Field Trip

Mrs. Adeleine guided us through security without issue, though her guest looked incredibly nervous. I knew the names of the others, and re-read that he was Mr. Kara. I don’t know how long I’ll need to remember that, but a photo and a few hooks are no trouble. The soft crunch of forest path ended and I looked up towards our destination.

The gallery stood on concrete pillars. It had no visible windows, but a ceiling that was all glass triangles peeked out above the trees. It would be lovely in the rain. I looked to _boy and caught a sparkle in his eye, probably he and _girl were in animated exchange —likely not about the architecture. I’d have been bothered a few weeks ago, but subvocalization was encouraged here, and _boy and _girl were friends. Pushing into conversations did not help with breaking into a new friend group.

It was cool under the building as we walked towards a door in a metal cylinder. Inside a staircase spiraled up into blackness. We climbed, guided only by emergency floor lights.

Mrs. Adeleine was a one woman army compared to my old teachers. My second week I had lunch with her and asked a lot of questions about her tools. I learned about attentive shift tracking, other mind models, ambiguous answerer hierarchies, and what she did for the four days of the week she wasn’t with us. She wanted to learn about me too, and my interest in artifacts is how I ended up meeting _boy and following her up these stairs.

_boy, then Kara, reached the top first. They waited for three of us, paused, and _boy said “lights”. We were hit by the gleam of gold, silver, and reflected light. One piece commanded the entire room. Dark floors, walls, and invisible mounting equipment made this piece look like an apotheosis from the void. I learned that word 3.2 weeks ago and it’s already mature because I’ve been overusing it, whoops.

_boy was unusually quiet. He’d probably been asked not to spoil any details, seeing as this was his family collection. Mrs. Adeleine asked us to identify some of what we stared at. I subvocalized to tutor net and promptly got answers and the reminder to refer to her as just Adeleine. My follow ups were fielded by Kara, he knew quite a bit about metallurgy, archeology, and how the golden wings had held up over time. Adeleine raised a question from _girl about religious impact. My notes returned nothing. Adeleine allowed image search and challenged us to report on our findings in 1000ms. Speedy lookup could sometimes stand-in for memory if you didn’t have too many shaky novel concepts floating around in your head at one time. Suddenly I had purposes and origins, surrounding controversy and impetus, and manufacturing and value. There were beautiful images and lots of history. Important history. This was once the pinnacle of human creation. I sent off my report and made some additions to my deck. I already had mature concepts here —measured now by my previous record of understanding and but later if I chose, brain chemistry— and a good number of connective hooks. In fact, my aunt kept a similar object at home, a trinket in comparison, which she had allowed me to inspect on special occasions. Her and her antiques, granted, it was beautifully polished and someone like her great great grandfather had made it himself.

My report came back quickly. One of the nice things about _school was how much intelligence they dedicated to dealing with ambiguity. In this case, I’d been promoted past two agents to Kara’s personal eval for a few metaphors, one of which was highlighted by tutor net. _boy had the most interesting highlights, even with a few spoilers unrevealed to us. That wasn’t a surprise, he was the one who asked to begin this module.

I gushed a “this is so cool thank you” to which he responded “you’re so formal” and “wait til you see the embedded meteorite through the microscope :)”. It seemed like Adeleine was unpacking that just now. Stalling, she turned on full net search and challenged us to 500ms Kara with any questions about the Hubble. Kara smiled and I prepared to flex my recent interest in forward error correcting codes.