by Ed Finn
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 sssnake! sssun! sssassy, sssoon, and sssilly! We all laugh. She tries to take my card back: No! No! No! It’s mine! She trades for aaaa, like aapple, caaat, and haaappy. Then tah! tah! tah! Like tick and time and tummy!
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 thei
r 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.
“It is causing social upheaval in many sectors. Everything is affected. Business and trade, political structure, science, the arts, religion—everything. Universal literacy might seem like a simple change, but even American slaveowners knew the power of reading would not lead to simple results.”
The interviewer remarks, “It is anything but simple. I’m going to turn to our legal expert. Can you help us understand yesterday’s UN mandate that calls for governments to support free distribution of OPEN to all children in the world?”
“It is indeed . . .”
LEARNING TO READ: An Anthology. Read by people of many ethnicities—girls, boys, women, men—translated into English by the grok:
How language
Feels in my hand:
Sharp
Sinuous
Like cutting into rainbows
With my brain.
Pathways arise
I follow them
As if up a rope,
Pulling myself up
Hand over hand.
A rough tongue licks my brain
Vision ripples; re-forms. Once
Small, I ride the wave,
Made huge
By just
A word.
I am made Other
I am made Past
I am made Future
I am the stranger
Walking past me in the street;
I am the cat
Asleep at my feet.
Word-lightning zigzags;
Inner.
No other hears
When I hear
Each thought
So private
Yet utterly public.
I read my great-grandmother’s letters.
She is dead
Yet her voice speaks to me
As if she were alive. She rings in my mind;
She sits next to me
On this summer afternoon in Cairo.
Words leap through mind like wild gazelles, their flight
A bright path etched on air.
Meaning strikes like sunlight: story feeds me.
When my mother went to the protest in Kabul,
She wore her brave blue burqa.
She did not come back.
My video flies to YouTube:
The million-colored scarves
Of women chanting in the street
Light spills across them
They are like ridge beyond ridge
Of mountains, transparent
In the sunrise
They are thoughts! They are thoughts! They are thoughts!
Reading my first novel:
I do not finish so much as
Let it fall
And move amazed
Through a changed day
Where all seems hushed and new
I was like a red horse
With a sun in my heart
Running through the woods
Of northern Michigan
And I could write it down for other kids
To be that horse
To be that day.
Reading was like a stranger
Who came to town and stayed.
Some said she was dangerous,
But that seemed so unlikely.
She pitched in where she was needed.
Helped with the kids and cooking, built web pages, organized yard sales,
Set up carpools, organized like-minded people
Soon we could not live without her
After a year she started her own business.
Now she owns the town.
Learning speech sounds: letters
Stand out, flamed with color
A fleeting stage, they tell me.
They flip and mirror: my brain follows
And soon they settle; normal.
But now I know their ancient selves
Stretch far back in time.
Once things, before they changed to sounds
And then sounds changed to lines
Stood on their own feet, walked through time,
Omnipotent
Taking on local color
In neighborhoods of minds.
WAVES OF PEOPLE MARCH down Wilson Boulevard, their chant “O-P-E-N” a roar. Their signs read RADICAL LITERACY FOR ALL.
Camera pans to coming clash: BAN BRAIN MEDDLING. KEEP OUR CHILDREN FREE.
A MURMURING UNDERTONE THROUGHOUT the flashes, like words a running brook makes when you listen without thinking: What does it mean what does it mean to be what does it mean to be human?
DO WE WANT TO be human, or not?
I DISCOVER A SEARCH function and follow the bright ping of Melody.
Melody’s twenty-year-old voice, low in my head; her bright face above a podium: “All the with words. Com-munication. Com-plete. Com-munity. We kids glimpse this vision”—a short, lilting laugh—“I know, I’m an adult now, but when I chose this path I was a child and became part of a network that is actually growing younger, as more children—nearly a billion, now—are reading fluently, with understanding, by age seven, because more of us are reading than ever in history. We are also producing our own literatures—trading them, learning about other cultures and also learning how universal some problems are. Just as there is a natural ‘sensitive period’ for laying down language skills, which OPEN replicates, we are finding that there may be a ‘sensitive period’ for incorporating and practicing one’s ethical and moral framework. When loyalty is freely chosen, based on conscious decisions, we find it is fluid and dynamic. When loyalty is fear induced, as in many repressive regimes, it is deeply damaging. We are learning the kinds of strengths and skills we may need to determine the difference between the two for ourselves, so that we can make positive decisions about our own commitments as we mature. I may find out I am wrong when I am older, but in my personal experience I have found that most very young children are idealistic. They can tell the good from the bad, and, mostly, want to emulate the good, to be good people. But when we are children, we are powerless, and, being plastic, we emulate the b
ehavior of those around us and mirror their emotions. Thus, even in families where you might expect a happy result, unhappiness and resulting unpleasant behaviors are a part of life. Perhaps the gray areas of human behavior—lying, cheating, stealing—and most definitely the black areas of psychopathology—may be deviations from the norm that are actually sicknesses, illnesses that can be healed by the proper application of OPEN and optimal experience of empathic states, so that it will become almost physically impossible to hurt others and look on without feeling remorse, pity, sorrow. However naive it may be, most children believe that a perfect world is possible—that their parents will once again love each other and remarry, for instance. Unlike earlier children, we have a new power. With the invisible power of literacy we can put ourselves in the place of others. We can’t help it. We feel deeply the power of anger. The anguish of injustice. We can rejoice in our own individuality and in the group with which we identify without needing to do away with others. We are far too addicted to the joy of learning and life to have time to contemplate the destruction of others.
“The religious instinct, at its best, builds vast cathedrals and motivates people to be empathic, to help others, to share, to do no harm. At its worst, it is a means of creating sharply defined classes of people—those in power, who can bully with impunity, and those without power, without human rights, who must submit or be hurt, ostracized, or even killed. This is the history of all religions through all time. In an initiate, pathways of thought are established in the mind that, in some cases, claim to obviate the need for deep thought regarding morally complex issues. We have seen both escape from cults through the use of OPEN and the paradoxical establishment of new cults. It takes strength and help to leave a cult, where all of one’s important relationships exist, and seek a more healthy life. No one can predict what effect OPEN will have on religion, though it is interesting to try.