all the paints I could want, a big shelf with gallons and quarts and pints of bright hardware-store paints and stiff hardware-store brushes, spray paints, an industrial-strength fan to vent the fumes, a laundry sink, and boxes of rags. It was an act of desperation for them. They gave me all that because it kept me happy. I had my own world.

I repaint my room all the time. My bed is painted. My dresser is painted. My walls are painted. Layers of other years, other parts of me, peek through; it's an archaeology of me. I paint patterns I see in my head, zigzags and dots, like that. I lie in bed, see a picture or colors in my head, jump up, and get started. Or I'm in school, and think of what I'm going to paint when I get home—what colors and brushes to use, how I'll blend this or that.

Sometimes I just get a rage on and start splashing paint around.

When I try to paint people, they come out funny, their arms too long, their faces crazy, but that's okay, I tell myself, and I tell myself that all the time. Sometimes I wrap my arms around my knees and put my head down and say it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

Last night I was screaming “It's okay! It's okay!” out loud and Dad ran into the room and said, “Melody, what's going on?” And I saw that I had thrown the can at the wall and made a big yellow cartwheel of paint across the floor that he had run through, leaving yellow sockprints. He grabbed me and held me tight, and I stopped screaming and trembling. “Look!” He pried open a red can of paint and mixed to orange and made more footprints on the floor until we were both laughing.

Then Mom opened the door and yelled, “I'm working two jobs for this?”

My father's face moved from laughing to fixed, like a statue, like he was a different person, in a blink. He said, “Come on out and do your homework now, you have to let that dry,” and I felt trapped. We opened the windows, left our painty socks on the floor, and closed the door on my kingdom.

I sat at the dining room table with my tablet and pulled up my assignments. I looked at the wall of my mother's books, all neatly arranged and never pilfered, never leaning into the gaps as they used to be: she had no time to read anymore. I closed my eyes and remembered myself nestled next to her, an open book spanning our laps, and she was trying to make me say the words on the page when one of her tears fell and shimmered, a delicate hemisphere magnifying one spoke of a wheel in a picture of a train.

“Melody?” I opened my eyes. The homework words leaped around on the screen; I had an instant headache, a dark hole in the center of my chest, and a stomachache.

“Honey,” said my father, who had pulled up a chair next to me. “What's wrong?” He knew what was wrong. We both did.

“I can't read with all that noise.” I pointed to the TV.

“Turn it off,” said Dad. Alex flipped me the bird behind Dad's back. He and Jake slunk back to their rooms. “Okay, try again.”

Mom's shadow fell across the tablet. “Go on,” she said. “Sound it out.”

“Wh . . . wh . . . when!”

“Good guess,” Dad told me. He pushed the screen and it said, “
Where
.”

“Why do you coddle her?” snapped Mom, and walked away.

He went to the next screen, which had three words on it. “Which one is ‘what'?” asked the voice.

I had no idea, but pointed to one of the words.

“Think about it,” said Dad.

Those words were always like a slap in the face. I burst into tears, ran back into my room, slammed the door, and dove into bed. Outside the door, I heard Mom and Dad fighting: his quiet words; her screams. I put pillows over my head and cried myself to sleep. Again.

SO I OPEN MY
eyes the next morning, when everything was about to change, remembering all that, and like a robot getting shorted out, my arms heavy and my eyes aching, I finally get dressed.

When I emerge from my room, Alex is in the kitchen getting his breakfast soda. He and Jake, eighteen and nineteen, are unemployed layabouts who do nothing but play video games and eat potato chips. They do not help our parents around the house, and our parents seem powerless against their combined indolence, against the dronelike lifelessness of their pale faces drifting from computer to television to refrigerator. They somehow suck money from the Internet, and Jake won a ragged-out old car while online gambling, but they kept that secret from Mom and Dad and made me keep it secret too.

On my way to the bus stop, I glance down the block at the house Mom and Dad used to own, a pretty bungalow with trees in the yard and tulips, in spring, that Mom planted. They lost it in the crash. Growing up in that house gave my brothers a sense of entitlement I don't have. I'd been a baby when it happened. Dad had been an artist then, but after that took what jobs he could get. Right now he's managing a fast-food restaurant. He's a nice man; he never yells, but he never seems to be able to keep a job for long. Mom works in an office.

