Her mind was shaped like a star fort: beliefs angled so nothing hit them directly, every approach for an argument covered by multiple lines of cold fire. She was too young — younger than the young discipline I excelled at — for this to be deliberate. Even so she was a disquieting marvel – somebody immune to a fearsome industry’s full arsenal. What else, I wondered, could come from that?
As a black hack computational psycholinguist I couldn’t but be obsessed with her. Every day I looked at her neural scans and behavioral records and wondered about the hidden history of her life. What sort of environment made a child grow up with such a precise fractal geometry of self-defense in their mind?
As her mother I asked myself the same question every night and I saw the dim outlines of answers encircling me I envied my daughter the strength of her walls.