Work Text:
The needle goes in and River tries not to feel it; tries to focus, tries to hold on. The memories come, unbidden:
She doesn't remember when she learned to read but the common assumption is that she must have done so some time before she learned to speak because her first word was the one written on the wall of her nursery.
She doesn't remember her parents fretting about it or cooing or showing her off to their friends, but she does remember tracing her fingers over and over the dark blue lines on the wall, as a child.
河
Hé. It means "river".
*
At home her parents spoke mainly English, which put them in the minority on Osiris. When Simon was little they enrolled him in the most prestigious nursery school in the capital and after a few months he informed them, in perfect Mandarin, that he refused to speak English any longer.
River went to a different nursery school.
She learned Mandarin a few hours a day, with the other children, and then in the afternoons at home with a tutor. It came between her private lessons in mathematics and her swimming lessons, three times a week. In elementary school she was required to take Cantonese, as well. It was the most popular language on Osiris, although Mandarin was the lingua franca of the core planets. She never found it particularly hard.
Each day at school they made her sit and write her characters. They gave her twenty five and she flipped the screens on her worktable until she was up to fifty. The teacher refused to believe her at first. They gave her special quizzes. She passed them all.
It was silly, to have to memorize it the old fashioned way, tracing her plastic stick across the patterns on the screen. They might as well have given her a brush and a scroll. But apparently, in thousands of years of human evolution no one had found a more efficient way to learn characters.
*
They unhook her from the machines; take the plastic band away from her sweaty forehead, from her wrists. She doesn't want to go. She wants to let the memories consume her. She thrashes and screams and for the next two days she's in a dark space, restrained, and the memories are silent; locked away. She stares at the wall and wonders at the blankness of her mind. She knows, vaguely, in some remote part of what's left of her brain, that it hasn't always been this way. She hasn't always needed them and their chemicals and their steel and their blue hands (so unlike the ocean; a shade of blue that is a product of human civilization) to let her think; to have command of her own mind.
She wishes for the memories and closes her eyes. Sleep refuses to come.