Hieroglyph (13 page)

“Science,” murmurs my father, as the needle goes in.

The injection is very, very expensive—so expensive that few people in the world can afford it, so radical that use of the individually tailored cocktail is illegal in much of the world, and so controversial that I have been afforded—quite annoyingly to my brothers in particular, whose shady activities, I discovered later, ceased abruptly—round-the-clock security.

“Now,” says Dr. Campbell, “I'd like you to meet Glinda. She had the shot a few weeks ago. She'll be your Mentor.” She ushers me into the lab.

Maybe it's my imagination, but everything seems brighter, more sharply defined. “I feel a bit nauseated,” I say, and Dr. Campbell gets me a ginger ale and some crackers. I am opening the package when an African American girl about my size bounces into view.

“Hi! I'm Glinda!”

She sticks out her hand and I shake it. “Nice to meet you. I'm Melody.”

“Okay!” Her eyes are merry and she has a big smile on her face. “I had my shot about a month ago and I'm going to be your guide here. Yeah, I felt kind of woozy for an hour or so. Want to lie down?”

I finish my crackers. “No, I'm fine. So what's this over here?”

“You left-handed?”

I nod.

“Okay, get on your gloves and let's get started.” She notices me staring at her long dreads.

“Cool beads.”

“Step back,” she says, and gives her head a shake. Her dreads swirl; the beads clack together in a kind of music. “Hair as a weapon. Once people get a smack of beads in their face, they don't bother me. Okay. All these exercises look simple, but you know they're tough. And even with all the fancy help, English is a joke. It doesn't make any sense. Well, it makes sense sometimes, and that tricks you into thinking it makes sense all the time. You just have to learn a whole lot of rules and, sometimes, just the way a bunch of words look. It's a lot easier in phonetic languages, like Italian. You're not stupid—English is. What do you do?”

I know immediately what she means. “I paint.”

“I play the saxophone. Now I can actually read music! I learned how to play by ear, and I'm an ace at memorizing—y'know?—but wow! Now I can play what I see on the page. When I see a score, I hear it in my head. It's like magic.”

The first thing I have to do, she tells me, is connect each letter to a sound and to a motion. “Making the motion with your hand, or your finger, wires it into the brain.” She laughs. “Not that there are wires in your brain.”

“It seems more like a light show.”

We even sleep in the lab—there are cozy little bedrooms there—so we won't miss a second of our enhanced developmental time. Grad students drift around, taking notes and making videos, and everything I do is recorded, somehow, by a light cap that I wear with sensors in it. I forget about it after the first day. Being able to concentrate is such a change that all distractions vanish. I'm climbing a trail up a steep, windy ridge, the trailhead far below me.

I dream the things I'm learning—sounds, pictures—and sometimes I wake at night, remember where I am, dash out, and start where I'd left off. I'm beginning to be able to sort out letters, because they stay solid, but also because I'm doing a lot of tracing work with my fingers and just simple writing of sounds on paper. “Ssss,” I say, as I write a sinuous
s
over a dotted line. There is a set of letters in a partitioned box, and when I pick one up it says its sound, “mmm,” and I begin playing with them—there is no other word for I'm doing; it is not work; and soon I'm putting together words that sing at me—“ffaassst!” It's crazy. I'm doing preschool things, and I'm thirteen. But it's the most fun I've ever had.

I'm laughing and crying the day when, after a solid two weeks of work, the lights come on. “Cat! Sun! We went to the park!”

Glinda is sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding up cards, and she tosses them into the air. We jump up and down, hugging, crying, and screaming.

The days go by. We play spades, gin rummy, Scrabble, all kinds of games I couldn't play before. We're like a big family, the whole lot of us, a dozen kids of all ages who have had the shot. I feel as if I've been asleep my whole life and now I'm awake. There's a whole new world around me—a world I can participate in, and change. I run around reading everything I see out loud, and then the words are in my head, silent, giving me pictures, feelings, information. Thanks to the bots in my brain, which transmit information to a screen, I can see that solving a puzzle releases a cascade of pleasure-giving chemicals. I can hear the names of the chemicals, even see a statistical rendering of how many neurons are changed. The amazing thing is that it was just tiny little bleeps of stuff that woke me.

