The next morning, Quinn walked into the kitchen to find Elena sat eating her breakfast silently by herself. He went to pour himself a coffee much as he had done the night before and the two exchanged a lengthy look, not a word said between them. Had he seen she was awake? Did he realize he had been close to ending up with a knife to the skull if he had come any closer? She deliberately turned her attention to the book in her hand while Quinn watched her, sipping his coffee, anger in his eyes. He knew. He knew, she realized. He plated himself some food and took it out, leaving her alone to continue reading and finish her breakfast. She waited until the sound of his footsteps once again echoed away and then smiled, a dark smile on her face.
She walked out into the corridor when she was good and ready, the pride in her chest a new feeling, making itself known alongside the perpetual fear in her stomach. She walked into the hall a little taller, going back to her training with a renewed vigor, finding her concentration had improved as she spent less time trying to block Quinn, and his effect on her physiology was slightly reduced. It freed her up to consciously and conscientiously go through the motions, taking the time in her head to read the words and interrogate the recalled data at her own speed, analyzing what was on the page.
Finally, with a huge sense of relief, she had her breakthrough moment, the images springing to her mind just when she needed them. Justin and the others congratulated her, Quinn even did the same, but it compounded her mediocrity compared to him and she felt the return of a short burst of shame. He had already learned so much; she had seen the change in his vocabulary, the loathsome discussions he had with Justin and his team over lunch and dinner trying to learn ever more. He had laughed at her extra study in the kitchen, but it was he who was becoming addicted to knowledge, learning as much as he could during the day but also in his free time at night. The pressure was on; she could not fall any further behind. If they really were on the brink of a new revolution, she could not let Quinn be the one to get there first.
As the sessions continued, she found her recall improving and the data bursting from within to give her the correct information. Her visual cortex was working on overdrive to memorize the images as they flashed on screen before her, and her mind was reclaiming space within that biomass for those images to be stored. The neural network scans showed that her brain had indeed backfilled some dark recesses, a slight increase overall in neuron density and number, much the same as Quinn had developed earlier. The images in her head were no longer an intricate meshed pattern of numbers, pictures and words but instead individual cards almost, stored and indexed by her mind as the days went by.
She could not see it, could not really think it, but she felt it. The data she learned was becoming imbibed by her whole mind as the information connected to other regions of her brain and she was able to link that knowledge to her sensory perception. She heard bird calls out her window and knew already it was a blue jay, a bird common to the area but one that she now knew so much about; she spent a good hour just watching it interact with other blue jays as her knowledge of this complex social system of birds played out in front of her. She looked at the walls of the warehouse and with her rudimentary knowledge of building and architecture was able to take apart the structure in her mind and discovered there were hidden features she had not noticed, panic rooms and weapon storages cleverly concealed that most people would miss. She took in the stratosphere above her and with her advanced vision and knowledge she could almost see the clouds condensing, interacting with the hot and cold air around it as it progressed in an almost predetermined path that even the best meteorologists would be unable to predict, but that she could now see and understand the theory behind it. Everywhere she looked, knowledge was bursting out, asking for her attention. It was sublime.
But they were being trained for war.
With Elena's recall ability significantly improved as the weeks and months continued, Justin and his team stepped up their training to create a strict regimen of physical and mental activity from dusk till dawn. They spent the mornings in Elena's hall devouring weapons manuals, martial-art handbooks, images of various pressure points on the human body, written depictions of how to kill another human being in the quickest and most energy-efficient way possible, torture, interrogation, explosives, sabotage, the list was extensive. It made Elena feel uneasy at first, but in typical game-theory fashion, she felt that if Quinn was learning this, she needed to know it too. A day or two later, the information had normalized, the pictures of dead or beaten bodies no longer shocking her, and she simply went through the motions, her eyes straining as the pages illuminated, flash--, flash--, flashing into memory, a dozen images a second.
YOU ARE READING
Encephalon: Emergent
Science Fiction[COMPLETED] New York, present day. Elena's neural network has languished her whole life. Like the rest of us, she has eyes with weak receptors, memory that cannot record every detail and a brain that uses a fraction of its capacity. But Elena is abo...
