Free The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

he relished meeting people, not only adults but kids too, who obviously enjoyed knowing things. Accustomed to keeping his mouth shut in class, to imitating the sullen obstinacy of his fellow pupils because he had seen what happened to those who showed off their knowledge, he was astonished and for a while badly disturbed by this. Nobody tried to push him. He knew he was being watched, but that was all. He was told what was available for him to do, and his instructions stopped there. Provided he did one of the dozen or twenty choices, that was enough. Later he wouldn’t even be obliged to choose from a list. He could make his own.
    Suddenly he clicked on. His mind buzzed like a hive of bees with new and fascinating concepts: minus one has a square root, there are nearly a billion Chinese, a Shannon tree compresses written English by fifteen percent, so that’s how a tranquilizer works, the word “okay” comes from the Wolof wawkay meaning “by all means” or “certainly” …
    His comfortable private room was equipped with a computer remote; there were hundreds of them around , the campus, more than one for each person living there. He used it voraciously, absorbing encyclopedias of data.
    Very quickly he became convinced how necessary it was for his country and no other to be the first to apply wisdom to the running of the world. With change so radical and swift, what else would serve? And if a repressive, unfree culture got there ahead …
    Shuddering when he recalled what life under a non-wise system had done to him, Nickie was ripe to be persuaded.
    He didn’t even mind the twice-yearly sampling of his cerebellar tissue which he and all the students had to undergo. (Only later did he start putting quote marks around “student” and thinking of himself and the others more as “inmates.”) It was done with a microprobe and the loss was a negligible fifty cells.
    And he was impressed to the point of awe by the single-mindedness of the biologists who worked in the anonymous-looking group of buildings on the east side of the campus. Their detachment was incredible and a little alarming, but their purpose seemed admirable. Organ grafts were routine to them—heart, kidney, lung, they made the transplant as impersonally as a mechanic would fit a spare part. Now they were after more ambitious goals: limb replacement complete with sensor and motor functions, restoration of vision to the blind, external gestation of the embryo … Now and then, without realizing what the slogans implied, Nickie had read advertisements in bold type headed buy baby bunting and if you abort then we’ll support! But not until he arrived at Tarnover did he actually see one of the government fetus-trucks making its delivery of unwanted incomplete babies.
    That troubled him a little, but it wasn’t hard for him to decide that it was better for the not-yet-children to come here and be useful in research than for them to burn in a hospital incinerator.
    After that, however, he wasn’t quite as interested in genetics as he had begun to be. It could well have been coincidence, of course; most of the time he was hungrily rounding out his incomplete picture of the modern world, concentrating on history, sociology, political geography, comparative religion, linguistics and fiction in every possible form. His instructors were pleased and his fellow students were envious: here was one of the lucky ones, who was certain to go a long, long way.
    There were graduates from Tarnover out in the larger world now. Not many. To build the student body up to its present total of seven hundred plus had taken nine years, and a good deal of the early work done here had gone to waste on the error side of the trial-and-error methods inevitable with any system as radically new as this. That was over. Sometimes a graduate returned for a short visit and expressed pleasure at the smoothness with which the establishment now ran, and told half-sad, half-funny stories