She broke into a jog, then an easy run. As her muscles warmed up, she pushed herself a little, trying to reach the place where each step generated the next, and it was easier to keep going than to stop. She thought about her serious children and then ran away from that concern. She thought about brains and their intricacies and vulnerabilities and how one person might perfectly harness body and mind, for sport or science or craft, while others couldn’t even walk across a room without pain or exertion. And then she was just running, and all was quiet in her head, and in the quiet she found her own answers. And then she was just running.
When she got back to the house, drenched in sweat, she found her family eating breakfast around the kitchen table. She gave each of them a kiss on the head, met with various degrees of acceptance and revulsion and a general agreement that she should shower.
• • •
On David’s parent-teacher night, Julie stayed home with Sophie. The doctors had upped her dosage again, hoping this time it would do what it was supposed to do. Otherwise they’d be starting over again with another medication, another round of trial and error. How could David want his brain messed with when the best neurologists in the country still played trial-and-error games? How could recreational surgery be so precise when there was still no surgery to help Sophie? There was no logic to any of it.
Val hadn’t expected to fight his teachers over it as well, but they spouted the same lines as David and Julie.
“He really is getting left behind without a Pilot,” said his math teacher, Ms. Sloan. She was young, closer to David’s age than Val’s, with a fading sunburn on her nose and cheeks. At one point Val had known all the teachers at both schools, but she hadn’t kept up with the new hires, and Ms. Sloan was a stranger to her.
“Getting left behind how?” Val had spoken with other teachers who had observed as much, but she wanted to hear specifically how it pertained to her kid.
“His peers with Pilots are using their time more efficiently. It gives them more time to study, and it lets them keep working things out while they’re doing other tasks.”
“It’s a fad.” That was what she hoped, though it looked less and less like that was the case.
Ms. Sloan walked around the front of her desk and sat on it. It came across like a move she rehearsed in her spare time. “It’s not a fad. It’s an optimizer. They get more out of their brains. Multitasking. The kids with Pilots have more time to study and more time for extracurriculars and fun—like gaming—because it lets them do it all at once. With upside-down learning I’m recording lectures for them to watch at home anyway, so we can focus on problem sets in class. This way they can do something fun while they listen, and I can help where they’re having trouble. They’re using their brains and time better.”
She swept her brown hair into a knot and cocked her head. A blue light gleamed above her right ear. She smiled like a zealot, Val thought, even as she knew it wasn’t fair. At least now she had an idea how Ms. Sloan found the time to practice dramatic desk-sitting.
The teacher reached for a tablet and swiped through a few pages with only a glance down. “Right now I’m talking to you and I’m thinking about my lesson plan for tomorrow and I’m reviewing David’s quiz grades. I could be doing three or four more things as well—listening to music, messaging my boyfriend, reading an article.”
Val pictured a cartoon octopus messaging and reading and grading and rocking out all at once, then tried to refocus. What Ms. Sloan said was true; Val would have sworn she had the teacher’s full attention. “How do you, um, access it all? How do you know you’re paying enough attention to each thing?”
“Practice, for starters. I’ve trained my brain, the same as you’ve trained yours. It helps me use my time better. I know David got seventy-two percent on our last quiz, for example.”
Val sighed. She was willing to be the parent who didn’t let her kid get the latest toy, but she didn’t want to disadvantage him in school. Maybe Julie was right and she was being overcautious; that was her default state. She’d try to consider it with an open mind, even if she didn’t like it.
CHAPTER FIVE
JULIE
Julie kept thinking about David’s request, long after he’d let it drop, more because she wanted a Pilot than because he did. How cool would it be to divide her attention and yet still be fully present? That was what the literature said it did: “Boost your brain and approximate functional multitasking!”
She thought of a million uses. She could get work done for the congressman while still spending time with her family, so she didn’t have to choose one or the other. She could get work done while getting other work done; she was never sure if she was doing enough. Did she have time to take on one more constituent request? What would suffer? Would she lose her job if she refused to take on more?
Best of all, she could concentrate while keeping an eye on Sophie. As it was, whenever Sophie was in the house, Julie couldn’t help being distracted. Was she playing quietly or seizing? Were her medications’ side effects altering her personality again? Julie tried her best not to hover, but it was hard not
