Jarhead: High IQ isn't Always Good

Jarhead: High IQ Isn't Always Good

Copyright January 2024 by Fit529 Dotcom (started 12/2019)

== Disclaimers ==

All characters exposed to or engaging in sexual activities are over age 18. Names have been changed to protect people in alternate universes with the same name as you.

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== Chapter: Jarring my Head ==

Mid-way through my 2nd grade year, my father died suddenly from an on-the-job accident.

He was a biochem prof at a large medical school you've all heard of, so his job wasn't exactly risky, but no part of working in chemistry is without risk. As best we understand it, he picked up a bottle of a particularly nasty chemical and a drop of that had descended the side of the bottle. Skin contact wasn't instant-deadly, but he had a hangnail, and the small cut led to fast uptake and an hour later, he was found by a co-worker.

Several months later, my mother and I moved to my grandmother's house in north suburban Boston, a medium-sized 4-bedroom where my mother grew up. Unfortunately, my grandmother passed away the next year, too, and then it was just my mother and myself.

Space was tight, so some of my dad's book boxes ended up in my walk-in closet and sat there.

Fast forward to the summer after my 4th grade year.

School had ended, and I got super bored sitting at home all day, so I started unpacking a couple of the boxes in my closet. I felt slightly-older, and wanted to clean up some of the outdated and lame-ass toys that were cluttering my bookcase. It just felt oppressive, that much stuff so nearby and always in view. I wasn't a neat freak, but sometimes maybe I had moments.

Of course, my mom's enthusiasm for my cleaning activity was over the top, and I think she was happy I might be reading more and gaming less.

As the toys went into a 'donate this' box, I had open space on my shelves.

What ended up on my shelves was an odd mixture of hardcover fiction and medical books. The medical ones were too odd to pass up. Some were biochem texts, and that wasn't digestible. I wasn't crazy, I was in 4th grade and couldn't read all that complicated stuff.

But, I put the obviously way-over-my-head books on my shelves - it made me feel smart, having them there.

Opening a couple of them up one day, I got to a thicker one and I started paging through it. The book opened oddly, though, and I found that some of the pages had been glued together to make a SECRET compartment!

As I realized it, I said it out loud: "Cool!!!"

Really, who doesn't like surprises?! I loved the idea!

Of course, not all secrets are interesting, but this one changed... everything.

Inside the carved-out glued-together compartment was a small metal box of breath mints with a label and a bar-code taped onto it, plus a letter, hand-written in small tight script, two pages, both sides. Addressed to my father Angelo, it read, in part:

Angelo:

Fun book, eh? I couldn't give you the 'mints' outright in that meeting -- the pharma lawyers are all over us after the Dawkins debacle. They had us locked down pretty tightly scheduling-wise (time on the sequencer is damned expensive) and I could only run it long enough to make enough for the 9 pills you specified. I logged the time as, "Mistake", which this whole thing might be.

Necropsy on lab rats (bulk samples, un-assayed but good enough): Proximate COD was USC -- umbridging sphagno-cerebrellular - my term for 'brain-splosion' - for the older ones. Your request for random subject rats helped -- all past late-puberty onset cranial suture fusion died. Younger ones survived. Craniums expanded ~10%. Older rats had 95% mortality and at that, only in low doses. Be advised human subjects MUST either be hospice early teens (an odd test group, for sure) or those with previous -ectomies for intracranial expansions. I'd suggest postoperative astrocytomas in stage 5.

I know - you said prelim, use roundworm. I went farther. Follow up was rat as noted, then rabbit, and a single geriatric rhesus study showed no cytotoxicity and telomere resets. Roundworm lifespan was +3x. Rat study would take years. Kicker was between a 3 and 5 sigma (!!!) IQ shift (hard to test!). That's for mammals at least (!!) - VERY promising. I've got to say, though, it gives me =Great Pauses= [underlined].

These ethics are chancy! Great harm flows from over-high IQ -- being unable to fit in, Cassandra syndrome ("Your problem is ___", no one believes you, happens, resentfulness against messenger). Depression from powerlessness is frequent in high-Q ppl -- you know better than most. I've felt it myself, and I've seen it in some of my students. They all figure it out, of course, but it takes time.

We didn't start out, you and I, at 100 iq's.

