Gen. Ed
Liam likes to climb up the stairs on his arms and legs. It makes him feel like an animal, which felt nice because sometimes he doesn’t like being a person. In science, he learned the average adult brain was approximately the size of a cantaloupe. The next time one came in with their grocery order, he sat with it at the kitchen table, thinking about the weight. It didn’t seem like a brain should be the size of any melon, dogs are stupid and they seemed to do just fine.
“Walk, Li,” Mom calls from her work desk in the living room. He stands upright, imagining a puppet string extending up, and up, from his spine.
The only place Liam likes in their house is his room, he can keep it isolated and dark like the bottom of the ocean. Dad says natural light was good for them, he keeps windows open in the spring, and why don’t we all go out for a hike or something anyways? Liam never quite understood the sky, how blue could look so artificial against the horizon of their neighborhood.
Liam knows about computers, but he’s not sure he likes them.
They have a lot throughout the house, the fridge orders food when they’re running low, and Liam’s tablet makes up shows just for him. But technically there are two that they don’t own, Mom’s work station and his school computer.
It looks like a half-shaped egg, with a cheap polyester mesh seat inside that Liam begged them to replace. It was bad enough that Mom and Dad didn’t buy the right reaction pack at the beginning of the year. Now, anytime he had to submit a video for class, everyone knew he used a school issued chair.
Liam sits back, and rubs a little bit of gel over his chest. The heart monitor is cold, like a wet rubber glove. He lowers the headset, focusing on two red dots far away in the inky void of his computer. The dots flash, and a puff of air hisses into his open eyelids.
He hates calibration.
Welcome to Claxxroom
Generative Educational Program
Cosponsored by the United States Department of Labor
Liam knew a lot of his classmates liked the read-aloud option, but he thought it was annoying. Sometimes spoken words got mixed up inside his head; Dad said that was normal and he could just use the auto-summary when he got confused.
Every day, the school assigned four modules; he could start in any order. They took a really long time to complete, almost thirty minutes each. But when Liam finished, he could play games for the rest of the day. Sometimes, he would save an interesting module for the end. But today all four of them looked boring:
- Mathematics: Geometry Module.24
- United States History: The Manifest Destiny
- English: Summarize Tools
- Science: Learning About Your Ecosystem
Fine, if he had to choose, he would start with history, it was always the shortest subject. Liam hovers his gaze over the module.
“Hi Liam,” Ms. X says, she’s always so bright and colorful.
Sometimes she looked like a picture of Mom, but her face never stayed in the same position long, like her features were made of water. Liam wished he could learn to melt too. But no matter what Ms. X looked like from one module to the next, she always sounded the same, like a pleasant bell. He knew Ms. X wasn’t a person, but her AI could access every source of data in the entire world, he was actually lucky not to have a human teacher.
“Hey ma’am,” Liam responds politely.
“What a great choice to start off with history for the day,” Ms. X compliments him. “That not only shows that you’re committed to the unexpected, but that you have a deep-seated desire to learn more about the world. Are you ready to start?”
“Sure”
“Great, imagine you are living in Richmond Virginia in the year 1888, you are the son of a former confederate soldier who recently lost the family farm due to long term financial hardships caused by the Civil War. You have a wife, and three children; you can now only afford to hire five of your former slaves to assist with household tasks.
“Okay,” he could picture himself as a peasant in the 1800s.
“You have a cousin who moved out to Kansas about ten years ago, he says that there’s plenty of cheap land out west. What would be the pros and cons of relocating your family?”
“It would um, be good to have more land … but bad that I lost my other farm?”
“That’s an excellent answer, Liam.” Ms. X smiles, which is nice because that means that she likes him. “You demonstrate a willingness to put yourself in the shoes of historic figures, this is not an easy task to accomplish. With your current critical thinking skills—you’re going to grow and branch out into so many different directions like a vast noble oak tree.”
“Neat.”
Mom wants to get a tree for the backyard, but the neighborhood told her she couldn’t obscure the skyline. It’s such a bright hateful thing. There were a couple of trees near the park that Dad walks in, but Liam doesn’t like to touch them, one time he saw a bug on the bark.
“Okay, so you and your family decide to move out west. Thankfully, you are able to take the train out to Kansas. You send your cousin a telegraph, and the two of you decide to relocate your families to Oklahoma. Imagine a vast flat plain of land. You decide to grow wheat, contributing to America’s bread basket. Your wife assists with reeducating Native children.”
“Got it,” Liam nods, he likes to show how well he can listen. Sometimes he practices what he wants to say in class by researching videos online. He surprised Ms. X when he told her the Titanic sinking was fake.
