Predictions

"Who - why - when - what are you do - done - doing to - today?" my son asked, sat at the breakfast table, pondering his choice of jam.

                "I've got two meetings with clients, quite an important day for me." I smile and pour his orange juice.

                "Con - coke - cork - cool."  He takes a large bite out of the slice, it quivers under the weight of blueberry slathered on top.  "Cat - car - can I ass Mark arouse - around for tea?"

                I take a slow sip from my coffee, "You can ask him around, yes."

                "Who - why - when -what did I sad - say?"

It makes speech easier!  You'll never be stuck for the right word again!  Can automatically translate your speech into twenty different languages, with more being added all the time!  Consult your healthcare advisor about the Predictive Speech implant today!

So ran the copy, and every kid wanted it for some reason that eludes me to this day.  I argued with Terry about it, told him I didn't want to put a chip in our child's head, but he said it was fine.  I asked him how he knew and he told me that he had one implanted a couple of months back.  I was offended he hadn't told me, which he took as an opportunity to remind me that we're not married anymore and he doesn't have to tell me everything.  If anything this just reminded me why I divorced him in the first place.

                We spoke to Dr. Stephens and she said that it's a simple, painless procedure, just a little implant that sits snugly in the interior frontal gyrus of the brain.

                I asked if she knew anybody who had the chip and she told me about her neighbour's kids, said it had improved their manners considerably.  "None of that text speak," she'd confided.

I decided to let Harry stay with his Dad after the operation, I was still quite shaken by the whole thing if I'm honest and thought that if there was to be any teething trouble then Terry would be better at dealing with it.  Me, I'd just drag Harry back to the doctor and get him to take the damn thing out, it's not like our boy ever had trouble communicating before and I'd hate to think of him as part of a little crowd at school.  That Mark is a bad influence, but we all knew those sort of kids, I mean, I aspired to hang around with Julie Walker and Margie Kempton, and now I'm rather glad they ostracised me.

Harry came back a week later, he greeted me with a big hug and beamed, "Hi mum!"

                I must admit I let out a massive sigh of relief that he wasn't spouting gibberish or worse, and Terry could see this weight being lifted from me, he gave me a knowing smile and ambled back down the path to his car.

                Like any one would be, I was curious, and wanted to just test that things were ok.  We both headed, naturally, for the kitchen, where I began to make myself a cup of tea.

                "Would you like a drink?"

                "Yes pl - please," he smiled.

                "Cup of tea?"

                "No thanks."

                "Don't you like tea?" I teased, knowing how much he hated all hot drinks, apart from warm blackcurrant juice.

                "No."

                "What's wrong with it?"

                "It's disguised - disgusting."

                "Disguised?"

                "Dis - disgusting."

                "Disgusting? Why don't you try some?"

                "No!" he objected, laughing as I wafted a tea bag in front of his face.  "Y - Tu - Tic - Tuck!"

                "Tuck?" I squinted, confused at his little face sticking his tongue out in protest.

                He concentrated, thought about what he'd said, muttered the series of words again like they formed part of a spell and then finally announced, "Yuck."

                "Did you mean to say 'tuck', did you know you were going to say it?"

                "Was - wash - wasn't thinking."

                "So, if I were to make you eat this teabag, what would you say?"

                "Y - Yuck," he articulated the world with the same theatrical disgust, and I chastised myself for being over-bearing and suspicious.

But, something lingered, and I phoned up Dr. Stephens who put me on to Mr. Enright at the company that designed the Predictive Speech units.  He reassured me that it would take a while for the chip to completely adapt itself to my son's choice of vocabulary, but it had some very smart software that would begin to recognise his most commonly used words and automatically default to those in future.

                "So the stammer?"

                "That's just the unit trying to second guess him, it goes to what our studies have suggested are the most favoured words based upon the electrical data released from your brain."

                "Why does it need to do that?"

                "Well, to make sure he's never short of a word really, that's the point of the unit ultiimately, you'll never be tongue-tied again, or perhaps it'll help you get the confidence to say those things you never thought you'd be able to, it's also a really useful tool when making an important presentation to..."