So. Treatment is highly stressful. Suggest amelioration. Combos of interferon-31A with your 'ultra-somnolence' (Saztipheen-3 hcl, was it?) should prevent test subjects from being too active while their brain is literally growing new support structures. Still, they should be mostly confined to bed with diapers, aside from small trips to eat and use the toilet if they make it in time, and they won't. I've seen that stuff in my practice with cancer drugs that cause similar problems to what you described.

Combined with interferon, per dose, ~1 week extreme lethargy, same as flu/mono. My Rx: 1 pill, 8 days apart, 3 total pills/subject. Cranial pain likely, several weeks + blurred vision from eye distortion as neurogenerative. Induces ongoing non-musculoskeletal omega-HGH secretion, good fitness and long life - No roid growth tendon tears, at least. Healing and growth self-correct circa 4 weeks post, so ~8 weeks.

Full capacity, when I've seen this growth in tumor situations (not your scene, but factors should approx. rates), I'd guestimate, 9 weeks total post-hoc.

Oh -- and before you send me tissue samples next time, clean your equipment better. I suggest (careful!) 7 M DBM - deoxybenzonitrinated methylfluoramine - it'll take a layer of glass off your beakers but we'll only get the molecules we want to analyze. Oh -- and patients will be immunocompromised during treatment, so careful of pathogens. Keep 'em locked up, diapered, immobile, mostly, and for ~2 weeks after.

Read me in with prelims and I'll peer review the draft if you want. Oh, and I'll back your bioethics committee app if you get that far. This has to be kept quiet. Global societal implications are Utterly Beyond Fucked Up. Stay sane, this is a lot to consider at the same time you're science-ing.

Kisses,

Damon

That's a hell of a thing to read, for sure. Especially, the last line. I was pretty sure my dad had been straight, but if he hadn't? It made me wonder. Maybe it was an in-joke between them.

The rest of the letter was beyond amazing, of course. I spent the next hour looking up the terms. The only familiar one was DBM, which was familiar to me vaguely as something associated with my dad's passing, but it was a vague memory.

I opened the metal case. In it were 5 pills. So, he'd finished one test subject and was going on to the next.

Getting smarter was a possibility? Seriously? This was extremely interesting to me. I'd never been that smart, and I was self-conscious about it. I mean, I'd read a lot, online and sci-fi novels and stuff, and I loved science, but I always had the sense that there was a huge amount of stuff I was missing out on. In school, I wasn't ever the first kid called on, though I usually knew the answer, and a lot of times when the teacher did call on me, my answer was wrong.

For example, one time in 3rd grade, the teacher held up a picture of a grizzly bear and asked what it was. I said, 'mammal'.

I had a reason!

Mom and Dad had given me a 'junior science' book with a bear on the front, but the book title was, 'Mammals'.

I got laughed-at. It's not fun. It was a stupid answer, so I learned not to answer questions quickly. I was already shy, and we moved away to Boston soon after that, so I didn't have many friends to begin with. But, then, Dad's dying left me emotionally fragile, and I got a lot of teasing from just seeming vulnerable. It's the way bullies work. I didn't tell anyone about my family situation because that would risk even more hard-hitting emotional damage.

To cope with this, I read books during class time instead of paying attention, and my grades weren't great. When the teacher called on me, I could usually spout an answer fast, so they mostly left me alone anyway, and understood I wasn't normal that way.

Truthfully I had a hard time getting interested in school stuff. I could read whole books about duck habitats and physiology, different species around the world, ecosystem interactions, etc., and all they wanted to talk about was that ducks are brown and they float.

I didn't like school too much because of it. So, I read stuff, but sometimes the books didn't cover things I was supposed to have learned in class while I was distracted by a sci-fi novel.

But, reading was the only thing that kept me sane! So, I didn't make great grades except in art or creative writing, where I could just wing it and get by with okay grades.

So, the idea that I could get smarter? This was an idea I had to think about, a lot!!

== Chapter: Intromission or Intermission ==

I found that letter just after 4th grade let out, and spent the next 2 weeks at a Cub/Boy/Girl Scout camp in Maine, a great time with tons to do. That was fun, but the whole time in the back of my mind I was contemplating, What If I Do It (take the drug).

