It was exactly like every other school he’d attended. The though gnawed at him as he made his way back to the dorm. He was wearing a fancy uniform and the teachers made a big deal of how special and smart they were to have been accepted here, but it went exactly the same way it had at his last school, and the one before that.
You sat in a class room, the teacher told you stuff, you wrote it down, you did exercises, you took tests. The ‘specialness’ of the school, the ‘advanced curriculum,’ came down to the teachers being better at telling you stuff, the students being faster at picking it up, the exercises getting harder faster.
He held out his hand and flexed it in a specific way he’d been taught in his orientation; a pig, old-fashioned iron key appeared in his hand, the puff of displaced air tickling his palm. He fitted it into the lock, turned, opened the door, removed the key; then he flexed his hand in a different specific way, and the key vanished.
This drove him crazy. If they could do that -- and he had to admit, it was an impressive trick -- why couldn’t they just have the door recognize him and open? Or, for that matter, if you can make a key disappear, why not make the door disappear? It had to save on storage, wherever the keys went after you gave that little flex.
For that matter, he knew that they could have simply moved him from the classroom to his dorm room instantaneously, saving him the key fuckery and also the walking across campus. He trooped up the stairs, grumbling under his breath at the lack of elevators and the general tackiness of the cinderblock construction of the dorms; they were painted bright, cheery colors, but it couldn’t hide the fact that they’d been built before the advent of extrusion or lighter-than-air plasticrete or... well, any of the more modern building materials.
He sighed and tossed his backpack onto the bed. And for pete’s sake, why paper books? And notebooks and pens for taking notes. He was sure there was some sort of enculturation that was supposed to be taking place, some lesson he was supposed to learn about the value of this or that, but he wasn’t getting it.
There was a big puff of air, and someone was standing in his room. He sat down hard on the bed, blinking.
The person standing in his room was wearing the uniform of an upperclassman. He stared as the older boy turned to face him.
“Kinesiology in ten minutes, in the gym.”
And then there was another puff of air as the upperclassman vanished. He sat still on his bed, his heart thudding in his chest at the sudden intrusion, the shock warring with the bitter resentment that the day wasn’t over yet. He was hungry and tired and disappointed and he didn’t want do anything else.
Kinesiology was some kind of weird hippy religious practice that seemed to be endemic to the school. He’d read about it before he came; all the Internet had had to say about it was that it was the study of human motion, but the school literature about it was all woo-woo and mystical: some kind of combination of tai chi and transcendental meditation.
He quickly changed into the special kinesiology uniform they’d given him, like a martial arts gi made of light t-shirt material, in school colors. He tied the white belt around his waist using the special knot they’d spent ten minutes teaching them at the orientation.
God this place was stupid picky. They’d spent all morning, it seemed like, in Semantics, listening to the lecturer talk about the extreme importance of precise phrasings and the different shades of meaning and the effort to eschew ambiguity: her words, repeated ad nauseam. Everything had to be done in the precise and perfect way, and no deviation would be tolerated. What a complete nightmare.
The gym was an easy walk across a field; other first-years were making their way there as well, easily recognizable in their stupid gi things. The gym floor was half full of students in gis, all sitting cross legged; he ended up right about the middle of the floor, five students on either side of him between him and a bathroom if he needed one. He tried not to feel claustrophobic.
“Students.” The teacher walked out to the front of the class and put his hands together in some sort of complicated sign, then bowed.
The students bowed back, raggedly. The teacher smiled indulgently.
“The first step to right practice is a clear mind.” The teacher lifted one leg, then the other, folding them under him taylor-style, resting on thin air about three feet off the ground. He held his hands out to his sides.
“The first step to a clear mind is breath. Take a deep breath, then let it out.”
The entire class breathed in, audibly, then out.
“When you breathe, start with your stomach. Let your stomach out as you breathe in, let your lungs expand down into your body cavity...”
They spent ten minutes on breath, in and out, learning full three-step breathing pattern: Belly, then chest, then shoulders, then repeat backwards. It was interminable.
He was supposed to be relaxed, he knew, but he was seething. Goddamned spiritual claptrap. Fuck. He could be eating or sleeping or...
