[HISTORICAL DOCUMENT]

H.R. 1429

One Hundred Twentieth Congress of the

United States of America

An Act

To authorize the Uplift Program, to provide technological benefits to disadvantaged students and to strengthen education.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE

(a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the “Uplift for Educational Performance Act.”

SECTION 2. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

It is the purpose of this program to improve the educational performance of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, physical, and emotional development—

(1) by providing disadvantaged children and their families direct access to implantable medical technology, such as Neural Autofocus^®, when such medical devices are determined to be necessary, based on medical evaluation.

[HISTORICAL DOCUMENT]

It’s a strange sound. Intense and furtive. A pattern under it. It invades my sleep around the edges, seeping in.

Snick, snick, snick.

Sunday morning. Two days crashing in Jim’s tiny spare bedroom. No work today and a damn good thing, too. I’m exhausted. My arms and legs feel stiff under the loose-knit afghan. For the first time in my life, dirt-stained calluses have surfaced on my hands and fingers. I’m sore and glad for the pain, because without it my thoughts slide inexorably back to Pittsburgh. Back to the people I lost.

I’ve only been in Eden for a couple days, but it’s been a blur of work and sleep and failing to wheedle information out of Jim. The old man handed me a forged driver’s license yesterday and gave me a short haircut in the living room. Told me I better keep to myself. Stay out of town and never, ever get my numbers run.

Snicksnicksnick.

I force my eyes open. A startled yelp catches in my throat. Something is on the other side of the screened window next to my bed. Some kind of gray-faced monster. Child size. Watching me.

It’s a little boy. He must be standing on the hot tub on the deck outside. His hands move rapidly, twisting and swiveling something held out over his potbelly. A Rubik’s cube.

He smiles at me, pressing his forehead against the window. Small sharp teeth flashing. His hands never stop turning and flipping the worn cube.

Something is off about the little boy. His ears sit low on his head like a couple of fleshy lumps. Small eyes, too far from each other. The color of mud. An oddly smooth patch of skin stretches between his upper lip and piggish, upturned nose. Classic fetal alcohol syndrome, the proof of it outlined in his distorted features for everyone to see.

And he’s an amp. A nubby maintenance port protrudes from his temple. Faintly I can make out the telltale square outline of a retinal implant on the white of his left eye. The retinal chip floats there like a tattoo, collecting information about the world and ferrying it to the Neural Autofocus embedded in the boy’s temple.

There’s a lot of hardware in him, but his smile is real. Genuine. It belongs to a little boy and not a monster. And what with the yellowish node on his temple, who knows what might be going on in his head? These days, there’s no guessing what kind of mind lurks behind a face.

“Hey,” says the boy, voice coming in loud and clear through the window screen. “I’m Nick. You’re Owen.”

“If you say so,” I say, wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

“I’m friends with Jim. Come outside. I wanna show you Eden.”

Eden is an island, according to Nick. And it’s surrounded by sharks. Real big old gnarly-ass man-eaters.

As we walk, the kid shadows me. I get the feeling I couldn’t shake him if I wanted. Eden is too small and Nick’s personality is too big. He’s telling me his theory now. Theories, actually. The little guy has collected a lot of ideas in his decade or so of life and he doesn’t mind sharing.

Nick moves like a puppy. His small brown hands are always in motion, sometimes slow and deliberate, other times making short, eye-blurring bursts.

He can solve the Rubik’s cube in under thirty seconds.

“Yeah,” says Nick, as he leads me around the trailer park. “I mostly use the Fridrich method. Pretty advanced. With finger shortcuts and triggers I can do four-move bursts. Over ten moves a second. Of course, you gotta lube your cube to go that fast.”

Nick bursts into hysterical giggles. Eden is otherwise quiet under the growing heat of the morning sun.

“Eden,” he informs me, tongue peeking out of his narrow slit of a mouth, “is all by itself out here. I’m not sayin’ you can’t venture into shark-infested waters. But you better not be going by yourself. You got to have somebody watching your back every minute. Plus, sharks are worst at night. Nocturnal predators. So, you got to be home before dark.”

I ask the obvious question. “Is it shark week on TV or something?”

“Yeah, but that don’t change my point,” he responds. “The sharks make all of us amps stay together on our islands. To be safe, right? But Eden ain’t the only island. There’s a bunch more of ’em. Other places where poor people got the Uplift program. And the vets. Plus, out there in Pittsburgh, where they done all the original trials. Lot of test subjects out there with all kinds of crazy junk in their heads.”

Is that what we are? A nation of test subjects? Involuntary participants in a never-ending social experiment, exposed to wave after wave of new technology?

Nick points along a row of run-down trailers. “Over there’s my house. Earl. Miranda. Jim.” The kid stops at a dark trailer on the end. It has an ominous red star spray-painted on its side, paint bleeding from it in dried rivulets. “Lyle and them guys are in those boxes there.”

The laughing cowboy and his gang. I try to act casual.

“What do you think of Lyle?” I ask, peering at the rotting, graffiti-covered trailers.

Nick scratches one of his misshapen ears. “Kind of a badass, ain’t he? I like that. But mostly I’m just scared of him, I guess.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You admit it?”

Nick leads me toward the edge of the trailer park. “Oh, I’m scared of all kinds of stuff. Not the dark or monsters or nothing like that. Stuff I’m scared of is worth being afraid of. Tornadoes. Pure Priders. And Lyle and his friends. Especially Lyle. Sometimes, it’s like he can’t see you. Like he’s got shark eyes.”

“I heard the police were looking for him.”

“Everybody knows that. But Lyle’s got this way of moving. Sneaky fast. Anybody in a suit or a uniform comes around and he’s gone. Just leaves us to deal with it.”

Nick kicks the dirt, looks away.

“Do you like it here?” I ask.

“I guess. It’s hard to leave anymore.”

“What about school?”

“My mom teaches out of our house. Hardly any kids go to town for school. It’s got where you can’t even go out with your port under a hat. If a regular old Reggie Jerkwad finds out, he might mess you up good and send you home.”

“Reggie?” I ask.

“They call us amps. We call them reggie. Don’t ask me.”

Nick keeps leading me around the perimeter of the park, pointing out trailers and cars and pathways through the weeds. I follow, still sleepy, bemused by this hyperactive little creature.

Weeds suffocate the mostly fallen-down wooden fence that surrounds Eden. Through a missing section, I see a brand-new chain-link fence on the other side. Squat and solid, it wraps Eden in shining links. Looks like it was built yesterday.

Seeing me looking at the double fence, the kid goes solemn.