Over the next few weeks, the lab—it is a cold word for the warm, inviting world we have, with its cushions, its books, its bright colors, and the incredibly gifted helpful people, adults and children, in our learning environment—fills with other children who had had their shot, and it is a great thrill to find that I can actually help
them
. Mom and Dad visit every few days. Both seem satisfied in their own ways about what's going on—even Dad, when he sees how happy I am. A great weight lifts from me: I hadn't known that my inability to please them had been so much a part of my life.

Too soon, it's time to go back to the real world, to integrate back into my school.

I am supposed to be subject A4957, a closely guarded secret, a bit of data, like Glinda and the other kids in the lab. Like the other kids in the world. No interviews allowed.

But someone had leaked the news.

I'D BEEN COMPLETELY SHELTERED
at NIH, but Dr. Campbell warns me about it and says that it is perfectly all right to say “no comment.” A dark limo takes me out the back entrance, but I get a glimpse of picketers at the front gate of NIH. To the delight of my brothers, they've been staying at a hotel for the last week. Unfortunately, they hadn't been shy about giving interviews; Mom and Dad couldn't be with them all the time.

“This is crazy,” says Alex, looking out the hotel window. “There are people who are afraid of you learning how to read!”

“They're afraid that it might be forced on them and their children,” says Dad.

“But if it works, what's so bad about it?”

“What if it works today and not tomorrow? What if it has some kind of terrible side effect that they don't know about? What might happen when people denied education because of their gender, their religion, their race, or their social strata learn about the world, about science, about history, about how other people live? What will happen to the way things are if the thinking of a lot of people changes?”

“Doesn't everybody already know?” I ask. “We have television. We have the Internet.”

“As you know,” says Alex, “both are edited.”

“And not equally distributed,” says Jake. “I heard that somewhere.”

I peek out the window. We're on the fourth floor, and when the crowd glimpses me, signs pump up and down in the air. “Dad, I can read the signs now! I can read the signs!” I dance around the room. “And I can read
complicated
words!” I'd raced through lists of words and their definitions and usages, thrilled at the depth and complexity of my language skills. I already knew a lot more words than most kids my age, because I worked so hard at memorizing them for so many years.

“Like what?” asks Jake.

“Like . . .” I look out the window and a woman with long black hair scowls and waves her sign. “ ‘Harbinger of Doom,' for instance.”

“Yeah? What's a harbinger?”

“Like an avatar,” I said, smugly. “Like a signal of the future.”

“Yeah, right.” But he looks impressed despite himself.

I'd been looking forward to seeing my room again, and everyone was feeling pent-up. But it didn't look like we could leave yet; the house was too insecure. Mom asked me if I wanted to go back to school and I was able to edit “Hell” out of my “Yeah!” response. But yeah. Hell yeah.

THE NEXT DAY, PAPARAZZI
follow the black Suburban that takes me to school. I feel like I'm in an unpleasant movie. They treat me like a bomb: streets are cleared for a two-block radius. My bodyguards open a path for me to get into the building. It's really annoying. I can hardly concentrate and show off like I'd planned, though I whiz through a few segments of math and get out of the Math for Idiots screen. I hear that the principal got a few death threats, but he refuses to send me home.

It's all pretty unsettling, so around lunchtime I tell my bodyguards that I want to give an interview. Maybe that will make them go away.

I choose the place in the front of the school where I'd pretend-kneed bully-kid in the crotch.

“How do you feel about being an experiment?”

“Like a rat,” yells someone in the crowd.

“Great,” I say into the microphones. “I hope that it helps other kids like me.”

“How do you feel about being the first?” That's a hard one. Should I throw the other kids I know about to the wolves? Finally I say, “I think everyone knows I'm not, and I wish you would leave me alone to get on with my life.”

