Kindle Notes & Highlights
Wyatt braced herself, and raised her eyes to meet her cousin’s. She mentally reminded herself of what she was supposed to do during interpersonal interactions: Make eye contact. Return polite, superficial remarks with polite, superficial remarks. Say please. Say thank you. Compliment her hairstyle or clothing.
She understood numbers, but human beings were strange, mysterious entities whose actions seemed arbitrary and chaotic—puzzles with pieces that never quite added up to the logical whole.
That was why she avoided people. They were irrational, strange. They didn’t seem worth the bother.
She never truly got lonely, after all. She only felt right when she was completely alone.
looked at your fMRI,” he told her. “You’re not neurotypical, are you?” Wyatt stared at him. “So what?” This wasn’t news. She was very aware her brain didn’t function the same way most people’s did. “Your brain isn’t the standard, unlike most of the kids recruited for this program. That means someone in top brass”—he gestured upward with a big finger—“authorized your admission to this program as an experiment to see how a brain like yours will tolerate a neural processor. Did anyone tell you what these machines can do to a human brain?”
People had always been strange to her, and she’d been able to remain safely across a chasm from them, separate, and glad of it. It was all different now. She noticed their faces, their eyes. She noticed changes in their voices. She noticed how they held their bodies, how they moved them. And she pondered what they were thinking. She cared about what they were thinking, and she’d never in her life imagined how painful that could be.
