Mei Ling put awayher homework for the evening, pausing to rub the fatigue from her eyes. A program beeped for attention on the screen and she clicked maxmizing the GUI. It was the tree-of-knowledge search interfaceshe had coded in her spare moments for Sean. At first she had researched readingrecommendations by manually trawling through textbook reviews online. That had gotten old really fast. Then she had cobbled together a relatively simple search engine to compile book lists by subject and ratings thendisplaythem as a 3-d connected graph. The hyper dense bush of book labels that rapidly grew on the screen had shocked her, giving for the first time a feel for how vast human knowledge was and how hubristic Sean''s task might be. That reminded her of another issue with Sean''sprogress, namely the extent to which he assimilated a new book stronglyhinged on how well he understood the base material. In the extremecase, he didn''t feel anything at all when he made contact with new material that was well outside his competency. Alternately if the new book was too similar without covering new ground, he didn''t get much out of thateither.This meant more wasted trips to the library, or wasted coinsat the library printer, that Sean would gripe about even if he saved all printed research for future use.
Mei Ling let out a sigh when she thought of her friend. Her life had gotten more busyafter Sean had aquired his power. She was satisfiedthat Sean was finally living up to his potential, of course. Even the teachers noticed. Mei Ling was no longer Miss Know-It-All, a label she had worn with pride despite the occasional derision from her classmates. It wasn''t easy living up to expectations as the only child of Asian immigrant parents. Not when most of her cousins were honor students who routinely got straight-''A''s. But it didn''t seem quite fair that it took her weeks of diligent study to get the most out of a book whenSean could now absorb it in an instant. Not that she begrudged him his victory. Sean was her bestfriend, her only friend if she was honest, someone she could confide in without being judged. Given her orientation, Mei Lingwasn''t comfortable with maintaining close friendships with her own gender even if she was careful to keepthat aspectof herself hidden. She hadn''t dared to come out to her parents, yet. Mei Ling wasn''t sure if her father would ever understand.Sean had been her rock.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The screen drew back her attention, and she blinked in surprise. She had gotten the idea to refine her search program by grouping topics from book contents intoa Venn diagram to filter out common threads running through all texts. The GUI clumped the tree nodes together based on how much in common each book had with another. The hemispherical bush had collapsed into a tall narrow tree, the book labels snapping togetheras if pulledtaut by invisible string. She stared at the reconfigured tree-of-knowledge for a long time, a new insighttaking root in her mind. Perhapsthere was a better way for Sean than absorbing book after bookand hoping for things to click. There were fundamentalideas running as a common thread through all the fieldsof human knowledge. Through physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, economics and system dynamics these concepts appeared again and again as general principles that the world worked on. If Sean was to see through the incredible chaos of the real world he would need to change the way he thought. Simply reading books wouldn''t cut it. A whimsical image came to her mind, a vast keychain suspended in her mind like a glowing halo and strung with these memetic units, each acting like a key to unlock a particular puzzle about the world. Like real keyssometimes,more than one would appearto fit a puzzle but only the bestonewould unlock any given puzzle. Sean would needto train himself to try out several competeing ideas for each breakthrough.
Mei Ling leaned back smiling. Thismightmakea real differencein maximizing Sean''s power. Sean needed her as much as she needed him, because he was a dumbass. A decent, even likeable, dumbass to be sure, but still a dumbass. If left to himself he would haphazardly chew through books, go to a good college - no doubt about that now - and then settle for some mediocre but well paying job that wasted his true potential. But Mei Ling would not let her ''bestie''slide into mediocrity, she would mouldhim into what she saw as perfection. She paused to frown. She should be happier for Sean, but she... wasn''t. Why is that, she wondered with a twinge of guilt.
END OF CHAPTER