This book was written for the sheer fun of writing it. It’s an older book now, but I doubt if I can just leave it at that.

Sheridan Derwydd

Humanity produces some very unlikely looking people. Einstein, with his drawstring trousers and higher physics on the back of envelopes. Newton with his great ideas and greater professional paranoia. Da Vinci, the strange, omni-scientific exception to categorization, H.G. Wells, the rather improbable draper’s assistant. Teddy Roosevelt, the world’s first tree hugger. These highly idiosyncratic people were never going to fit a “normal” life. Their lives were their talents.

Life is talent. The truth about anyone is their personal ability. Whether that ability is ever used or not seems to be largely dependent on the vagaries of the human environment. It is obvious that the most productive people who have ever lived haven’t been totally prevented from using their talent. All inventions are the result of talent. You couldn’t have had the wheel without it.

Innovations don’t result from people doing nothing. This idea had eventually managed to find a place in education by the year 2103, after a century of playing with spreadsheets pretending to be training the next generations. There was finally some active interest in developing and promoting human talents from primary school on. That was the year Sheridan Derwydd was born.

The first thing his parents, Sydney and Matilda, noticed about Sheridan was that he was the only textbook birth in the history of the local hospital. A 25 minute labor. He was born before the doctor scrubbed up. He was suspiciously convenient to have around, for a newborn anything.

He hardly cried at all, he was more regular than a phone bill, and he fed without fuss. He also slept a lot. Feeding sometimes involved waking him up. The doctor said that since he ate like a racehorse when awake, it was probably best for him to decide when to eat.

He was a frighteningly healthy baby. The standard baby issues came and went so fast that they were sometimes gone before they got to the doctor. Sydney went from a confused to a fanatical father. Matilda ran the reliable gamut from anticipatory horror to love. They were a pleasant couple.

Sydney was a bookish person with a gift for logic and extrapolation. Matilda was a particularly quick, sensitive person with a deep receptivity for emotions and a passion for music. Everyone who knew them when they were single was entirely unsurprised when they married.

They filled each other out. Sydney converted Matilda into a true literateuse, and Matilda had Sydney bewitched with Beijing Opera and some of the more esoteric avant garde music of the time. Matilda’s sensitivity and speed of thought were a great help to Syd’s incessantly active mind.

Syd was an English (international English) teacher, which still wasn’t illegal, and Matilda a graphic artist of considerable talent and renown, which was then recently decriminalized. She was famous and wasn’t even remotely interested in the fact. Syd wasn’t famous and nobody was quite sure why. He seemed as though he should be. Matilda had pushed him into writing his first book, which he began in the hazy days of her pregnancy. Sheridan’s arrival had added a lot to both parents, and they began to work with a power they’d never had before. Three happier people would have been very hard to find.

Sheridan began talking at six months. Syd and Matilda dropped everything for a while and decided to learn from this experience. His first word was “Book”. Within two weeks he was making sentences of a sort. In two months he was able to hold reasonably complex conversations. Matilda said some years later that he never learned to speak baby talk. His sentence construction was something neither of them had ever heard before.

“To book” was the first expression of intent to do something he ever made. With a sort of ruthless logic came the next step, “From book”, referring to a source of information, a copy of The Oxford Nursery Rhymes with the original woodcuts. Sheridan was attempting to explain why he’d been trying to get their Pomeranian to play the flute. For a nine month old child it was a fairly convincing explanation.

Meanings in books were his next project. It was obvious that the things in the books meant something. He therefore insisted to be told what, and how to read them. His parents were a little nonplussed to discover they never needed to repeat anything to him. He was able to read at fifteen months. Writing was a little more difficult, having to learn the eye/hand and motor skills, but he painstakingly copied the letters in the books to the point he was actually doing calligraphy when he stumbled across one of Matilda’s reference books to Old Gothic Lettering. 

Nobody is more open to their talents than a child. Had he been looking for two more committed people in terms of promotion of children’s talents he couldn’t have done better than his own parents. They were also very aware of the dangers of deforming young talent by pushing it into places it doesn’t want to go, or giving it a set of unworkable, over-weighted, priorities.

Sheridan was supposed to be having fun, as well as learning. Voluntary learning is unbeatable. Syd had learned long ago that pushing compulsory boredom into young kids is a very thankless task. He’d hated the rubbish he was forced to read as a child, and was determined that his pupils would never suffer as he had.  He’d been chastised for giving his students books that were “too hard for them”, and then, inevitably, praised for his groundbreaking work. In Syd’s opinion the real payoff was that his was the only class where everyone in it was getting straight A’s. He was also amused when the other teachers started to notice that the kids were now able to understand what they were saying.

