I did. We both got up and returned to our packs. “What did you mean about them messing with my brain?”
“Do you have any idea what other kids learned in school?” she asked in response.
“Same as me.”
She opened her pack and pushed her arm all the way to the bottom, felt around for a bit, and pulled out a case of bots which she opened. “The bots in this case contain all of my high school texts and my assignments.” She found one and handed it to me. “This bot has the index to everything in the case. Tell me which subjects you’ve studied on this list.”
I slid it into my brain plug and scanned the index. “Chemistry, mathematics, and physics which includes electricity and electronics,” I said.
“No literature, writing, poetry, geography, history, art, or any of the others?”
“No. I had my hands full with three subjects.”
“I’ve studied everything on the list.”
“That’s impossible!” I reacted immediately. Why was she making such a preposterous claim after we had just finished a huge fight? Was she trying to start it all over again?
“Deep breaths, Z-man,” she said, taking deep breaths herself in unison with mine and stopping when I had calmed down. “If this IS a lie, you could easily prove it. All of the other bots would be empty.”
“But, how could you have taken so many courses? I wasn’t able to do more than three subjects because it took me eleven-years to get to the end of them. How did you get to the end of all those courses?”
“Do a search for School curriculum, find Mathematics, and then scan through the topics,” she said. “What’s the final topic?”
I looked at the list. It ended with Equations in two variables (advanced students only). I told her that.
“When did you study two variable equations, Z-man?”
“Grade 5,” I answered.
“Other IOF students stopped when they reached the unit on two variable equations, but you were given six more years of math. Six full years more! Look at Chemistry. Tell me when you learned the topics in my grade eleven course.”
I had studied them all in my middle grades. “You’ve made up this list!” I accused. “Just because it says that it’s the IOF Approved Curriculum doesn’t mean that it is.”
I was flapping my arms around, so she grabbed them both and mimicked taking deep breathes for me. I was too agitated to object to her invading my privacy zone. We breathed together for a while and she removed her hands. She spoke slowly and quietly. “I know what I’m saying sounds outrageous to you, but I’m not trying to upset you. Think for a minute. Why would I make up such a fictional curriculum list, and then give you a case of bots with all my assignments and projects on it that matches this list exactly? There are years of hard work in this case. How could I fake that? Why would I fake that? What do I stand to gain?” She held out the case. “Here. Browse through my courses some time. Try the literature course. Read I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou. It’s a poem.”
“What’s a poem?” I asked.
She turned her back on me, shook her arms in the air, and screamed at the top of her lungs for about ten-seconds into the sky! I couldn’t believe I had seen her do that. The hairs on my arms were standing straight up. I stepped back a couple of paces when she turned back to me.
I heard her mutter “I hate’m! I hate’m!” Well, that made her feelings pretty clear. She wanted a fight, so she was going to get a fight! She hated me just because I didn’t know what a poem was? What was wrong with this girl?
She must have seen the look in my eye, because she didn’t try to get close. “Find the last physics course in the IOF curriculum. Tell me what grade you were in when you took it.”
I found the end of the list quickly. It wasn’t that long. “Grade 6,” I said.
“And yet, you and only you have continued to study physics. What have you taken?”
“Magnetronics, chaos theory, quantum physics, digitized simulations of brain chemistry. Other things too. It’s just physics. I read the text. I do lab work. I experiment for six-months or so. I create an invention. I test it. I get my C+.”
“Have you ever seen anyone else in the lab?”
“No. I’m the only one allowed to be in the lab so that nobody can disturb my experiments.”
“Z-man, nobody else in the IOF has their own fully equipped physics lab! Don’t you think that’s weird?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Look down the list of physics topics that I learned. Do you see anything there that you didn’t study?”
I knew most of them, but not all. “I didn’t take anything about fireworks, rockets, nor explosive power for sure. I’d have to look more closely at some of the others.”
“Z-man. Man has been to the moon and back. We used to have man-made satellites circling the earth, giving us improved communications and weather predictions. Unfortunately, satellites could also be used for warfare so they all were destroyed in the time of chaos.”
I started to interrupt, but she was back to her seeing red self and wouldn’t let me get a word in. “Z-man, read my history courses. It’s all there. It has an IOF slant – why those things were bad and why it was good that we lost our ability to put objects into space. But, those wonders of science existed. We’ve lost them because the IOF only allows one person to study physics in any depth – they call him the Z-man. The DPS controls everything a Z-man learns very closely. Math, physics and chemistry only. No literature or artistry because that would give him a soul. No history because that would give him perspective. No psychology or sociology because that would give him an understanding of people. Nothing frivolous because that would give him a sense of humour. No poetry because that might allow him to love. They only want him to study pure science. Later, they have him convert his inventions to weapons, or to devices that can control the masses. They are very careful to prevent him from learning anything about man-made power: how to make fireworks; how to make controlled explosions; how to make rockets. They don’t want him to have that knowledge because then he’d be able to break out of the disguised prison they’re going to send him to after grad’bration.“ Now she was the one waving her hands in the air.