                "Save it," I rather curtly announce before ending the call.

I picked Harry and Mark up outside the school gates, they hopped into the back of the car and buckled up.  Mark said hello and asked me how my day was, which was an unexpected pleasantry.

                "How about fish and chips for tea?" I asked, glancing back at them in the rear view mirror as we set off down the road.

                "Yes please!" the two chimed in unison, when presented with a treat precocious boys always regress to being toddlers.

                I put the radio on and we drove to Ryan's fish bar, parked up and bundled out of the car.  It was quite busy for a Wednesday evening, all parents and children who had similar ideas in an effort to spare themselves an evening of cooking and cleaning.

                "What would you boys like?"

                "Cunt and chips." Mark grinned eagerly.

                "Me too, with my - mush - misguided piss," my boy smiled.

                I could see some heads turning, awkward eyes waiting for me to take action.  I crouched down, a serious look on my face, "What did you just say?"

                Mark looked up forlornly at the boards, pointing, "Cunt - cunt - cod and chips," the words came out after some stumbling efforts.

                Harry was already combobulating his sentence, looking down at the floor before raising his head and proudly saying, "Mushy peas."

                "I don't want to hear that kind of language from you Harry, and I'm pretty sure your parents wouldn't want you to talk like that either Mark. Ok?"

                I wanted to reprimand them further, deny them the fish and chips, but I was not certain that they were entirely responsible for their behavior.  Punishing them might only encourage them to swear some more, but this time out of choice.  So we waited patiently, quietly and awkwardly in the queue until we were served and then headed home.

Whilst the boys ate their dinner, with the greasy paper unfurled on their laps in front of the television, I - optimistically considering the time - called Mr. Enright again.

                "Hello?" was the puffed reply.

                "Mr. Enright, sorry to bother you, it's Sarah Alderton, we spoke about my son, he has the...

                "Yes, I remember.  What do you want Mrs. Alderton, I'm just about to leave the office."

                "You mentioned that the chip picks up on frequently used words, sets those as its defaults, well, what if someone used bad words frequently?"

                "You mean swearing?"

                "Well, yes."

                "It depends how much they swore to..."

                "He's a fourteen year old boy."

                "Oh dear, well, then, yes, there's every likelihood that swearing might be a more prevalent go-to for the device but..."

                "Yes?"

                "There are ways to monitor and control the output."

                "What do you mean?"

Upstairs was the instruction pack that Harry had brought back with him, I had dismissed it, having attempted to continue to treat my son as he always was and not some technological hybrid.  But, as Mr. Enright had said, there was a section about parental locks and, in a plastic pocket, a CD-ROM.

                I installed the software on my computer and looked through the options, it was laid out very clearly with a series of sliders to set the level of control.  I decided, considering the earlier outburst, to set the parental lock to high.

                Little green radar signals appeared on the screen, a cartoon representation as it searched for my son's output and then Harry Alderton popped up, alongside Mark Bollard.  I clicked on my son's name and a blue bar filled up to 100% before a rewarding little ping announced that the settings had been saved.

                Feeling satisfied I browsed around the software a bit more, realising that I could open up the implant and look at, and monitor, what new words had been added to the chip's dictionary that day.

                Mantle, tectonic, convergent, had all been added in the past six hours, he must have had a geography class.  But also, highlighted in red - with a note indicating that these words were now restricted from his vocabulary - was clit, cunt and jism.  At first I was more surprised that he'd learnt all three in such a short space of time, but then I did always presume Mark was a bad influence.

                Clicking back through the history of words over the past week since the chip was installed I was alarmed to discover what terrible language my son had managed to amass, words that I am certain I did not know until I was much older than he.

                I decided to look at what words Mark knew, and found a list of equal and greater depravity than my son's.  There were homophobic, racist, sexist, disablist terms, all manner of colourful swears and cusses, lurid descriptive terms, all of which I was able to order by their offensiveness as perceived by the software's online ranking system (clearly I was not the only concerned parent utilising this software).  Yet none on Mark's profile were highlighted in red, perhaps his parents were unaware of his pottymouth or this software, so I felt that they would be grateful if I set the parental restriction for him.

