The Rise of the Cyborgs

Chapter 10:Zoe

Forgotten word Cryptomnesia (n.) When you forget that you've forgotten something, and perceive it as a new, original thought.

Meta's POV. Library/Insitution 71

The next day I was back at the institution. The Institution had been converted from an abandoned shopping mall. With all the new temporary fixtures could be difficult to navigate. So in the morning before first bell, I had found my way to the library.
Weirdly I quite like bookshops and libraries. It was the sense of serious calm, like a church. You might not believe, but you did believe in the calm it made for your soul. I walked up to the checkout desk. It was operated by the largest man you could imagine. He worked in the library but they really kept him to deal with the kids who refused medication. Even the strongest and most violent couldn't stop him. During the day he worked here. By worked, I mean he sat around with a pair of headphones on, watching his phone. While he did this a floor cleaning Roomba orbited his feet. It trying to keep up with the crumbs he created from the food he was stuffing in his mouth.
I'd went up to him with a book. He looked at me.
"How do I take a book out?" I said nervously. He checked the time. It was still before the bell. My parents had dropped me off very early to avoid the jams and disapproving eyes of 'folks'. The kids used words the vanillas and the neurotypicals to describe the 'non-impaired'.
"Scan your arm then the book." The librarian said chewing on an apple.
I held my arm out I had left the ID band on - it helped if they could scan you in to the school. I held the barcode to the reading eye and the eye beeped. I held the book out. There was a page with a barcode on the first page like the one on my wrist.
"You're done," the fat librarian said. I felt sorry for the chair he sat in. You just felt it was going to give way one day. "you know just taking books out isn't going to fool anyone. You can't fool a neural scanner."
"I understand, Warder Smith," I said.
"Sanchez" the warder corrected "Wader Sanchez. Word girl... Bell in 15 minutes."
"Yeah sorry," I said. "I always get name badges wrong."
Which had been true, but not now.
*********

Over the next few weeks, I had gone back to the library to get more books. These added to the few lonely books on the shelf of the dormitory. My day evolved. I found myself wake up about 5 in the morning. I felt alive. Rested like I had a long nights sleep. My sleep was as good as my dreams were bad. Sometimes my dreams would involve the books I was reading.


I would suddenly wake up. I would be dark and the others were sleeping. I didn't wear a watch as I couldn't normally tell the time. There was a green glowing LED with an alarm clock near the door. It would always say exactly 5:00 when I woke. Now fully awake I would roll over and grab a book. Under the covers with a torch or by the dim light of the LED, I would read. I would run through the books. While I was trapped in a locked dormitory I was free in my imagination. By the time the others began to stir or the alarm went, I would have a pile of exhausted books next to me. Putting the books back I would look Brooklyn as he slept. There was a piece there I never saw in real life. Sometimes I would hear him mumble in his sleep. It took a couple of nights but he always said the same words. "I guess I can go to." I really wondered what that meant.


As the days passed my reading got faster. This was it. I could read. I consumed book after book like they were a drug and I was a biblio-junky. Day after day. I was looking for some time to read alone. I would spend too long on the toilet. I lived for the nights when I would wake up and consume more. I was Gorging my self on text, like a starving man suddenly given unlimited cake. The problem was getting more. I lied to Warder Sanchez and told him I was getting books for the others, or being undecided. He was still convinced I was faking it. Still reading book after book was suspicious. I was running out of books to read and getting the harder and more adult books. They didn't have that many books I was getting through them at to high a rate.