Matilda had been watching bemusedly this triumphant foray by Sheridan into Syd’s territory, and the Gothic lettering had come as a sort of personal vindication on her side. So when her two year old son hijacked her computer and asked how it made all the colors and shapes, she’d been only too happy to show him the codes that ran the programs. This was the first time Sheridan had seen numbers at work.

He understood page numbers, (it was how he taught himself to count) and basic addition, because he kept running into them so frequently in his reading. This was numbers making things that weren’t numbers, though, so Matilda found herself explaining basic code writing.

The calculator function, inevitably, got roped in to this epic, and all in all it was an interesting couple of months. By then Sheridan was able to play with the copy of the code that Matilda had given him for his very own computer, and he rewrote the whole thing.

He experimented by adding functions, changing characters, inventing shapes, and crashing the computer with a regularity that was impressive. This was Sheridan’s first encounter with the idea of syntax, and the eternal refrain of “syntax error line…” made a lasting impact.

After six months of this he was writing working code. His parents were slightly stunned by his patience. He had thrown very slight tantrums as a baby, but his reaction to frustrations and problems was utterly merciless. He would sit down and work until he beat them, no exceptions.

He even fixed an operating system error that the technician in the shop had said was unfixable, inherent in the system, on Matilda’s computer. All he did was move a couple of lines to remove the need to use the dud line, but it was quite enough, and the system had never worked as well. Syd and Matilda had watched an awed manufacturer come and go.

At this point the second child, Sally, was born, and although there were some signs of a normal baby, exposure to Sheridan soon had Sally toddling about being doted on by her elder brother and shown all the things he’d learned. Sally was herself a very fast learner, and her first word was “Sheridan”.  The two kids soon had Syd and Matilda almost climbing the walls in pleasure at their daily achievements. A few years…centuries….passed in bliss.

Interestingly it was Sally, not Matilda, who introduced Sheridan to music as a thing to make. This was an area in which she was more talented than he, and his fascination with his little sister’s ability to make such beautiful sounds soon had him trying to play along. Even so, he’d be silent when she got inspired. He found her music far more interesting than the fact that he’d achieved the equivalent of tenth year education without having to go to school. He was by now nearly six.

Syd had been staggered when the principal at his school said that Sheridan should go straight to high school. There was literally nothing left to teach him in primary school. Sally later got the same result. The two were stimulating each other’s minds symbiotically, according to the local psychologist, who also said that he might have to find another career if they kept it up. She also said that no thesis could do justice to it, and that if Syd had the time, a journal might be worth the effort. That idea had Syd busy for decades. Matilda did the visual records.

The strange thing was that notwithstanding this unusual series of exclusions from a “normal” social upbringing, Sally and Sheridan’s social skills were immense. They met other kids their own age, and were friendly and tolerant. They met older kids and were extremely popular. This aberration was caused by the fact that both Sheridan and Sally were born comedians.

They could and did catch most adults entirely unawares, which naturally endeared them to the other kids. Sally’s dismissal at age four of someone’s incessant and rather stupid, embarrassing, chatter as “conceptual dandruff” had devastated everyone at one of Syd’s school’s staff parties. Sheridan said that Sally had a natural advantage in looking so cute; nobody ever suspected what she was capable of, until it was too late.

When Sheridan wasn’t being funny himself, he was being dazzling. He invented a new graphics mode, a “fitter” program which overcame the dire monotony of grids. It was an equation Monet and Euclid would have liked. It created a scale of points in almost infinite combination, a 2 to the fifth power scale upon which to place color and line. It ran as: Select area; enter point scale; run “fit”. This translated into a delineation in graded scales of color based on the existing colors.

It also required a 256,000x magnification to see the individual points, well beyond the human eye. The patent was worth millions. Sheridan shared it with his family. He’d originally been trying to help Matilda make a portrait of Syd. Matilda, being Matilda, had been fuming about highly technical drawbacks in the graphics.

Sally was the one who’d noticed that it was the nano-grids that were making it difficult. Her father wasn’t made of little squares. It may be noted in passing that Matilda was then the only graphic artist on Earth who was actually paid to do portraits using a computer. The software really was that lousy. 

She invented the “universal shaper”, a combination of points which accurately fit image lines. According to Sally, she figured it out learning sewing, and then refused to explain how, saying it would insult peoples’ intelligence.

By the time Sheridan did actually get into a school it was for those his own age who were similarly talented. He was top of his class, despite genuine peer competition, for the first time in his life from someone other from than his sister. Sally was actually running a bit faster than Sheridan and joined the school a year later. She said old age was catching up with him. He said it was her choice of character reference.