Engram

“Daddy, I want to be a designer. I want to design things.”

It was very strange when my one-year-old said her first words. She was looking at me across the kitchen, her round head over the tablet, her eyes focused like a grown-ups.

”It is strange, but what should we do about it,” my wife whispered late at night, “The doctor says there is nothing wrong with her.”

We enrolled her into a special education program at Cole Dynamics which was actually and honestly a job at Cole Dynamics, only they would not let a company hire one-year-olds yet. Our daughter was one of thousands like her. Babies who suddenly awoke.

”The younger they are, the more neuroplasticity in the brain.” I caught a piece of an interview with Jeremy Cole, founder and CEO, “We need about 30 minutes of viewing, cartoons are great for this because of how much movement and color there is. We use eye tracking to build the model of their engram and then we can use audio and visual cues to rewrite it. It takes a few hours. If they can use it to sell products, we can use to further the cause.”

I did not catch what the cause was back then. I had to get back to work. Wonder-babies were on the news for a couple of weeks and then faded into mundanity.

At two years old, our daughter was writing code for an automated factory. She had a setup of three monitors and a tiny keyboard. They had started selling those around the time. For her first yearly bonus, we put up an extra solar array.

Spending time with my daughter was strange. She had opinions and dreams, and was very much our daughter. The tiny baby frame did not match the mind that was driving it, but that’s only if you think stereotypically. She did not want to move away, did not get driven off to a secret compound or anything like that. She still liked hugs and stomping in water.

”It looks unearthly,” my wife said as we looked at the immense structure they were building. It was an endless tower of industry and catwalks and stairways, bigger than anything ever built before. It bustled with drones, walking and flying about. It faded into the blue of the sky, into space.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk