Mei Ling put away her 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 interface she had coded in her spare moments for Sean. At first she had researched reading recommendations 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 then display them 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's progress, namely the extent to which he assimilated a new book strongly hinged on how well he understood the base material. In the extreme case, 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 that either. This meant more wasted trips to the library, or wasted coins at 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 busy after Sean had aquired his power. She was satisfied that 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 when Sean could now absorb it in an instant. Not that she begrudged him his victory. Sean was her best friend, her only friend if she was honest, someone she could confide in without being judged. Given her orientation, Mei Ling wasn't comfortable with maintaining close friendships with her own gender even if she was careful to keep that aspect of 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.

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 into a 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 together as if pulled taut by invisible string. She stared at the reconfigured tree-of-knowledge for a long time, a new insight taking root in her mind. Perhaps there was a better way for Sean than absorbing book after book and hoping for things to click. There were fundamental ideas running as a common thread through all the fields of 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 keys sometimes, more than one would appear to fit a puzzle but only the best one would unlock any given puzzle. Sean would need to train himself to try out several competeing ideas for each breakthrough.

Mei Ling leaned back smiling. This might make a real difference in 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 mould him 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