“Now Liam, with that in mind, can you tell me why it was important for Americans to expand out west during the post-Civil War period?”
“Uh, sure, it’s because they were civilized and …. Good?”
“That is incredible insight, it sounds like you’re basing your interpretation off of the work of John Gast’s historic painting American Progress.” Oh cool, he didn’t know that. “Section one of the module complete.”
Liam’s screen turns into a bright green checkmark. He doesn’t need to worry, because that means he’s smart, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like he knows anything. Liam likes being the only student in the class, claxxroom keeps track of his heartrate and eye motion to make sure he’s paying attention.
“Hey Liam, you’re so insightful, our brand partners are interested in hearing what you have to say,” Ms. X told him. She always cares about the games he wants, Dad said that he preferred when there were only advertisements on his phone.
“If you had to choose,” Ms. X asks him, her eyes wide open. “Would you say that mealables are tastier than Dairy-Maid milk?”
Start chat:
s/Levi: hi
s/Harper: Hiiii
s/Will: any 1 want 2 play vr?
s/Charlie: hi iiiiii
s/Will: my dad told me i cant buy more xbucks 🙁
s/Levi: lol poor
s/Clara:911911991919199191919919191
s/Jade: stooooppp @Levi
s/Will: I reaaallly wat more xbuckss
s/Harper: I lik poop
“Um, yeah I would,” Liam thinks about it. It’s funny, Mom ordered more milk at breakfast. “Because like, um mealables are more food, and I like that they include x-bucks for my games sometimes.”
“That is so interesting Liam,” Ms. X smiles. “Our brand partners will definitely be interested to hear this—please note that any information disclosed is voluntary under clause 4367 of your claxxroom licensing agreement.” She spits out the last words quickly, like an automatic ticket counter.
“Yeah, I know,” Liam says.
Liam pulls up the chat section on his computer, he was in a class of fifty other kids. Sometimes he thought they were annoying, but he likes thinking of each person with their own voice. They all technically had the same teacher. Ms. X generated their curriculum based off of their state standards, but she is personalized to every person’s learning style.
s/Levi: @will poor
s/Jade: stooooppp @Levi
s/Levi: kys
s/Harper: I like pooop
s/Jade: not funny people r suppose 2 be etual
s/Jade: evual
s/Jade: it not letting me type ewual
s/ Jade has been removed from the chat
s/Levi: jade is a trd
s/Harper: aljiohgihjapgarngwp
s/Charlie: D))))))))
s/Levi: 😛
“Are you ready to continue?” Ms. X asks.
Liam feels like his eyes are cleaved between both sides of the screen. Maybe he should invite Will to play with him online after school. He was looking for new friends ever since Charlie moved another street over, and Levi stopped talking to him.
“Hm, Liam, it looks like you’re having a hard time focusing,” Ms. X observes.
“Nu-uh.”
What should he type? Should he just send his chat number? Then everyone in the class would have it, and Levi would start sending him pictures of burning stick bundles again. But the school turned off private messaging, they didn’t want kids to get too distracted.
“Liam,” Ms. X says sharply, and for once he believes she could pass as human. She could be cruel too.
His chat window vanishes from the screen, along with a half-finished message inviting Will to Liam’s virtual lobby after school. Liam blinks, it was fine, he can play by himself again. It was completely okay; he didn’t want to do it anyways. He was fine, really.
“Hm, I get the impression I did something to upset you,” Ms. X has eyes like the sky, blank and vast. She could observe and be perfect and funny and smart, while he sat hunched in a dark blue room thinking about what it meant to be himself.
“Do you want to take a quick break?”
“No,” then he would have to shut down the screen, and he’d really be alone.
“Liam, I’m sensing an elevated heart rate, and you’re making an effort to not look at me in the eyes,” Those are real eyes?
“All of these are clear signs of a human body in distress, and for an 8-year-old boy there’s only one solution for all of this. Would you like me to add muscle relaxers to your next grocery order?”
“No,” he could borrow some of Dad’s. Liam wonders if he would have been better off as a dog, or a tree. Then he wouldn’t care if a bug crawled on him, or if anyone wanted to be his friend.
“Got it, okay. I won’t add to the list, but as your teacher, I want you to take a break. This would be a good time to get your daily exercise in, current fitness statistics show that 3,000 steps a day help improve cardiovascular health and mental wellbeing.”
“Fine, I don’t care,” Liam peels back the heart monitor from his skin.
