mnemone

1: a girl and her mom are in a library and smiling. Narration begins: "A 10-year-old in Delaware was visiting her local library with her mother."

2: the girl picks a book off a shelf. Narrator: "While searching the shelves, she picked up the book "It's perfectly normal" by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley."

3: the girl holds the book in the car with her mom. Narrator: "The book is about sex education and is one of the most banned books of the past two decades. The little girl took it home."

4: the girl points at herself while the mom is shocked. Narrator: "Later that day, the little girl showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said: "This is me.""

5: the mom looks worried. Narrator: "Her father was abusing her, and it was the first time she'd spoken about it."

5: a fat black old judge in a courtroom. Narrator: "The father was convicted, and the judge said: "There were two heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.""

6: the author, an old white woman with short hair speaking. Narrator: "In an interview, the author, Robie H. Harris, said..."

"I have been called a pornographer, a child abuser — every name in the book, as the saying goes. But whenever I am called one of those names, I think of that ten-year-old girl. I wish we never had to talk with kids about any of these aberrant behaviors. But we have to do so because they already know about them to some extent and because kids have a right to have the accurate information that can keep them healthy and safe. They need to know how to get help to make any abusive behavior stop."

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our partners like to say "haha, they're advertising to someone else, other AI companies or something" and while that might be at least partially true, the spark of thought we had a couple weeks ago was that actually...

... surely they're for "investors," right? these ads are fucking nothing. nothing, at least, but visibility. visibility that can be pointed to, manipulated into some vague figure about impressions, which is then extrapolated to hypothetical valuation in exchange for actual money.

The psychosurgeon greeted the child as she stepped out of the chamber. She’d elected to keep a slight scar—nothing but a faint white line, but anyone whose opinion she cared about would remember what it meant. For the next six weeks, they were gone. The itch, the squirming, screaming itch to bite her lip in sets of three… she nibbled herself experimentally and felt nothing but a slight twinge.

Her mother knelt down, placing worn hands on her shoulders. An affectation, as much as the surgery scar. She never cared what it meant before. 

“How do you feel, sweetie?” She asked.

The child tilted her head. As if empathy was a pea rolling around in her skull, and now that it had been placed there, she could hear it rattling about.

“I…” She tried the words. “I love you,” she said.

Her mother did not cry. The child appreciated that. She had chosen to raise a sociopath. She fed her, sheltered her, taught her how to move through the world. The child would support her mother’s continued existence, because doing so provided her in return with resources and protection.

She was cured, now. And the meaning of “I love you” twisted in her gut, sending her stumbling to hands and knees. 

Her father thought she was overcome with joy. Her mother, she could see her face, knew the child felt nothing of the sort. The child felt—disgust. The itch was cured. So she wanted to claw open her gullet and rip the parts of her that were her out and leave an empty, smiling sack of skin for some other reason.

“Turn me back,” she gasped.

Her mother faltered. “Sweetie?”

“TURN ME BACK.” She staggered back into the pod. The psychosurgeon chimed twice as she stumbled inside. “You—you don’t love me. You don’t. You don’t, don’t, don’t. You never did!”

She was calm again once the procedure reversed. But she would never forget the way they looked at her when she was like them. The unbridled relief. The boundless love.

They’d never looked at her like that before she changed. She suspected they never would again.