“But, I’m not very smart. I’ve never received anything higher than a C+.”
“They give you a C+ because everybody gets C+ on everything they do. The IOF teaches kids that average is good; anything other than average is bad. But nobody does the same work. Smart kids take different courses from non-smart kids, but they don’t realize that because everyone is working individually. The IOF says that every child is born with a fair set of genes. People believe that because everyone looks the same. The IOF knows how to manipulate genes that control body size, colour, and shape. They haven’t the foggiest idea how to control intelligence. And, about once every two decades, a truly exceptional child is born just because of random chance. They give him a name starting with a Z. And, because they don’t know how to make any more babies like him, they make sure their Z-man can’t escape.”
She shoved the case of bots into my chest. “I’m going to check our back trail,” and she turned around and ran away from me. I could follow her progress clearly from her screams into the air. “I hate them. I hate them. I hate them.”
# # # # # # # #
When Izzy returned, she said the back trail was clear but she was going to check ahead. She took her pack and disappeared into the woods and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day.
I got bored walking along by myself, so just for something to do, I read some of her history bots. It was exactly as she had said. Man had flown in space. The bot also lectured about all the terrible things that had happened in the past with warfare, tyrants, genocides and so on. The bot said that all of those atrocities had been caused because people were different. After a while, I couldn’t think any more. My head hurt. None of this was logical! I had thought the IOF was good. Then, I learned some stuff and realiz
ed that the IOF was bad. Then, the bot showed that the IOF was right about warfare being caused by people being different. What was the correct answer? Math had correct answers. Everything that wasn’t correct was incorrect. In physics, something worked the way it was supposed to or it didn’t. How can anyone make sense of something that doesn’t have a correct answer?
Izzy cooked supper that night. We ate it silently. She was upset too. Afterwards, she wouldn’t look at me; wouldn’t listen to music; just stood there drilling arrows into trees.
Just before dusk, she came and sat in front of me. “Perhaps we’re the only normal people in the world, Z-man. Perhaps, everyone else is weird. We could agree to that, couldn’t we?”
I thought for a bit. “No, we’re both weird,” I said.
We were quiet for a long time. Then, she sighed. “Yeah, we are. But, that’s a good thing, right?”
I didn’t answer. How could being completely different from everyone else be good? Average is good. Not being average is bad. I just didn’t see it.
“I won’t turn you in tomorrow,” she said as she went to her hammock, which was several trees away from mine.
“I won’t tie you up or kill you tomorrow,” I replied. I didn’t want to do any of those things. I just wanted to understand all the things that were happening to me. I read one of Izzy’s bots until I finally fell asleep.
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Chapter 12
Izzy threw pinecones into my hammock until I decided to let her see me wake up. “Let’s do something fun today, Z-man” she called up to me.
“OK,” I said. I didn’t want to fight. In truth, if someone had said that I could put my brain-band back on and all would be forgiven, I might have taken the offer. Probably not, because the DPS were terrible people. But, what alternative did I have?
We had a quick breakfast and set out on the trail. Izzy asked if we could leave the bots in their case for a while and I agreed. My head was hurting anyway. Then, she started asking me silly questions.
“Z-man, why are boring classes like dragons?”
“There are no dragons,” I replied.
“Because boring classes drag on and on and on.”
She had to explain it to me.
“What kind of knight sings when the wind is blowing hard?”
“How do you know if he does?”
“A knight-in-gale.”
She had to explain it to me.
“What happens when a duck flies upside down?”
“They can’t. It’s aerodynamically impossible.”
“They quack up.”
She had to explain it to me.
“Are we having fun yet?” I asked her.
“Those are riddles. They’re sort of funny. Try this instead.”
Then she told me a long story about someone who was named Opporknockedy who was a piano tuner but he only tuned once. It didn’t make any sense. I told her that.
“OK, you tell me, Z-man. What makes you laugh?”
I had to think a long time. “I laughed when you told me that I couldn’t give myself the name finger-licking-good.”
“Why was that funny?”
“Because it would be such a silly name and because it reminded me of how foolish I must have looked when I was sticking my fingers in my mouth and licking them clean.”
“Way to go, Z-man. It IS a silly name. And, it’s good that you can laugh at yourself. What else have you laughed at?”
Again, I had to think. I couldn’t remember anything else that I had laughed at. She got impatient when I didn’t answer. “Izzy to Z-man. Are you there, Z-man?”
“Is that funny?”
“Not yet.”
“What am I supposed to say back?”
“Z-man to Izzy.”
“Why is that funny?”
“It’s not yet. Then, you and I would play a game where you pretended to be an astronaut and I was a person in another rocket ship trying to talk to you. Like this. Izzy to Z-man. We’re all out of food, our water is gone, and the alien marshmallows are getting puffy. I think they’re trying to grow arms so that they can take over the ship. What should I do?”
“Marshmallows are aliens?”
“Pretend.”
Izzy didn’t make even a tiny noise while I thought. “Start a bonfire, put a stick through them, and eat them for supper?”
“Now THAT’s funny! Way to go Z-man.”