“Now,” said the teacher, “Your mind is an empty room above and behind your eyes. It is a dark room, empty of thought as you breathe. Relax into the darkness.”
He failed to relax into the darkness, though he did visualize the dark room behind his eyes. It was easy: a dark room was where he wanted to be, instead of here. Asleep.
“Now,” said the teacher, “Imagine a blue glowing light, in the upper left hand corner of your dark room. It needn’t be anything in particular, just a blue glow.”
He saw the blue glow easily enough. Almost immediately a green glow appeared in the upper right hand corner of the dark room in his mind.
“You should be seeing a green glow in answer to the blue glow,” said the teacher. “It will respond to simple stimuli. If you can make the blue glow blink, the green glow will blink in response.”
He made it blink a few times; the green glow blinked back. He experimented a little: he’d memorized Morse Code, ages ago, for some merit badge. He started making the blue glow blink long and short.
‘F-u-c-k--t-h-i-s--b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t’ he spelled out with his blue light.
To his surprise, but not really, the green light blinked out morse in response:
’S-a-m-e--t-o--y-o-u--b-u-d-d-y’
He snorted with laughter. He’d almost missed what the teacher said next.
“This is the simplest form of handshake with the information infrastructure at the school. The blue light, and the green light in response, is how you know that the infrastructure is tracking you. When you want to initiate an interaction with the infrastructure, this is the first step.”
He blinked in surprise. Oh, God, he thought, that’s why there aren’t any real computers here: it’s all done with hocus-pocus.
“The infrastructure will watch your brain activity for specific patterns, and can use its magnetic and electrical fields to manipulate your mind in response. Over the next few months, we’ll be learning how to control our minds so that this interaction can become instantaneous, instinctive; by the time you leave, you will have forgotten that you once had to work at this. It will simply happen as you think about it.”
Fuck, he thought. This wasn’t just religion, it was some sort of computer human interface cult. He was about to spend four years learning to meditate so he could read his email. Goddamn it. His fingers itched for a keyboard. His stomach growled.
The green light winked on and off in a regular pattern; he tried to read it as Morse, but it wasn’t it was regular, pulsing...
Laughter. The green light was laughing at him.
He sighed. This was going to be unbearable.
You sat in a class room, the teacher told you stuff, you wrote it down, you did exercises, you took tests. The ‘specialness’ of the school, the ‘advanced curriculum,’ came down to the teachers being better at telling you stuff, the students being faster at picking it up, the exercises getting harder faster.
He held out his hand and flexed it in a specific way he’d been taught in his orientation; a pig, old-fashioned iron key appeared in his hand, the puff of displaced air tickling his palm. He fitted it into the lock, turned, opened the door, removed the key; then he flexed his hand in a different specific way, and the key vanished.
This drove him crazy. If they could do that -- and he had to admit, it was an impressive trick -- why couldn’t they just have the door recognize him and open? Or, for that matter, if you can make a key disappear, why not make the door disappear? It had to save on storage, wherever the keys went after you gave that little flex.
For that matter, he knew that they could have simply moved him from the classroom to his dorm room instantaneously, saving him the key fuckery and also the walking across campus. He trooped up the stairs, grumbling under his breath at the lack of elevators and the general tackiness of the cinderblock construction of the dorms; they were painted bright, cheery colors, but it couldn’t hide the fact that they’d been built before the advent of extrusion or lighter-than-air plasticrete or... well, any of the more modern building materials.
He sighed and tossed his backpack onto the bed. And for pete’s sake, why paper books? And notebooks and pens for taking notes. He was sure there was some sort of enculturation that was supposed to be taking place, some lesson he was supposed to learn about the value of this or that, but he wasn’t getting it.
There was a big puff of air, and someone was standing in his room. He sat down hard on the bed, blinking.
The person standing in his room was wearing the uniform of an upperclassman. He stared as the older boy turned to face him.
“Kinesiology in ten minutes, in the gym.”
And then there was another puff of air as the upperclassman vanished. He sat still on his bed, his heart thudding in his chest at the sudden intrusion, the shock warring with the bitter resentment that the day wasn’t over yet. He was hungry and tired and disappointed and he didn’t want do anything else.
