Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld, December 2020) is set in a Galactic Empire future, and opens with Pinander at college reciting one of his set texts. After this, he meets his friends for lunch:
Pinander’s mind expands with activated Lore. He sits with Jain and Philo.
“Alright?”
A penitent Jain hunches over her steaming bowl.
Philo studies a scroll. “I’m not going to make it,” he says.
“Where are you?” Pinander says.
“The Temple Odes.”
Pinander explains the Temple Odes were songs. “Some verse lends itself to silent reading, but not the Odes. You should be reciting or singing.”
Jain giggles in her soup steam.
Pinander reckons Philo is doomed. Intelligence goes a long way in the imperial service exam, but shyness can hobble you. There are soundproofed study rooms for students like Philo, but to pass the exams you must study constantly: at meals, in showers, in the loo, to and from study groups, as you drift off to sleep. There’s a lot of verse like the Odes. If you don’t recite or sing, Lore will go un-activated, remaining useless noise in your skull.
We learn that the students spend several years in an aestivation facility dubbed “The Crypt” before they come to college, during which time a huge body of knowledge called the Lore is downloaded into them. Afterwards they have to activate it by reading or reciting or singing various texts.
The rest of the story sees Philo commit suicide, and Jain drop out, but only after she passes on the revolutionary idea that there was another context written for the Lore by a poet called Sinecure. Further academic and counter-revolutionary intrigue follows (a Professor makes a cryptic remark that takes root in Pinandar’s “activated mind”) and the story eventually proceeds to an ending (spoiler) where Pinander manages to track down a scroll written by Sinecure and uses it to gain a dual view of his Lore and the Empire.
The core idea of this story is a bit unlikely, and much that follows is either a hand-wavey development of that idea or a rather over-elaborate description of college students and parental pressure and revolutionary intrigue in a far-future Imperial Empire (i.e. too much description and not enough story). It also has an ending that seems a bit unfocused. Ultimately, I guess I liked this, but it takes some getting into, and I’d understand if people bounced off it.1
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.
1. This story got a mixed response in one of my Facebook groups.