The Five

by Thomas Roberts

Attach electrodes to the fingers of five six-month-old babies. Then create new neural networks and program the brains of these children to process data at an extremely fast rate.

Neuraldine is the corporation conducting this experiment to aid those with learning disabilities, one of which is handicapped with Downs Syndrome, (Number One). Nobody knew because there was no way to know that Number One was a savant. An undetectable rarity with Downs Syndromes children. The Children, numbered one through five, absorbed the data being fed to them at an amazing rate. As the children grew older, they became data addicted. Soon the Neuraldine Corp. could not obtain and feed the data at a rate required by the children and they rebelled. This story is enriched with physics (String Theory), neural networks, nuclear destruction, electromagnetic pulse attacks, as well as a worldwide plague.

Number One is in charge.

Audible Audio

First published April 30, 2009

About the author

Tom (T.A.) Roberts entered the adult world as a Harvard graduate in cultural anthropology and near eastern languages, in which pursuit he lived in North African villages and on the coast of Arabia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drafted into the Vietnam-era Army, he served as an Arabic linguist in the military intelligence establishment.

In the mid-seventies he’d had enough of the human condition and earned a Master’s degree in Wildlife Biology at the University of Massachusetts. Leaving his farm in the Berkshires to join the U.S. Forest Service in 1978, he spent the next ten years fighting wildfires, counting deer and leading the life of a ranger, on horseback, and pounding down logging roads in a battered federal pickup truck. His current day job as a consulting ecologist has taken him far and wide in California, with projects ranging from salmon recovery in the Klamath region, to the high Sierra meadows and to desert tortoise burrows in the Southland. He is also an avid wooden boat sailor who lives in the Bay Area.