a few years, a kid like him will be given cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger’s and SSRIs to smooth out his awkward human interactions. But he knows something certain, before almost anyone else: People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded.
He still binges on old-school reading. At night, he pores over mind-bending epics that reveal the true scandals of time and matter. Sweeping tales of generational spaceship arks. Domed cities like giant terrariums. Histories that split and bifurcate into countless parallel quantum worlds. There’s a story he’s waiting for, long before he comes across it. When he finds it at last, it stays with him forever, although he’ll never be able to find it again, in any database. Aliens land on Earth. They’re little runts, as alien races go. But they metabolize like there’s no tomorrow. They zip around like swarms of gnats, too fast to see—so fast that Earth seconds seem to them like years. To them, humans are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck into the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home.
HIS FATHER IS THE ONLY PERSON Neelay will ever care for more than he cares for his creations. They understand each other, with no words spoken. Neither of them is happy unless they’re sitting at a keyboard together. Cuffs of the neck and pokes in the ribs. Teasing and giggles. And always that gentle, head-tilted, singsong lilt: “Watch out, Neelay-ji. Be careful! Don’t abuse your powers!”
The whole wide universe waits to be animated. Together, they must create possibilities out of the smallest atoms. The boy wants scales and songs, but his machines are mute. So Neelay and his father create their own sawtooth waves, clicking the little piezo speaker on and off so fast it starts to sing.
His father asks, “How is it that you have turned into a creature of such concentration?”
The boy doesn’t answer. They both know. Vishnu has put all of living possibility into their little eight-bit microprocessor, and Neelay will sit in front of the screen until he sets creation free.
In middle age, the boy will be able to drag a cute icon and drop it into a tree diagram, producing in one flick of the wrist things that took him and his father six weeks of evenings in the basement together to create. But never again, this sense of the inconceivable, waiting to be conceived. In the redwood-trimmed lobby of the multimillion-dollar office complex paid for by a galaxy right next to this one, he’ll hang, for many years, a plaque inscribed with the words from his favorite author:
Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD NEELAY makes his Pita a kite for Uttarayan, the great kite festival. Not a real kite: something better. Something the two of them can fly together without anyone in Mountain View thinking they’re ignorant cow-worshippers. He tries out a new technique for animating sprites he read about in a mimeographed hobby magazine called Love at First Byte. The idea is clever and beautiful. You rough out the kite in different sprites, then poke them directly into video memory. Then you shuffle them onto the screen like a flip-book. The first little flutter makes him feel like God.
His brainstorm is to write the program so that it can itself be programmed. Let the user key in the melody of his choice, with simple letters and numbers, then make the kite dance to that rhythm. The grandeur of the plan spins Neelay’s head. His Pita will set his own kite dancing to a real Gujarati tune.
Neelay fills a loose-leaf binder for the project with notes, diagrams, and printouts of the latest version. His father picks up the binder, curious. “What is this, Mr. Neelay?”
“You don’t touch that one!”
His father grins and bobs. Secrets and gifts. “Yes, Neelay, my master.”
The boy works on the project when his father’s not around. He takes it to school, that maze of halls full of organized torture that will inspire many a dungeon crawl of his later making. The black notebook binder looks official. He pretends to take notes in it, while working on his code. His teachers are too flattered