A thin, pasty boy on the bus makes quiet, nasty-sounding remarks behind me. I don't know what they mean but I know they're nasty and there is no other seat. He always seems to sit behind me. I endure him every day, my stomach in a knot.

When we pass the Supreme Court, I focus on the sign wavers to keep my mind off other things. Today, I hear, muffled through the window, “NO TRANSGENIC HUMANS! STOP PLAYING GOD!” “Transgenic,” I whisper to myself to cement it in my mind. I like new words, and I can remember them if I repeat them to myself. I open my tablet and say it, but close it instantly when the guy behind me bats me on the back of my head with his open palm and says, “Try ‘idiot,' bitch.”

I imagine swirling around like a tornado, using the superpowers my brothers are always trading in their games, and ripping his head off. I know there is more to me than anger and sadness. I know that if I could read, I could go anywhere and do anything.

I ask the kid next to me, “What do the signs say?”

“ ‘
BAN BIONAN. NO TO NANO-NORMALIZATION
.' That other group's signs say ‘
HELP OUR KIDS LEARN. FREE HUMAN POTENTIAL
.' ”

“Thanks.” Both groups are now chanting “SAVE! OUR! CHILDREN!,” which about sums up all these protests: everybody likes kids.

I stick in my earpod. “Oona,” I say, holding my hand over my tablet to block out the noise on the bus, “tell me about nano-normalization.”

“Sure, honey,” Oona begins, in my aunt's voice, who reads about fifty pages of stuff out loud to train the device and whips me to a website. Oona reads, “Humans are born to learn. We have taken over the world because we are curious and we explore. We take things apart and build new things. We invent . . .”

“Okay. So?”

I think I hear Oona sigh. “So all the little things you do from the time you're born train your neurons. They grow really, really fast and develop dedicated neural pathways for all of your senses. Your brain is self-organizing when you're an infant, and you start to see the edges of things, you start to hear subtle differences between the sounds of your native language, you start linking things together, but then—”

“Then things go wrong,” I say. “Like with me, right? Go ahead, you can tell me. You won't hurt my feelings.”

“The neurons are pruned.”

Pruned
. An ugly word. “Yeah! Like I said!”

“Melody, it happens to everyone when they're infants. Calm down. I'm going to shut down—”

“No! I won't smash you. I promise!” Social Services had given me Magic Man, Oona's predecessor, and I'd had anger issues with him. Aunt Oona bought this one for me, but the main program remembers being Magic Man.

Oona starts talking again. “It says that there is an international coalition of neuroscientists, educators, and governments—all kinds of vectors are involved, actually—working on improving education for people like you and for everyone, but that business interests keep them from moving forward. This Supreme Court case is about whether or not new medical strategies can be used in education. Next week, they will consider whether the patents on a learning neurobiologic called OPEN are legal. But some kind of business bots are stopping me from further exploration.”

“How can they?”

“Education is all about business, not people. Not teachers, and not children. Testing companies rake in billions every year administrating the mandatory testing program . . .”

Oona stutters and the screen freezes. Alex is good for one thing: adept with computers, he told me that was what happened when business, or government, which controls the Internet, television, everywhere we get information, does not want you to know something. But what you want to know is usually there, somewhere. My fingers do the little dance that he taught me to reach the more radical sites and Oona is back. She shows me a video of a woman talking.

“Everything is upside down. All scientific evidence points to a model of the most efficient human learning as being completely individual. Humans, from infants to the elderly, learn in their own style, in their own time, driven by curiosity. February tenth is not the day that every third-grader in the country is ready to learn their four times table, and but that's how it's been taught for a hundred years. Without teachers' unions, it was easy to replace teachers with teacher-technicians. They only know scripts; they don't know anything about
how
children learn. They have a few layers of how to keep everyone on the same page; that's all. If that doesn't work, then they fail the children, hold them back to go through the same fruitless exercises. So one key move is to take education out of the hands of business and put it into the hands of kids and of educators, in that order. We call the people who will help coordinate the learning process Mentors. Mentors will have to know a lot about neuroscience, about learning styles, about their subject matter, and they will take their cues from the children, instead of the other way around. The child will show them what . . .”

We pull into the school parking lot. Just as we step into the milling crowd the pasty kid whispers in my ear once more. In my mind, I turn and knee him in the crotch, leaving him groaning, but really, I slide through the crowd fast as a pixel trace and enter the long, low building: East Side High.