“Read this.” That woman with the long black hair thrusts a piece of paper with writing on it into my hand. It's crystal clear: “I am the harbinger of deadly change.” Must be their script. I hold it up for the videos, feeling an instant's thrill of knowing I hold a trump card. I crumple it up and toss it to the ground.

“I
am
a harbinger. I am a harbinger of free literacy for millions of people, all around the world. It is a radical change. It is as radical a change as the polio vaccine, as the smallpox vaccine, only this liberates people from the disease of illiteracy. Thank you. That's all.”

Next day, the picket signs read
ILLITERACY
IS
NOT
A
DISEASE
. What makes the news is the one that says
ILLITERACY
IS
NOT
A
DISESE
.

WITHIN THE GROK, I
move back into myself: Alia. Melody's narrative shifts to a stream of images, narrative, songs, music, poems, that move through my mind in a particular cadence. As soon as I discern a pattern, that pattern shifts, and I feel like a living fractal, a meta-human, a big music flashing with color, intensity, emotion that clamps shut my chest or makes me join with others, briefly, in strange new song.

LONG WALK. FLIES. DAB
of goo in eye, don't rub it! Zahra screams for food. Sea of long white tents. Soldiers with candy. Missionaries; lentil soup. Mind your manners, now. Water warm and muddy. Drone of distant trucks.

A mob of kids runs past.
Candycandycandy!

Back doors of trucks burst open. Out come people, tables, boxes, chairs. A Sheng-man shouting, “English line! Cold Nehi! Take your shot!”

I push up front; a fast bright sting, cold! Orange Nehi pop.

Beneath a tree we get rough lines and circles stuck to cardboard. I try to peel them off. Big hands lead mine:
ssss ssss
for
sss
nake!
sss
un!
sss
assy,
sss
oon, and
sss
illy! We all laugh. She tries to take my card back: No! No! No! It's mine! She trades for
aaaa,
like
aa
pple, c
aaa
t, and h
aaa
ppy. Then
t
ah!
t
ah!
t
ah! Like
t
ick and
t
ime and
t
ummy!

Soldiers drive up. Shouting. Then they leave. We sing fast songs of words. I feel a loud excitement in my head.

SILHOUETTES OF BOBBING HEADS
in a tunnel. Burst of light ahead: emerge to soldiers clubbing people down; young men rise and rush them shouting LET! US! READ! LET! US! READ!

AN INTERVIEW AROUND A
lighted table, earnest talking faces, all else in dramatic shadow.

“Research has yielded conclusively that normal brains are not damaged, as many claimed they would be, by use of OPEN. It accelerates the process of learning to read for everyone.”

“But people want this for their babies.”

“It is not presently recommended for use until the age of four, but it won't hurt them. It doesn't accelerate normal developmental milestones. When natural stages of plasticity occur, the responses of the babies are optimized.”

The interviewer leans forward. “So there is a potential for them being smarter than children who don't use it.”

“Possibly.”

“Which may lead to a two-tiered society.”

“If it is limited, of course. That is why many groups are working to prevent that from happening.”

“But it's expensive.”

The woman shakes her head. “It was at first, but the fancy labs and computers we once used are rapidly becoming obsolete as the number of Mentors increases. They know how to create learning tools from the environment—so cheap and simple it's laughable. And tragic. Beans for counting. Sitting next to someone and helping them sound out words. Most people who have had the shot, or the serum, are thrilled to be able to pay it forward by taking time to mentor.”

The interviewer turns to a man in a tweed suit. “Dr. Eltor, the education system is in great flux, is it not?”

“Indeed. It's almost as if we have been stultifying as many children as possible, based on ancient models that probably worked well in smaller, more intimate populations, or models that worked well for homogenization of immigrant populations slated for factory work in the early twentieth century. That a good portion of children were able to succeed in old-style schools was used as proof that it was the best way for children to learn, for it was assumed that a certain percentage of children were unable to master what we wished them to learn. But without that framework, and with new information from the field of neurology about how learning really occurs, and with new, universally available computerized learning tools, children are learning more, and faster, so much faster that it seems that they are all geniuses compared with children just five years ago.