Free Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress

it
hard, and I felt hers tremble.
    (Quick, fluttery shapes filled my mind, fine as paper. A dozen
molecular levels thick. They settled on a rock, rough and hard and old
as the earth. The fluttering grew faster and faster, the fine light
paper grew red hot, and the rock shattered. At its heart was frozen
milky whiteness, pulsing with faint veins.)
    Miri said, “Don’t you want to see Nikos’ and Allen’s latest work on
the Cell Cleaner? It’s coming along much faster than this! And Christy
and Toshio have had a real breakthrough in error-checking
protein-assembler programming—”
    I said, “Let me see the performance stats now.”
    She nodded once, twice, four times. “The stats look good, Drew. But
there’s a funny jag in the data in the second movement of your concert.
Terry says you need to change direction there. It’s rather complicated.”
    “Then you’ll explain it to me,” I said evenly.
    Her smile was dazzling. Again Sara and Jon glanced at each other,
and said nothing.
    ==========
    The first time Miri showed me how the Supers communicated with each
other, I couldn’t believe it. It was thirteen years ago, right after
they came down from Sanctuary. She had led me into a room with
twenty-seven holostages on twenty-seven terminal desks. Each had been
programmed to “speak” a different language, based on English but
modified to the thought strings of its owner. Miri, sixteen years old,
had explained one of her own thought strings to me.
    “Suppose you say a sentence to me. Any single sentence.”
    “You have beautiful breasts.”
    She blushed, a maroon mottling of her dark skin. She did have
beautiful breasts, and beautiful hair. They offset a little the big
head, knobby chin, awkward gait. She wasn’t pretty, and she was too
intelligent not to know it. I wanted to make her feel pretty.
    She said, “Pick another sentence.”
    “No. Use that sentence.”
    She did. She spoke it to the computer, and the holostage began to
form a three-dimensional shape of words, images, and symbols linked to
each other by glowing green lines.
    “See, it brings out the associations my mind makes, based on its
store of past thought strings and on algorithms for the way I think.
From just a few words it extrapolates, and predicts, and mirrors. The
programming is called ‘mind mirroring,” in fact. It captures about
ninety-seven percent of my thoughts about ninety-two percent of the
time, and then I can add the rest. And the best part is—“
    “You think like this for every sentence? Every
single sentence
?”
Some of the associations were obvious: “breasts” linked to a nursing
baby, for instance. But why was the baby linked to something called
“Hubble’s constant,” and why was the Sistine chapel in that string? And
a name I didn’t recognize: Chidiock Tichbourne?
    “Yes,” Miri said. “But the best part—”
    “You all think this way? All the Supers?”
    “Yes,” she said quietly. “Although Terry and Jon and Ludie think
mostly in mathematics. They’re younger than the rest of us, you
know—they represent the next cycle of IQ reengineering.”
    I looked at the complex pattern of Miri’s thoughts and reactions. “
You
have beautiful breasts
.”
    I would never know what my words actually meant to her, in all their
layers. Not any of my words. Ever.
    “Does this scare you, Drew?”
    She looked levelly at me. I could feel her fear, and her resolution.
The moment was important. It grew and grew in my mind, a looming white
wall to which nothing could adhere, until I found the right answer.
    “I think in shapes for every sentence.”
    Her smile changed her whole face, opening and lighting it. I had
said the right thing. I looked at the glowing green complexity of the
holostage, a slowly turning three-dimensional globe jammed with tiny
images and equations and, most of all, words. So many complicated words.
    “We’re the same, then,” Miri said joyfully. And I didn’t correct her.
    “The best