Later that week I received a concerned phonecall from the school deputy headteacher, she asked me to come in for a chat.  I was with a client that afternoon, but let her know I would pop in around 4pm if that's ok, besides Harry's father was looking after him over the weekend.

                There is a note of hesitation, but the deputy headteacher said it would be ok.

When I arrive to the school I'm shown through to the deputy headteacher's office, she stands to shake my hand, but my eyes are fixed on Terry, sat with a stern and serious look on his face, barely a hint of a smile to say hello.

                "Is everything ok?" I ask, my voice immediately weak with worry.  "Where's Harry?"

                "Harry's in the nurse's room taking a nap, he's had a rather stressful day," the deputy headteacher, who hasn't yet introduced herself to me properly, though the plaque on her desk reads Ms. M. Slocum, says sitting back - hand unshook - at her desk.

                "What happened?"

                "They're not sure," Terry begins, resting his elbows on his knees like he would every time he wanted to have a serious talk and scold me for something like I was a child.

                "Harry," Ms. Slocum wedged in, wishing to deflate any pre-prepared tension my ex-husband and I may have brought to the room, "complained about having a headache during his biology lesson, he was then found having a - well, a seizure in one of the corridors.  He's ok," she hastened to add, "we asked him if he had any history with..."

                "No, never, he hasn't gotten any allergies or epilepsy or anything like that, not that we know of."

                "Is he a squeamish boy?"

                "What do you mean?"

                My ex-husband tuts, "They were doing a lesson about reproduction and they think our lad might have got disturbed by it.  He sees worse on telly every..." Having seen how wide Ms. Slocum's eyes had become my ex-husband abruptly ended his sentence early.

                "We've had children faint in classes before, it was just," she searched her mind for the right word, "the severity of his reaction that alarmed us.  I don't imagine you've talked about the birds and the bees with your son before?"

                "My son, Harry, isn’t an idiot, he’s got common sense about things like that… Christ! He’s fourteen, he knows that it’s not a bleedin’ stork that delivers a baby, he knows it comes out of a woman’s…”

                “Mr. Alderton,” Ms. Slocum stood up, her chair squawking across the floor, “that’s completely unnecessary, thank you.”

I went into the nurse’s room where Harry was lying in bed, there were tissues crumpled up on the floor with spots of blood on them, and as I got closer I could see he’d had a bloody nose.  When I gathered them up and tossed them into the bin, Harry began to stir.

                “Mum?” he murmured as if he suspected I was part of a dream.

                “Hey trooper, how are you feeling?”

                “My he – he’s – head hurts a bit.  What happy – happen – happened?”

                “They said you passed out after something in class, do you remember what they said?”

                After a bleary moment trying to recall he turned back to me, “I put my hand up to answer a question, but when I tried to speak I… my head…” he reached to his forehead, started rubbing.

                “It’s ok, sshhhh, there there.” I reassured him, rubbing his hair.

Harry went home with his father for the weekend as planned.  I picked up a pizza and hopped through TV channels until I stumbled upon a cheesy 80s action movie, it was edited for television so kept awkwardly cutting away during the violent scenes and the hero would growl bizarre phrases like: “Go fun yourself!”  After a while it ceased to be entertaining, so I flicked over to a chat show.

The phone woke me at 4am, it was Terry, he sounded desperate, like I’d never heard him sound before.

I arrived at the hospital an hour later, where the doctors told me that our son had had a brain aneurysm.

We deactivated the implant, but were unable to prove a link between the product and our son’s hemorrhage.  We were lucky he didn’t die, but he suffered severe brain damage.  Terry took it terribly, he started drinking again, I was always stronger than him, but it meant that I didn’t have any help looking after our boy, who was now barely a toddler again.

                Sometimes I look in his eyes and see a growing boy buried somewhere deep within, but there’s nothing I can do now to bring him out, to get him back.  The same thing happened to his friend Mark, I know it was that chip in their heads, yet people continue to get them implanted.  Sometimes I open the software on my computer to see if the radar picks up any new devices in the area, I don’t know what I’d do if it did.