Housetier had such
good luck with the request for help remembering a movie title, I thought I'd try with a short story I read years ago and forgot the title and author of. I actually found the author and the story mentioned years later in an article on writing, and this was
after I had been trying like hell to remember the story name, and then I went and lost track of the freaking writing article as well.
The story, science fiction, was written as the diary of a super-genius young girl as she goes through some time period after some sort of clean-bomb attack (clean as in killed everyone who wasn't in a bomb shelter but did not leave radiation or physical damage to the world above, so maybe bioweapon?) She had a pet bird (a mynah bird I think) and is skilled in karate. She learned Pitman shorthand in the space of about three days in order to conserve paper in her diary.
She learns/deduces that her father was part of a team developing/observing/experimenting with a crop of super-intelligent kids popping up around the country/world. She also finds out that she is supposedly super-smart even compared to the other super-smart kids (I remember a line something like: 'Great. Even among other geniuses, can't be normal'). She was something of an anomaly in that she was raised normally for a number of years because her father didn't realize his own daughter was one of the new crop at first, then she was subjected to what we would now call subliminal encouragement (advanced books that just happen to be lying around shortly after an overheard conversation about the same subject, stuff like that I think-that part is especially fuzzy).
The narrater (the girl) was a really likable, funny kid, or at least I thought so at the time.
Let's see, what else; she could see in the infra-red range (looked at a wall with electrical problems once and commented 'looks mighty hot' but didn't know others couldn't see heat that way). One of the 'sneaky education' vectors in her life was an elderly asian man who moved into town. He was the source of the karate training. He actually was one of the scientists like her father, working on the super-kid situation. I think he helped her get books on the sly that her father forbade (father was actually in on it, it was one of those how-do-you-lead-a-pig things).
She recalls 'exercising wings' with her mynah bird while still young enough not to realize they were different species? Father walked in while they were balancing on the rail of her crib?
I think she thinks she has located another potential super-kid survivor location in the end, but it is left up in the air as to whether she is right.
That's it; no more fragments of that story are coming up in my brain.
Any ideas?
