Chapter 36

Dinner was pleasant, and I was happy to be there. I knew that I wasn’t normally happy to be there, that it was ordinarily a necessary task, to feed the body to keep it running. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either. Except maybe for dessert.

So me feeling so happy was actually noticeable. Larry had commented on it, and one of the other guys in the dorm, who stopped to ask Larry a question, commented on it as well. So I was pretty sure that I had been successful in linkcasting myself that particular image.

The state carried through the rest of the evening, and I had a hard time keeping my focus on the reading I was supposed to get through. I was starting to see some downsides to these images I’d been casting about so freely.

I decided to see how I felt in the morning, and went to sleep feeling joyful, a very odd feeling to accompany sleep. When I awoke in the morning, I checked myself and decided that I still had it, though it seemed slightly diminished. But to be safe, I played around with an analog of the instruction I gave myself to clear the Cum Block. It took a little trial and error, but I eventually found something that worked, and I felt myself revert slowly to my normal state, whatever that was. Certainly not brimming with peace and joy.

But it made me think that all these named images, even if they did fade from existence eventually, should come with a fixed length, after which they would cease to work. It was no problem to simply attach that as part of the named description, and decided a couple of hours should be sufficient. Except for Boner Bliss and Spitshine. I thought those needed no expiration. Those would be useful things to the recipient, and they wouldn’t become active anyway until they decided to suck a dick, so no harm, I thought, to leave them in place.

I found it fascinating that things I thought I understood had more layers under them. I wondered if I’d ever figure out all of this, when I’d find the things I didn’t even know existed, or if I would at all. How the hell is all this ability dormant within us and we haven’t discovered it?

Well, maybe some of us already had, but they were keeping quiet about it for much the same reasons as I was. Or perhaps I was the first, and it was the accidental exposure to those chemicals by Parker’s Pond -- if indeed that’s what was causing this -- that woke up these dormant faculties in me.

Then I wondered, if these abilities were truly part of the human mind but buried deep and dormant, why they had become dormant in the first place. Had they ever been active, say in some pre-history civilization?

I thought about it for awhile, speculating how society would change if we all could use these talents. Or worse, how society would devolve into castes of haves and have-nots. Would people with these psi abilities become a new elite, controlling the economy and the sciences and government? Christ, that was a scary thought, a new dystopian society except for the select enhanced few.

I decided to worry about the downfall of society after breakfast, because I was hungry. I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth, then went to feed my elite ass before English class.

We were approaching the end of the term, and exams loomed. I could see it on the faces of the others. It was worry. It was the look of ‘Jesus, exams are coming up in a few weeks? How did that happen?’. There would be some panic studying starting soon. I was okay, having kept up with my assignments, and feeling that I had a pretty good grasp on the basic elements of the courses. I would pass.

That made me smile at the memory of middle school and high school, where the same kind of cramming happened every semester, with mixed results. It was a sad fact of pre-college education that academic success was measured by how well you could perform on exams, parroting back the facts we had been fed, with little emphasis on understanding them. Tests that have ‘correct’ answers are easy to grade. It requires little analysis by the teachers who grade them. You got the fact right or you didn’t.

College was a bit better, and most instructors did make an effort to impart understanding rather than mastery of a collection of facts, and exams reflected that, but there were still facts to be assimilated, for example in history. You needed to know names, dates, places and other things, then had to interpret them. Much the same thing with chemistry. So there was still memorization involved, because it would be on the exam.

So even though I had kept up with assignments, things that I had memorized earlier in the semester were now a bit fuzzy, and I would need to refresh my memory, which meant reviewing the notes, testing myself, re-learning what I had forgotten, retesting, and so on. Exactly the kind of stuff that I had hated as a student in high school.

I envied those people born with an eidetic memory, what the public called ‘photographic’ memory. They read something once and it was there in their head forever. It made school easy for them, effortless. It didn’t help with understanding the material, but they could recite the facts verbatim, even tell you on which page and paragraph in the text it was first mentioned. Some could even recite entire books from memory after a single reading.

Regurgitation of facts was mostly what was asked in exams. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a pill you could take to allow us to learn facts, like in geography, which I had hated in school? I had read that science had actually made some advances in this and had found some compounds which aided learning and retention of facts, but it was still not well understood and thus not widely available.

My mind, which had been careening around these ideas randomly, suddenly stopped still, as if caught by a snapshot in mid-flight. After some seconds, it said, ‘Isn’t that the kind of thing that hypnotism excels at, forcing the mind to focus completely? And isn’t what you do kinda like silent hypnotism?’

I wonder if I could put myself into an equivalent state to a hypnotic trance where I could exclude all other sensory input and concentrate on learning the facts I had to know? Would that be possible? Can you force yourself to ignore a particular sense?

Of course, I admitted to myself, hypnotists do it all the time. “The air conditioning has malfunctioned,” he tells his subjects, “and you’re all freezing.” And the subjects wrap their arms around themselves and shiver uncontrollably, teeth chattering. Their bodies ignore what their own temperature sensors are telling themselves, and instead believe the hypnotist. I had had something similar happen when I was in my own epicenter, and unaware of sounds and sights around me. The mind can control many of the body’s own functions.

This might be worth investing some time to work this out. If I could induce such a state in myself, it would make relearning facts much more efficient. And maybe it would improve my grades, too, if it worked. I sketched out a rough outline of what it would have to do, and how I would prove to myself that it actually worked, maybe flash cards I could use to test myself afterwards. Then I bused my tray and went off to English class.

Saturday morning I went out to the quad, partly to enjoy the spring sun and partly to get away from the noise of the dorm and Larry asking me questions. I found a tree and sat down under it, thinking about the problem, defining to myself what kind of state I wanted to induce, what I wanted it to accomplish, and also to insert some ‘safety’ features like a finite length for the state, and the ability to maintain a distant awareness of things or people calling for my attention.