Soon I will be invincible by Austin Grossman

Author:Austin Grossman [Austin Grossman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF
ISBN: 9780307279866
Published: 2008-06-10T07:00:00+00:00

There wasn’t any warning with me, not the kind they look for. My earliest dreams were about my own brain, a cloud lit by flashes of blue and purple lightning. My school file never showed anything out of the ordinary. I quietly watched other children’s showy disorders, their early cognitive failures or compulsive aggression, and knew I was something different. Nobody was watching out for me. I rose undetected through the intermediate grades and they confidently packed me off to Peterson, another success for the system.

At sixteen, I would sit quietly in an empty classroom and work out problem sets weeks in advance. The work went as fast as I could write it. I had a system where I did the mental work three or four questions ahead of where my pen was. It was May already, almost the end of term. Outside, the hot Iowa sun was steaming off the previous night’s rainfall. They knew I was smart—I would skip my junior year entirely and begin the senior curriculum in the fall.

Another student with this kind of gift might have become popular, sold the answers or traded them, or at least let a hint drop every once in a while. I never talked in class, never helped people with their work. Never pandered.

This wasn’t my real work anyway. I had a milk crate in my closet, where I kept my real efforts, a mounting pile of spiral-bound notebooks that sizzled with my jagged ballpoint scribblings. I worked all the time, even during the achingly slow class lectures. I’d mastered junior-level calculus years ago.

So I doodled holes in space, robot locomotion systems, and quantum computing devices. I fit them in around the day’s dutiful notes on mitosis or The Catcher in the Rye or the Federalist Papers; then I would layer circuit diagrams for impossible machines, mechanisms of gears and pulleys raising and lowering cartoon weights, and dragons whose fish-scaled tails wound over and under, around and through columns of figures and dates of battles, tapering as thin as the fineness of my pencil allowed before finishing in a broad-head arrow point.

I wrote code for computer games I ran on the primitive mainframe the school had, partners at chess, and even a dungeon game, where I steered a tiny swordsman or wizard through endlessly layer-caked levels that spiraled into the earth, sunken ballrooms and throne rooms and treasure houses giving way to caverns, grottoes, and lightless oceans, and still deeper caverns below those.

I extended them as I played, everything getting stranger the farther down I went, from goblins and wolves to giant ants, dragons, and demons, and castles underground. I still play it occasionally, in the off-hours. There was never any sense who had dug that deep, or why, or when I was going to find the real bottom, but I never wanted to stop, knowing a great prize rested there, a centuries-old glittering treasure or hidden revelation, buried fathoms-deep under stone and earth; a relic from the deepest past, precious as life and ancient as childhood memory.

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