31 - You Frightened Me!

Terry found the information flow settling down, quickly.  It only took the one day to get control of things so that he could deal with what popped up to every casual thought. Some he pursued.  Some he blocked, especially the ones about sex.  Some he flagged to pursue later.  He found himself sitting in his duty-chair... a tiny fraction of his awareness covering the ranks of lights and sensors and switches. 

No great hardship.  Since there was no outside shift and all of the maintenance had finished and the tech sent down... nothing tended to change.  It had been part of the problem for him.  He’d read all of the approved texts.  Written all of the approved letters and the one to his brother, unapproved.

Now there were whole libraries to browse through.  He’d been reading and absorbing as if someone had opened a tap into his brain.  He found himself grinning for no reason.  There was a sense of a vastness of books to be read, queuing up.

It made him happy.  He found that he could carve windows to the information he wanted and sometimes information he didn’t know he wanted.  He’d watch the portal form and feel this absolute smug sense that whatever happened it would be more interesting than the twenty-fourth read through of ‘The Technician’s Required Knowledge’ or the fifty-ninth read through of ‘All You Need to Know.’

He began opening portals into information he had no clue about, no understanding of, just watching things unfold on the other side.  Anytime anything horrific came near, he just shut things down.  He wasn’t sure if anything from those worlds could come through but he wasn’t taking any chances.

His smile twisted when he turned his mastery on his home planet.  He found he could open doors with the same alacrity there.  Flaming data.  Dragon security programs. Monsters. Things designed to frighten children should they accidentally manage to bypass parental protocols, or the Font of All Knowledge’s limits.

“You... you... you son of a...” words failed him when he found the image of the monster that had controlled his childhood dreams.  It was a few lines of descriptive code. In an antique, and obsolete format.  The monster it described was flat and bright and simple.  If you read what you shouldn’t.  If you  saw what you mustn’t.  If you pursued knowledge past where it was allowed.  This was the monster who sucked out your brain through your eyes.  Because eyes where how you’d transgressed.  Then if you were really bad, it would crawl into the cavity and live there, pretending to be you, but being a brain-sucker in the house and community.  It turned you into the information monster.  Your eyes would be empty, and your smile.

Terry sat up with a shudder, rubbed his hands over his face, though it did nothing to change the knowledge behind skin, blood and bone. “You... pig.  You frightened me into not wanting to learn.”