Joanna

The book fairly bristled with electricity. The currents of a thousand untapped ideas vibrated beneath my finger tips. I held my breath. The anticipation was almost more than I could bear.

A REAL book.

Uncensored thoughts.

Part of me secretly shivered with fear. Were the stories true? Would my brain implode? Would the skin actually melt off my face? Was it all a conspiracy, as Pierre had said, or were They simply protecting us from ourselves, as we'd been taught? I wanted so badly to believe that - had done for many years. But nothing could shake that deep suspicion that there was more to It All than we'd been led to believe - been allowed to believe.

Meeting Pierre had simply fed those doubts, brought to the surface a latent malaise. But he hadn't planted the seed. Watered it, perhaps. Fed it. Nurtured it. It had been there from the start.

Pierre and his cohorts seemed impatient. One coughed. Another shuffled his feet. Pierre straightened the strange, soft flat hat on his head. Well, I should say he angled it more definitively. The hat (which never left his head), could never be said to be straight. I had never seen a hat like that before, and at first I thought he had a piece of his sleeping mat stapled to his head in some weird ritual peculiar to the Underground. The Literistance. He'd laughed at me when I tried to dispossess him of his bear-ray, and hurriedly snatched it back, somehow achieving exactly the right situation on his pointed dome, without so much as the least aid from the smallest mirror. Despite not seeing any link between the floppy head ornament and a raging beast of the woods, I was impressed. I hid it.

Taking a deep breath, I cautiously wiped my hand across the old, worn fabric cover one more time. A minute flutter of soft and ancient dust floated briefly upwards, only to settle again on the tome in my hands. I read and reread the faded, embossed gold lettering on the cover. The Jungle Book. I'd never even heard of embossing before a few weeks ago and now, here I was: tracing it with fingers used only to smooth sheets of pristine paper, and the touch-sensitive keys on my Jaddies, the electronic devices everyone uses to read, write and communicate.

I opened the cover. Slowly in the dim light I read the first page. Then the second. I became less and less aware of the sounds around me - the frustrated throat-clearing, the pattering electrorats, the drip of semi-purified hydro ... I was lost in a world I could not begin to picture, surrounded by images I could not begin to lable.

17 May - M

The first book I remember reading is a 125-page treatise entitled "Water is Good For You". I was five, and that was the prescribed reader for five-year-olds. I read nothing but that for 365 days, when I graduated to "Communal Containment for Communal Contentment". The illustrations did nothing to make either publication more accessible to my juvenile mind.

When I was ten I was issued with my library pass, which opened the doors to the entire State catalogue, including such literary gems as "Why Only Two for Two?" and "The Fine System: Your Way to Freedom from Doubt".