✅ Younger Than You Think?

2: Laboratory

"I've got a little drink for you," Uncle Chad said, turning around and smiling as he offered the sippy cup to Iriña. She reached up with two stubby hands to take it, but she didn't have the strength to hold a cup yet. She just put her hands on the side so she could pretend like she was drinking by herself, and let the liquid trickle down her throat. Chad smiled at her, never complaining. He thought it would be amazing if all little kids could be so well-behaved; but then he knew that this particular child had been lucky to survive. And that might not have happened if they'd had any more trouble getting her to take her medication.

She finished the bitter syrup, and pulled a face.

"I'm sorry, baby. But it's what you need. Do you want to play now?"

He turned on the TV, and put on the Countgiraffes. They were the latest craze among toddlers, or at least parents who wanted to decide what their toddlers watched. Giraffes with necks that got shorter or longer when they were given numbers, so they could make a little graph. It was dumb, buit Chad didn't understand most kids' TV, and at least this was kind of stimulating. Iriña had seemed intrigued when he first put it on for her, although he was sure she wouldn't understand what numbers were at her age. Probably just entertained by the bright colours.

They weren't working so well today. She watched the screen as the sun set outside, but she was also glancing around the garage lab, looking for anything else that might catch her attention. She didn't move, which Chad was grateful for, but she kept on looking. He did his best to glance at her every minute or two as he called up formulae and simulations on his screen, trying to work out what the common factor was.

"Was da?" Iriña called out, and it took Chad a short while to realise that she was pointing at his computer screen rather than the TV, and parsed the half words as "What's that?". The image on there right now was a complex molecular structure drawn out in blue and white circles on the screen. It was rotating slowly, and Chad had been watching it in a kind of meditative daze, hoping that his subconscious mind might give him some clue what he hadn't understood.

"This is trivolyxylenol-2,4,4-phenyl-aptomyseclin spirulated synapsidrene," he said with a knowing smile. "But I wouldn't expect you to remember all that. It's a very, very dangerous drug, which would probably have been given a shorter name if DPF had been able to market it. I got in a lot of trouble for telling some important people about the problems, and it wasn't researched anymore. But it seems there are still some uses for preventing sleep."

He knew the kid was way too young to understand. She probably didn't understand any word with more than one syllable, but talking always kept her attention, and he didn't know if explaining it in the simplest terms possible might give him some new inspiration.

"Fo me?" Iriña giggled, and waved one hand clumsily to point at the cup on the edge of the desk. She understood, and the implications of that were incredible.

After that, the night shift of childcare changed. Chad still worked on his lab research, trying to understand what he had missed about this particular drug. But he also did his best to teach Iriña while her parents slept. A child's brain learns at an accelerated rate in the first two years of life, and that had been long understood as the reason they could learn to walk, talk, and so many other things in such a short space of time. But with a child who was not just awake but focused on what was going on around her twenty-four hours per day, that learning could pick up more than the adults had expected. She couldn't walk by herself yet because her legs didn't have the strength; and she couldn't talk because she still hadn't mastered her own muscles. But she could hear what was going on around her, and she had already started understanding what her parents said.

She had started remembering, as well. It was surreal to think back to a time when she had only known the meaning of a few dozen words, and she hadn't been able to say them. But years later, the day that Chad had realised she understood him seemed like a major milestone in her life. It was the day that animated giraffes had been replaced by Chad's attempts at education; doing his best to work out what she knew, and teach her one step further. He hadn't been good at it, because he had never mastered the skill of simplifying things for a younger audience. But that paid dividends when she picked up odd bits from what he said, and then read everything she could lay her hands on until she knew enough to support that fact.

A year later, Chad wasn't staying up to work nights anymore. He didn't need to, and Iriña had already shown that she would devour any book they offered her, to wile away the long hours of darkness while the rest of the town slept. He still looked after her; she still got lonely after too long without intellectual stimulation. And she could understand a great deal of what Uncle Chad told her, despite her young age. But the fact remained that she spent hour after hour stretched out on the bedroom floor, a book in front of her eyes.