Kinesiology was some kind of weird hippy religious practice that seemed to be endemic to the school. He’d read about it before he came; all the Internet had had to say about it was that it was the study of human motion, but the school literature about it was all woo-woo and mystical: some kind of combination of tai chi and transcendental meditation.
He quickly changed into the special kinesiology uniform they’d given him, like a martial arts gi made of light t-shirt material, in school colors. He tied the white belt around his waist using the special knot they’d spent ten minutes teaching them at the orientation.
God this place was stupid picky. They’d spent all morning, it seemed like, in Semantics, listening to the lecturer talk about the extreme importance of precise phrasings and the different shades of meaning and the effort to eschew ambiguity: her words, repeated ad nauseam. Everything had to be done in the precise and perfect way, and no deviation would be tolerated. What a complete nightmare.
The gym was an easy walk across a field; other first-years were making their way there as well, easily recognizable in their stupid gi things. The gym floor was half full of students in gis, all sitting cross legged; he ended up right about the middle of the floor, five students on either side of him between him and a bathroom if he needed one. He tried not to feel claustrophobic.
“Students.” The teacher walked out to the front of the class and put his hands together in some sort of complicated sign, then bowed.
The students bowed back, raggedly. The teacher smiled indulgently.
“The first step to right practice is a clear mind.” The teacher lifted one leg, then the other, folding them under him taylor-style, resting on thin air about three feet off the ground. He held his hands out to his sides.
“The first step to a clear mind is breath. Take a deep breath, then let it out.”
The entire class breathed in, audibly, then out.
“When you breathe, start with your stomach. Let your stomach out as you breathe in, let your lungs expand down into your body cavity...”
They spent ten minutes on breath, in and out, learning full three-step breathing pattern: Belly, then chest, then shoulders, then repeat backwards. It was interminable.
He was supposed to be relaxed, he knew, but he was seething. Goddamned spiritual claptrap. Fuck. He could be eating or sleeping or...
“Now,” said the teacher, “Your mind is an empty room above and behind your eyes. It is a dark room, empty of thought as you breathe. Relax into the darkness.”
He failed to relax into the darkness, though he did visualize the dark room behind his eyes. It was easy: a dark room was where he wanted to be, instead of here. Asleep.
“Now,” said the teacher, “Imagine a blue glowing light, in the upper left hand corner of your dark room. It needn’t be anything in particular, just a blue glow.”
He saw the blue glow easily enough. Almost immediately a green glow appeared in the upper right hand corner of the dark room in his mind.
“You should be seeing a green glow in answer to the blue glow,” said the teacher. “It will respond to simple stimuli. If you can make the blue glow blink, the green glow will blink in response.”
He made it blink a few times; the green glow blinked back. He experimented a little: he’d memorized Morse Code, ages ago, for some merit badge. He started making the blue glow blink long and short.
‘F-u-c-k--t-h-i-s--b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t’ he spelled out with his blue light.
To his surprise, but not really, the green light blinked out morse in response:
’S-a-m-e--t-o--y-o-u--b-u-d-d-y’
He snorted with laughter. He’d almost missed what the teacher said next.
“This is the simplest form of handshake with the information infrastructure at the school. The blue light, and the green light in response, is how you know that the infrastructure is tracking you. When you want to initiate an interaction with the infrastructure, this is the first step.”
He blinked in surprise. Oh, God, he thought, that’s why there aren’t any real computers here: it’s all done with hocus-pocus.
“The infrastructure will watch your brain activity for specific patterns, and can use its magnetic and electrical fields to manipulate your mind in response. Over the next few months, we’ll be learning how to control our minds so that this interaction can become instantaneous, instinctive; by the time you leave, you will have forgotten that you once had to work at this. It will simply happen as you think about it.”
Fuck, he thought. This wasn’t just religion, it was some sort of computer human interface cult. He was about to spend four years learning to meditate so he could read his email. Goddamn it. His fingers itched for a keyboard. His stomach growled.
The green light winked on and off in a regular pattern; he tried to read it as Morse, but it wasn’t it was regular, pulsing...
Laughter. The green light was laughing at him.
He sighed. This was going to be unbearable.
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