Constrained Writing Contest #17- Misuse of Knowledge

This week’s Contrained writing Contest is being judged by @metzli. This is the writing constraint she came up with for us:

Write a story about learning (something new) without using a school setting, church setting, or parent/child interactions.

I hope you like my story. Thanks for reading.

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Lexi grabbed her mind programing headset and sat down to her desk for her daily lessons. She had learned French earlier that morning, but now had the chance to talk to others using the French. While she was talking, the headset reprogramed her mind to correct the words she was mispronouncing. By the end of the session, she was fluent in French, and would have no problem communicating with the French businessmen when she met with them next week.

That took almost twenty minutes. It had been taking almost three hours to learn a new language. To Lexi, this was too long. There were new programming headsets on the market, but Lexi couldn’t afford them. What she needed was to learn how to program her own headset so that it didn’t take so long to learn things.

She searched the programs on her computer data base and found the elementary program for upgrading a headset. Since she had learned advanced coding earlier that week, she was able to code a new program for faster learning. What she didn’t expect, was that she would learn so much.

In only the first few minutes, she learned the basics of chemistry, and algebra. By the end of the hour, she was learning advanced calculus. By the end of the second hour she learned more about physics and was given a warning.

Text in bright red letters flashed on her screen.

“You are exceeding your prepared mind memory storage. Please rest. Do not continue to download more information.”

Lexi ignored the warning. She was tired of learning only a few things each day. Her job required her to be automated with the best programs, and she wasn’t about to be shown up by younger apprentices, with bigger brains. It wasn’t fair that they were given more mind capacity. It wasn’t fair that she had been passed up for promotion because she wasn’t learning as fast as the others.

She had no choice but to learn more, and more. Reprogramming the headset again, she added a warp speed learning program that would allow her to learn thousands of pages of text within minutes. She sat there watching the images flashing on her screen. She learned the world history in less than twenty minutes. She added five new languages to her memory, and three times the amount of logic.

There would not be any question she could not answer now. Not one fact that she would stumble upon. She was wired with knowledge; saturated with wisdom, and ready for anything. Her eyes widened. The warning on the screen continued. The headset glowed with power.

“We found her sitting in front of her screen, staring. It seems she was programming, but by the look of it, she may have exceeded her memory. We see it all the time. Misuse of Knowledge. It’s very common in the older generation, because they have such limited memory capacity.”

“What will happen to her?” Lexi’s mother asked.

“She will never recover. She will continue to loop the programs in her mind until she dies. You have the choice to keep, and care for her yourself, or you can recruit the Mind Control Team. They will take care of her in a government facility where they treat MOK. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

She looked at her daughter who looked very happy; sitting there with a dazed smiling look on her face. Her eyes dashed back and forth, as if she were still reading the information on her computer screen. She tried to communicate, but Lexi remained unresponsive.

“Maybe one day they will find a cure.” she told Lexi, as they rolled her out of the house in a wheelchair.

Lexi gathered the information in her mind, and attempted to organize it into folders by alphabetical order, and then in order of importance and relevance. This could take a long time she thought.

The End

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