saac spent his after-school time in the old barn with Sol: Vac Studies and Jethro fading from his mind as they drove from the thickspace.
He became increasingly excited as Sol explained how the spoken word relates to the written. How written words are actually phonographic transcriptions of speech. How you can break words down in to phonemes, sound-components of meaning.
It’s funny how he had missed that connection. But why shouldn’t he miss it? There are paradigms engraved into the way we do things, too small to notice. Paradigmatic thought patterns are much like the tongue: muscles trained to a familiar language, flaccid and confused by the new consonants and vowels of a foreign one. These muscles circumscribe the expressible: the paradigm of a native language.
To express the new thoughts we must not only hop the neural traceries of the old, we must retrain the muscles of the body that enact our ways of thinking about the world. And the old habit-formed muscles protest, dragging us back into old ways of doing things, accents from our previous ways of speech and thought. It takes time and effort to learn new paradigms.
So they studied together week by week, and Isaac began to learn.
* * *
Isaac studied long evenings, his natural eyes dark, his mindscreen lit, reviewing his memory of the pieces of paper with the alphabet, tenacious through his exhaustion. And it was funny, the Mind integrated his learning into himself just as if it were any other task, accelerating the personal mind’s acquisition of new knowledge with its extra heuristic analysis, shaving off the sharp edges, moving him into new learning.
Was it because he was processing well for the Mindnet—his brain calm—that the Mind reflexively helping him integrate without crunching his ‘stream through the thoughts of another ‘node?
* * *
It took more than a month before they moved from the building blocks of language to a concrete reading project.
A fine mist damped down the dust of the barn, tiny molecules making the pages of their books throb faintly with thick reality, the dry scraping of paper silenced by the thick air.
It seemed that Isaac had passed some sort of test, because Sol was next to him on the pink couch, her warrior chair reposed behind them, chaperoning gently.
“I’m not going to teach you from some boring primer,” she said, bringing him into the next phase of his learning. “First of all, I don’t have a good one. And the ones I do have are all, ‘See Dick and Jane chase Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!’ Yeah, no.”
“What about my old Bible?” He drew it from his basesuit and handed it to her.
She shook her head, regarding it, and passed it back to him. “Nah. Not for your first book. Plus, there is a totally other axis to what we’re doing here. We have to change the basis of your old thought, mix it up. So the Mind thinks it knows what you are thinking, when it does not. The Bible has been colonized by the Mind. It knows where passages sit inside you. It won’t work to redo your political mind.”
“Wait. What do you mean ‘redo my political mind?’”
“What, do you want to be a Mindtool?” She gave him a long look.
“No.” he said, slightly offended. “But I don’t want to just poke a spoon into my brain and stir around. I mean, I might do that if it got me free. But I would prefer something more… you know. Considered.”
“Nobody will be stirring anybody’s brains with a spoon. I’m just going to introduce you to some political ideas. Which, unless you really are a Mindtool, will take. So we’re going to start with something a little less boring. About a firefighter who burns books instead of putting out fires. Fahreheit 451,” she pulled a battered copy from her bag and held it up to show it to him, the burning black and red books on the cover torn in half. “We’ll just go slowly.”
They cheated a little bit, using some code Isaac put together to auto-define words passing through the mindscreen, but mostly she helped him parse through the first sentence, word by word, letter by letter.
After they had parsed it through, word by word, he read the first sentence aloud to her, “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”
He smiled, and so did she, looking at one another. He thought of the hair-thin limbic projections all through his mind, a single thread blackening under the fire of a match, writhing like a dying serpent as flame worked the alchemy of matter to smoke.
It took them them fifteen long minutes to work through Bradbury’s next sentence, “With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”
There were no metemotions attached to these words, yet Isaac’s blood answered the call to burn, hot in him, and Sol began to be aware that this head learning to read was not floating, but was attached to a male body.
“That’s the power of Bradbury. You kinda wish you were burning, even while you’re mourning the loss of history,” Sol said, looking slightly down and then glancing up at him.
“I wish I could find something worth burning,” said Isaac hotly.
She shook her head slightly, moving into theory and history, away from bodies. “There’s no point in burning. We didn’t have to burn to forget books. The DRM verification servers just had to spin down, and BAM. All the files were gibberish.”
“Yeah, but maybe if we had burned books, there’d be some tangible action to resist.”
“You’re just mad because it’s all digital now.” She smiled slightly, teasing him.
“I am. I want things to be real. People don’t use their mouths. People don’t use their words. People don’t read books, and they don’t even want to. Sheeple.”
“They might want to if they had the chance. But how would that benefit the Mind?” she asked.
“That’s not even it. People are enslaved to their lower mind. They’re happy enough to roller-coaster around on tracks the Mind has set out. They choose it.”
His words made her aware of their social distance and it made her angry, “But the tracks are already set up. You don’t even know what it’s like without the Mind. You have no idea how much operators look like the real puppets.”
“But you can go off the rails,” he said. “You can Choose.”
“You are such an idiot. Most of us don’t have a choice. That’s what operator privilege is. Having a choice.”
He felt a surge of anger, but when he interrogated his feelings, he realized that he was thinking from an operator perspective. Just want he wanted to burn in himself. His anger deflated, “Right. There is that,” he said.
Why could he not move away from his old ways of thinking? The Mind was no longer pulling at him like it used to, but the thinking patterns he thought he’d rejected so thoroughly were still rippling through him like seizures.