There were risks. On the plus side, I definitely wouldn't get that head-swelling thing because I was only 4' 6", I hadn't gotten pubes yet (I knew what those were -- my mom was a nurse, she Explained Things). The benefit sounded significant. It had taken me quite a lot of looking to figure out what '5 sigma' IQ was -- it meant being really, really smart. I liked that idea, a lot. I could do great things in the world, maybe. At least I wouldn't be a dumbass anymore.

As I thought about if I should do it, I had to consider whether I could get away with it.

Logistically, my mother worked nights as a pediatrics nurse, and took LOTS of extra shifts to pay off credit cards from her car repairs. So, my mom wouldn't notice.

Near the last day of the camp, walking in the woods technically with a group looking for grubs (collect, identify, take pictures, put back somewhere), I had time to think.

What I thought was... Yes.

I was going to do this.

There wasn't anything to do at that moment, I just kept on with the activity, but in my head, I'd shifted from thinking 'if' to thinking 'when'.

After I got home, Mom tried to sign me up for some summer soccer camp down the street, but I said no thanks since I just wanted to game and watch videos for a while. She didn't like it, but she let me do whatever.

Looking at Mom's schedule (on the fridge), I planned carefully. It would take preparation.

When my mom was out, I rode my bike with a big backpack to a pharmacy across town (so they wouldn't know me) and bought diapers. Figuring out the right size meant a lot of phone-lookup-time (I didn't know my waist size). In the end, I saw a really old lady down the aisle getting diapers, too, and asked her. She helped me find ones the right size. She was super nice. I know she thought I wet the bed or something, and I let her think that. Really, I was going to be doing that, so it made sense.

I got two packages; they barely fit in my camping backpack, but I didn't want to be riding down the street and have Jeff (a neighbor who picked on me) see me carrying diapers!

Mom would need to know if there was a problem, what she'd need to know. So, I found a website that would send emails on a delayed-action so if you don't keep hitting reset, it will count down and send the email. I wrote it all down and set a reset time for 14 days. I was prepared.

Listing out my anticipated symptoms, I had:

Extreme tiredness? Check, I'd be in bed.

Peeing and pooping in my sleep? Diapers, check.

Thirsty? Water glasses by my bed, check.

Puking? Empty plastic wastebasket next to the bed, check.

Emergency of some other kind? Phone -- house phone and cell phone on corded charger, check.

Bored? Phone and charger, check.

Excuses and schedule? My go-to was 'up gaming all night', check.

Fallback excuse? My 'feeling bad' idea might not work - when your mom's a nurse, you don't get to a legit pass on that one. But, it was summer, so I wasn't going to miss school.

Timing was everything. I made sure to be around just before she left one afternoon say hello.

Note: I did NOT want to die -- I just wanted her to see me in person and awake so that the next time, if I was asleep, I'd be okay. I had to time things so she'd see me during the few times I'd be awake, and make it seem like I was just about to go to sleep otherwise.

I was set. Mom went to work, I went upstairs and showered and brushed my teeth, put on one of my new diapers (hidden in a gym bag near my bed with some gallon-sized zip baggies in case I couldn't drag myself out to throw them out), and settled myself in.

Though I wasn't too religious, I said a prayer, too. I was 11 years old and about to make a pretty big decision. I could chicken out, I decided, it would be okay....

I took the pill.

For about 10 minutes, I browsed on my phone, but then I got really, really tired. It felt like my legs were made from lead. I turned out the bedside light and rolled over.

Wow, did I sleep!

I woke with a huge headache and cotton-mouth at about 9 the next morning, 16 hours later. Even disoriented, I noticed my diaper did have pee in it. I quickly drank some water from my bedside, hauled my aching and dead-weary body out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom to poop. My mom was asleep, I saw down the hall, so I put a post-it note on her door,

"Mom - New version of my WorldBuilder Terraformer is out. Will be up/sleep odd hours. Put notes on my door for chores if you need 'em. Love you!"

I was about to go back to bed but I realized I was famished so I went downstairs and drank up some of the Ensure my grandmother had stashed in the back of the pantry, along with some cold cuts and a jar of peanut butter. Chugging it quickly (I could feel the tiredness coming back) I got it upstairs and put it around my screen-locked computer like I'd been there all night.

Again, I fell back asleep, for another 15 hours.