************

Today I was back in the library. It was after school and before dinner. Most of the others watched TV, some played games. We supposed to do homework but today there wasn't that much to do. I looked at my hand. I had a couple of books already. Another would be suspicious. I was looking for a book I wanted to read. It was like when I picked fruit. I had started with the best and now I was looking for what was acceptable.
An idea hit me. It was dumb but I was curious about my new found skill. I picked up a book to experiment with. The Hobbit. It wasn't a book I felt particularly excited about reading. Curious, I pursed my lips and I held the book in my hands like a flick book.
"One two three," I said.
I held my breath, then staring at the centre of the page. I ran my thumb over the edges, animating the page numbers like a millisecond count down timer. Each page just flicked by. The only sound was the mild buzz of the pages going by. With that, the words just flew off the page like they were alive. I could almost be there, walking through the mountains and forests, like I could smell every banch and rock.
Five seconds or so later I leant back against a bookshelf. My brain was raw. I had never read the Hobbit before and I was left with an odd feeling of loss. It was better than I was expecting and I went back and slow-read or normal-read the good bits to check. I felt both worn down and slightly jacked up. It was like driving at speed down a freeway. You were both tired and buzzing slightly. I looked curiously at the book. That was the fastest I had ever read. I played the plot in my mind to see if I had understood it. It seemed to make sense. I put the book gently down like it was a bomb. I understood reading is faster than listening. I understood that when you read a conversation on a page it runs in your head at a much faster rate than it would in real life. This was the same but much much faster. It seemed to need a name, I called it flash reading. I felt odd, it seemed oddly shameful to disrespect the author's work by devoting so little time to it.
I looked around and picked up another book - the Lord of the flies. Zap. Seconds later the book was in my head in all of its hidieousness.
"Wow," I said to the empty room, "if the girls in the bottom stream could see me now. Forget them what about the girls in the top stream?"
In the bottom stream, I had met some incredibly troubled and dumb girls. There was one who,, was thin, small and constantly tired and difficult. She struggled with maths and nearly everything and was liable to attack the teacher. Even she read better than I could.
The girls in the top stream boasted about how they could read a book in an evening. Now I could flash read a hundred novels in the same time. I paused, this seemed oddly sacrilegious. I made a rule. My new rule was that good books deserved some time. My dyslexia wasn't just cured but made more mighty than could be believed possible. I wondered what I could use this for? Could I do the same with a text book or something? I stood back. Then slightly terrified about what had happened I rushed back to dormitory 7. I climbed up to my bunk and hid the books I would read that night.
**********
Zoe said "hi" formally, as she came into the dormitory before dinner.
I wasn't sure what had happened to me. I wasn't sure what caused it and I was still too scared to tell anybody about it even Brooklyn. Zoe came in. She had some bark and leaves she had collected for her bug garden. She tended them and I looked at her. For the last week she had seen stranger than normal. I lifted a book up and began moving my lips like I normallydid when I was reading.
"Zoe," said Warden Craven at the doorway making me jump" I need to speak to you in private."
I put my book down.
"You're reading again?" Craven said to me. It was almost like an accusal.
"I'm practising." I said, "I reckon if I get good enough they'll let me out."
That was actually my secret plan. If I could read well enough then perhaps I could persuade them I wasn't book-blind. The problem was they relied on a neural scan. I don't know what happened but I wasn't sure a brain scan would announce me as normal. For the moment I pretended to be is book-blind as I ever was. The whole thing seemed a little like magic. I was always afraid at some point it would disappear like the leaves of autumn. Like a will of the wisp going as effortlessly as it had come. Then there was Brooklyn and the others. It was somehow good to be with kids a strange as I was. I guess when you're misfits together you're not really a misfit.
"Right," said Craven to my quote about getting good enough to get out. There was something in his soft excepting tone that suggested I was here for good.
I stared at Craven for a second. It was a new habit I had developed. There was a mark on his finger where a wedding band had been. From his shirt, I could see he now wore the ring on a chain around his neck under his clothes. That meant he still loved her but she didn't love him. Perhaps she had found him doing something and divorced him? He had started changing his shirt during the day. Perhaps he was going to the gym or doing something which stressed him. He held a ring binder with the institute's number on it. Some of the pages near the back were not neatly stacked. He had been reading some new additional pages to it. The ring binder was weird.
"Zoe" Craven said. "it's time for your melatonin."
I knew it sounded funny, but he looks slightly nervous, also slightly pleased. For some reason, I was convinced he had a phone in his shirt pocket. I don't know why. Ever since I had crashed into that girl on the bridge my world was getting weirder. I was also thinking I could sometimes hear voices or high-pitched warbling. My hands could touch the cool North. I could swear the dormitory thermostat looked like it glowed in the dark to me. At night I had wild dreams. Like I was having every dream I ever had but at full speed. Then there was the reading. I didn't like to think about it because If I did I was eventually going have to admit I was going mad.
Zoe went off with Craven and I got back to my book and finished it.
Valerie came in. "Hi," she said brightly.
Given the time her dose of Ritalin was breaking down. She seemed brighter and happier, more alert. She had told me this wasn't her real self. She was only the real Valerie at weekends. I wanted to meet weekend Valerie. Generally, people at the institution didn't do play dates.
"How's it going?" I said.
"As good as it gets," Valerie said. She came over "You know I was thinking. You should just tell Brooklyn about how you feel."
I looked at her "What do you mean?"
"I'm not Zoe," Valerie said. "I know a crush when I see one. Plus I have an uncontrollable mouth and a savage mentality."
I felt very awkward at this point I must've changed to the colour of cheap lipstick.
She continued. "I'm surprised they let us sleep in the same room as the boys. You know what I heard... Have you seen my jacket?" Valerie said looking around "I think they don't believe that the boys in wheelchairs, you know can do it?"
"Really?" I said, "do they realise Brooklyn's lost his legs, not what's between them."
Valerie began to sort out Collin's sheets then stopped "Have you seen my jacket? It's like fake leather, prewar."
"You're switching channels on me," I told her. It was my way of warning her that she was starting to lose me.
"Come on you just have to keep up." Valerie smiled. She looked around "It's so quiet and boring here. I'm surprised you can stand it. I'll see you dinner."
bed half made Valerie walked out. This was very much like Valerie. She was sweet and I knew she didn't walk out because of hurt feelings. She was just being herself. She had the attention of a butterfly. It would flutter from the flower of one idea to another. She was fantastically creative and could spend an hour improvising some hummed song. She was who she was.
My strange day continued. I noticed Craven had left the printed handbook he had been given. It sat unused on the table. Rumours bounced around the institute like a voice echoing in the darkness of a cave. I knew the government had 'tightened' the law about the 'lax and lenient treatment of impaired'. This had given rise to 'new regulations' on the matter. What this meant was up for grabs. Most people outside the institute believed it would backfire. The rest thought it would  end up with the impaired costing more money. On the inside the impaired thought it meant everything, from bigger nightsticks to waterboarding.
I got down from my bunk and went over to investigate the book. I wondered about knocking on Craven's overnight door. He got very angry when people knocked on it. He had threatened to send more people to the Grey room to reflect on their behavioural issues if they did.
Looking around there was no one about. I picked up the printed manual put my thumb of the top and flicked it like a flip book. In under a second I had read all 300 pages. It was mostly boring. The only thing of interest was a large section organising the visit of a mobile scanner. Project Liberation. Apparently, everybody was to be rescanned and re-tested. It seemed extravagant and unnecessary. It's not like any of us got cured. Well except me. Page 270 did have a very good map of the building including the ones they never told us about like the grey rooms.
"What are you doing?" Warden Craven said to me from the corridor outside. I just put the book down but was still touching it.
"I just wondered who's it was?" I said.
"It's mine give it here." He said. quickly I hand over.
"Is it a nice story?" I lied.
"No. No, it's not." Craven said turning back to his room. He got closer to his door then turned around. "Never let me see you touch that book again understand? If not it'll be the grey rooms I can promise you that."