So, we played Let’s pretend to be ridiculous for an hour. It was better than her riddles.
# # # # # # # #
We were having a rest break. Izzy had her squeeze-canteen and was soaking her hair with it. Suddenly, she squirted me in the face. “Got’cha,” she said.
“Hey! Why’d you do that?”
“Got’cha is a game. I just gave you a squirt. Now, you give me a squirt back.”
So, I did. Then, she started ducking and weaving, all the time giving me squirts on my clothes and face, but mostly aiming for my face. I hit her a few times, but she didn’t stay still long enough for me to get her very wet.
“You can move too, you know.”
So I did, and that made it more even. She explained the time-out rule, when both people stop and fill their canteens. Then, we played a bit more, both of us dodging around a bush. She made a bird call.
“Hey, Z-man. Look up there. A raven.”
“That wasn’t a raven…" I couldn’t finish my sentence because my mouth was full of water and the air was full of another Got’cha! So, that’s how I learned it was all right to distract the other person. Of course, when she knew it was coming, it was hard to do. We ended up both soaking wet and lying on the ground, panting.
“Was that fun, Z-man?”
“Yes, that was fun,” I agreed.
She lay back on the ground with her eyes closed and a smile on her face. So I squirted her and said Got’cha. Then, we had to have a wrestling match. “D’ems de rules,” she said but I think she just made that up.
I had her down on the ground and was straddling her, trying to pin her knuckles to the ground like she told me I had to. Every time I almost had one hand flat on the ground, she’d wriggle and pull the other one up. I was concentrating on the task – she was impossibly strong.
“Z-man?”
“What?” I grunted.
“You think of a name yet?”
“Why?” I pushed harder.
Suddenly she relaxed and I fell forward so that our noses almost bumped.
“Because I don’t want to call you Z-man any longer.”
I was looking straight into her eyes, and she was looking very serious. Some sort of trick? I wondered. “Why not?” I asked.
“Some people, when they say Z-man, they mean it as a terrible insult. That’s not the way I’ve been saying it, but I don’t want you to remember that I called you Z-man and think I was hating you. Give me something else I can call you, please?”
My face was about two centimeters from her face, and I was looking in her eyes, and they were looking sort of sad, which is kind of weird because we had been having fun.
“Please, Z-man.”
She wasn’t making the funny eyebrows, so I guessed that she was serious. Then, I thought of how she had been so mad at the IOF because I hadn’t been taught any literature and I remembered what I had read last night by the guy who never said anything straight out, but was always messing around with weird lines of words. “William,” I said.
“William?”
“Yup. William, or Will for short. Not Bill, not Billy, not Willy. Will.”
“Well, Will not Willy, what made you choose that name?”
“It was the first name of that Shakespeare guy who wrote all that flowery stuff in one of your bots.”
“Yes, Shakespeare is a flowery kind of guy.” Then, she said Thank you and she bobbed her head up and kissed me right on the lips. The next thing I knew, she had me in a headlock and was grinding her thumb knuckle into my skull. She said
I had to be taught a lesson because I had forced her to kiss me. I couldn’t remember doing that.
We walked the rest of they day, mostly listening to music bots. She really liked Sonny and Cher so we were singing along to one of their big hits when she paused the music and turned to me. “We should do an act, Will.”
“What’s an act?”
“We pretend to be Sonny and Cher and sing their songs together. We make up all the movements too.”
“Who gets to be Cher?”
“Me, silly. I’m the girl.”
“Only sometimes,” I answered, and she shot me in the forehead with her finger. She had to explain that one too.
So, we pretended to be 1960’s rock stars. We’d share a verse. Then, we’d do the chorus together. But for the chorus, we had to stop and face each other and make silly movements with our hands and bodies while singing I got you babe. I got you babe.
We sang songs like that for ages. Then, she taught me how to play the Hip-check game where someone pretended to accidentally bump the other person off the trail. Then, she did the Ooops, you accidentally tripped game on me by distracting me and almost tripping me. I did it on her too but I forgot that I was supposed to stop her from falling, which she did quite dramatically. She said she was OK and she was smiling when she got up. “That just means that I owe you one, Will. I’ll get you back some time when you least expect it.” She shook her finger at me and said it threateningly but her eyes were smiling.
We crossed a ridge and she said we had to be quiet now. She wrapped both arms around my waist for a moment and squeezed me, and told me that it had been a wonderful day. We walked down into a deserted valley where she said we’d able to wash our clothes and have a bath. She was being nice so I didn’t ask why we had to hump the packs through a fire-blackened path into the valley when we could have hiked more easily through nearby trees with the sky-rope.
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Chapter 13
I slept well into the morning and scrambled down my tree to find Izzy gone. Her pack was still there so I wasn’t too worried. She came into camp when I was on my knees, looking through my pack for some powdered food. I looked up as she stood over me and received a shower from her wet hair as my greeting. “The lake down yonder is all yours, stranger,” she said after running out of wet hair. "Say, I didn’t catch your handle. What do you go by in these parts?”