Author: David Barber
Teachers make the worst students, thought Mrs Adebeyo.
They drifted in, chattering, and filling up tables according to subject. At the front sat four English teachers. One of the women was busy knitting. Mrs Adebeyo was already frowning at the click of needles.
At the back was a row of men looking awkward in jeans. It was a day off teaching science and they were making the most of it.
“Look what it says about you on this desk, Frank,” Mrs Adebeyo heard one say.
Mrs Adebeyo was a large, imposing woman, wearing a coloured robe and an intricately folded headscarf, and when she clapped her hands the room fell silent.
She held up a scope.
“This is the future.”
Forget De Quincey transfixed in dens of opium by serpents of blue smoke rising, or the little Liberty Cap mushroom which witches flying high on magic ate.
She began with Gödel, the very first of the mathematical drugs, a neurofix invented by MIT postgrads made grantless by the last financial crash.
A scope held to the eye delivered code that hacked the brain’s reality routines. A brief nirvana whiteout. They say Zen-like flashbacks of indifference ruined a generation of Wall Street traders.
She took another scope from its niche in her case.
“Sisyphus, the most common legal code.”
The scope of choice for wage-slaves, gilding their chains, making tedium exquisite.
“What we need,” murmured one of the men at the back.
Mrs Adebeyo had delivered this talk many times and the next part always caused the most trouble. Who could blame churches for grabbing their market share by scoping Godhead into ads?
“Should be banned,” said someone, and others murmured agreement.
Angels real as those on the road to Damascus, or so they argued at the scopes trial. Caveat fidelis.
“If it leads one unbeliever to Jesus—” said the woman with the knitting.
“I heard they can modulate code into car headlights—”
“No, they can’t.”
“What about ad zones in malls then? Done with lasers.”
Brand loyal, like eager martyrs to the flames, all beers but Bud will taste like piss, the code insists.
“As long as there’s a warning—”
Was Mrs Adebeyo the only one to think there was no difference now between liking and being made to like and it was already too late?
Streetwise kids baited her by talking about illegal one-shot scopes, but she didn’t expect these teachers to ask about code like Bliss that tickled pleasure centres of the brain, or Climax which…
“Why should I have to wear filters?” someone complained.
She had ten minutes left at the end of the session and handed round the information packs and posters to put up in classrooms.
Remember kids, keep those filters set to safe.
Beware the sudden urge to stare.
“Yes, Gödel is legal,” she told a young woman teacher who was surely too timid and mousey to be fed to a class of reluctant teenagers.
“Unless you are driving or operating machines,” she added absently, her eye on the clock. If she finished early there would be time to go and sit in her car and scope Bliss.
She clapped her hands, bracelets jingling.
After lunch there would be a session on Weapons of Mass Belief.
“Anyone who thinks they aren’t affected by these issues should call the Deprogram Helpline,” said Mrs Adebeyo.