Savant

1: Introducing: Us!

In the year 1910, at the age of just six, a child named Sabine fell tragically ill from typhoid and was left blind and mute. Though she eventually regained her sight and some of her speech capabilities, she remained childlike in her nature and developed a strange obsession with buttons and coins. She'd count them, arrange them in groups, apparently just playing-until those around her realized there was something else going on. They discovered that Sabine could square, divide, or multiply large numbers in a matter of seconds. She had the personality of a child but the brain of a genius. The disease which had stolen so much from her had left her with a new gift. Sabine was, in short, a Savant.

There's a theory that has been floating around for a century or so. According to this theory, everyone on the planet has an inner genius like Sabine's, a kind of super-self locked inside their head. Maybe that genius is a painter, a songwriter, a mathematician, or an acrobat. However it manifests, that genius is extraordinary. Like, bona fide comic-book material.

Problem is, we flawed, messy human beings have trouble tapping into that genius streak we supposedly all have, because our brains get stuffed up with other things-things like fear, language, even our own personalities. Our creativity is inhibited by the bars of normality. Break those bars (a concussion might do it, or a disease like typhoid), and you set that little inner Einstein or Bach or Van Gogh free. Sure, doing so would most likely leave you a bit... odd. You might stutter-if you're lucky. You might go blind and mute, like Sabine. You might become antisocial or psychopathic or any number of things. But wouldn't it be worth it? Wouldn't you trade your ability to speak or your capacity to make friends for the sake of genius? For the sake of being special?

If anyone had asked me that question a year ago, I don't know how I would have responded. I don't know, because I have no idea who I was a year ago. Maybe that Jenna would have been like, "Dude, you can totes take my eyesight or ability to feed myself or whatever! Like, who wants to be normal anyway?" I don't know. Maybe that Jenna was a total badass who just didn't give a crap. But the Jenna I am today, the Jenna I became when I awoke to this new life, would say hell to the no.

Unfortunately for me, nobody asked.

All I know about the old Jenna was that she was ordinary. That alone is enough to make me envy her. When I awakened as the new Jenna, my inner genius awakened with me.

Patterns. Lines. Numbers. The ability to look at a bookshelf and in two seconds flat tell you exactly how many books are on it. The ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide massive sums. The ability to look at a building and digitally reconstruct it the next day. The ability to look at your face and draw a perfect portrait of you on an Etch-a-Sketch in a matter of minutes.

These are the gifts they gave me, the latent abilities that had been hiding under the junk of my old mind like a hundred-dollar-bill at the bottom of a trash dump. Thank you, science! Thank you, Corpus jackholes in your white coats and glass laboratories! And thank you, Mr. Dillard, and your astonishing method of manufacturing Acquired Savant Syndrome by zapping people's brains with a little good, old-fashioned electricity, unlocking the genius inside us poor, ordinary humans with a little manufactured brain damage.

When they'd finished playing with our brains like kids with their hands in a bowl of spaghetti, they clapped themselves on the back and called us the Savants.

Unluckily for the scientists who created (or re-created) us, there's only one problem with creating something that's smarter than you are:

Sooner or later, that something is going to escape.