It is 2047. Emily Peterson has been an analyst at Invivion, a big tech company in Austin, for four years. But landing this job has been disorienting. She doesn’t know what analysts actually do at Invivion, and no one will tell her. And that’s not the only reason Emily feels uneasy in the modern world. Sometimes she just knows things about people. She calls this the Ability. She wonders if she doesn’t have two brains, a modern one and an ancient one, from the times before humans had speech.
. . .Language was the first technological revolution in human history. But think about it, it’s just another code, isn’t it? Another way to share and manipulate abstract information. Since then, we’ve come up with more codes: writing, numbers, math, computer code. Maybe it was inevitable that humans were going to explore this developmental path just because our brains were capable of it, but we paid a big price. The more we forget how to think without words, the more cut off we are from the world around us. Now we spend all our time coding—controlling—the world around us instead of experiencing it and other people. Language and coding only work out part of our brains; maybe that’s why we’re so bored and restless. We have to learn how to think non-verbally again so we can experience the world around us, embrace messiness. So we can do things like interact with customers and co-workers. . .