Waking in the middle of the night actually worked - I'd set a bunch of alarms on my phone that spoke what was happening, "Mom Gets Home 10 minutes!", etc. Happily, I was just conscious enough to hear that one, so I got up, throwing my legs over the side of the bed with some significant effort.

This thing wasn't fun. My head was pounding like a knife-stab, but I had to get up or Mom would suspect something.

As I stood, I could tell my diaper was full again, and I smelled something horrible, reeking of pee and... oh, god, poo. Ug.

I grabbed a zip baggie and packaged that sucker up, into a construction garbage bag, and then went into shower before she could tell.

My timing was good. She poked her head in the bathroom as she came in and said, "Hey, Honey! I'm home!"

I tried to be upbeat despite the insane pain level in my head, so I said, "Great! Just about to head to bed."

It worked!

She didn't notice a thing.

Over the next days, I kept up the cycling routine of up and down at intervals calculated to make her think I was constantly gaming, or had been up when she wasn't there or when she was sleeping, etc. She slept 8 hours, worked 12 or more, we'd "run into" each other at times of my choosing.

I slept and napped about 22 hours a day for that next week, getting up only to wolf down food, shower, use the toilet, and talk casually with Mom about whatever, like I'd been up forever and would be up a long time. She mostly was busy with her stuff and gone most of the time, so it wasn't a big deal.

On the 8th day, I reset my auto-email and took the second pill, and on the 16th, did that again - the last pill.

Sleeping the summer away wasn't my idea of fun, necessarily, but once I started, I figured I'd better finish it. Plus, I wasn't doing anything else really exciting. The extreme headaches slowed down and faded by the end, and I did have some blurry vision, but mostly I didn't see many bad effects.

On the plus side, I dropped some fat and gained some muscles. I don't know where I got them from, but I definitely gained them.

== Chapter: Awakenings ==

Near the end of the 3rd week, I started being able to stay awake longer and longer. Mom had kept insisting on me doing some yardwork, so I did some of that and powered through it, being careful not to jar my head too much. The letter had been clear on the dangers there.

I wasn't energetic, for sure, but I was able to sit up in bed and read. I finished the Heinlein novel I was reading and decided to try some non-fiction, to see if my newfound brainpower would help. I opened up my old social studies book, and it surprised me by being surprisingly easy to skim it and remember things

Granted, it was a 4th grade social studies book, and it had been boring the first time, too.

Picking up my math book, I read through that, too, in about an hour. Of course, all of it was stuff I'd had before, during the year, but it made a lot more sense seeing it the second time. I didn't have another math book to read, so I browsed around online until I found this free online math-tutoring site and just went through it start-to-finish, pretty quickly. I'd memorized my times tables early in 4th grade.

They had worksheets with up to 20x20 so I printed off some of those.

The site said that fractions were 5th grade, powers of ten, bigger multiplication, long division, rounding, estimating, all kinds of stuff that seemed pretty simple.

By August, I'd moved on to a different textbook site that had tricks for multiplying or dividing numbers in your head, lots of fun stuff. That wasn't beyond me, it was stuff I'd seen before, it just took remembering 'the trick' and I could do some pretty cool stuff, easily.

About two weeks before school started (sept. 3rd), I found a free algebra-training site, something about educating the world. Some of the pages I needed were in French, so I got out a dictionary and stumbled my way through.

On that site was a link to a PDF of an algebra textbook aimed at kids in 3rd world countries. Really, it wasn't about algebra itself, it was about how to teach algebra to junior high students.

I was barely in junior high.

Really, it was aimed at teachers, not me, but I started to see where they were coming from. It made a big deal over the fact that the students don't actually know the material until they can apply it and solve problems, especially ones in everyday life. I didn't care much, but the writing style was entertaining enough and I could skim it and get the gist of everything they were saying.

The main problem with it was the vocabulary. There were a lot of words I had to look up on my phone. I was pretty sure they were 'teacher' words, not real words I'd ever use. Come on, seriously, why the fuck should anyone say, 'pedagogical'? Why not just say 'teaching'? They always had to make it more complicated sounding just so they sounded important, I thought.

(This has been true forever and would continue to be, I discover later)

Finishing that text in a day or so, I went back to the algebra website. They had problems to solve and it'd tell me if I got the right answer or not (though answering in the right format was sometimes hard).

I LOVED that! I blitzed through that book...