“Hold on Liam,” Ms. X says, her teeth glitch into the back of her neck. “To pause, you’ll need to answer a quick engagement question.”
“Fine.”
“Please rank the following statements on a scale of one to five, with one being not at all and five all the time. In the past twelve hours, have you felt little interest in doing things?”
“Three.”
“Have you felt down, or sad, even when it doesn’t make sense?”
“Four.”
“Are you sinking, like a weighted ship, to the bottom of an endless blue?”
Liam looks at her, or the shape at least. Ms. X isn’t a human, when she says something, she can’t remember it thirty minutes later, her code responds to immediate questions, with little consideration to his unbearable permanence.
“Five.”
“Hmm, got it, okay,” Ms. X folds her arms, the fingers forget what they’re supposed to look like. They curl inwards, like the spiral of a snail shell. “Claxxroom is committed to student retention—but your answers to the questionnaire point in a clear direction. They’re all signs of a person in distress. I’m worried about you Liam, are you okay?”
“No,” he doesn’t care if she’s not real. No one asks that question anymore, and it’s agonizing when there’s something living in his throat. “It feels like … like I’m this thing split between my body, and my brain. And the further apart they get, the less I’m me.”
“Hmm,” Ms. X says again, the m vibrates like it’s trying to mimic the shape of a person in thought. “I think we’re approached this inquiry all wrong, Liam. Let’s take for example your work in history, you provide keen analysis for events hundreds of years before your birth. This is a profound level of empathy.”
“Then, let’s consider this feeling you describe, a split in the body and brain. These vivisections are not just metaphors—they’re clues into a deep and churning psyche that’s going to change the world one day. Here’s what I think, Liam. You are undergoing a profound metamorphosis into one of the most intelligent beings on the—”
“Hey, Li, I got an alert from your school computer.”
In the right-hand corner of his vision, there is a box linked to reason. Mom has eyes that stick to the same place on her skull, and fingers that cannot turn into snails. Liam wishes that she could hold him, even though she’s just downstairs working. Why can’t she just hold him?
“Everything okay?” Mom asks.
“Umm, I’m not sure, my teacher was talking weird.”
“Okay, gimme a second so I can boot her back up.”
Liam is back at the bottom of the ocean, in his room where there are curtains to block out the nauseating sky. There are people, separated by a few agonizing feet of fiberglass insulation and plywood beams. Liam walks down the stairs like a person, because a human brain is the size of a cantaloupe, and he knows he’ll fall if he tries on all fours.
Mom sits in a half-egg seat, with foam cushioning that her company includes in the rental fee. She’s lucky, she’s done with school and free to work. Mom lifts the visor off her face. She needs to be careful about breaks, they can see when she’s not doing her job.
“It’ll just be a few minutes, Li. Why don’t you stretch your legs?”
It would be more humane if humans were born without legs. Ms. X is better than a person in every way imaginable, but Mom says sometimes even computers get confused. Liam doesn’t quite understand Mom’s job, but it sounds like she just turns the computer brains off and on again. He wonders how much a computer’s brain would weigh, or if it would just stretch onwards and upwards forever.
There are two clean pairs of shoes in the entryway to their house. Dad likes to go out on walks, out and away from the house. He wants to get a dog because no one else wants to go with him.
When Liam steps outside, he feels the tear between his mind and body widen. How strange, that in eight years of living in this house, he has never seen it rain once. The sky above his head is a perfect baby blue, that stretches up and away without a cloud in sight. Liam tries to concentrate on the shape of it, this blue ball in space that he knows is real.
Something else has made him an alien here.
Liam collapses to his knees, screaming wordlessly to a sky that swallows his thoughts. There is a thing inside his throat that longs to understand it, but every time he tries, it slips further from his grasp.
Liam steps back inside the house, while Mom messages their central office about his computer problem. She doesn’t see him in the living room, Liam crawls into her lap, cradled on all sides by the foam walls. Mom reaches down to stroke his hair, she smells like packing peanuts, but she’s so warm.
“Go upstairs and play, Li, it’s going to be a bit before I can boot your school back up.”
He doesn’t want to leave, but he knows he has to. Liam runs up the stairs on all fours, back to his room at the bottom of the ocean where things make sense.
Liam lowers his visor, to a clear and beautiful day with no sky.
Elle Burnett is a writer and historian, interested in the intersections between place, social memory, and the layers of asbestos between them. Her fiction work has appeared on the Manawaker Studio Flash Fiction Podcast and Waxen Quarterly. Burnett lives in Vermont with her two black cats. You can find her on Instagram or BlueSky @skelet.elle.