Several decades ago, a small boy was born.

His parents were overjoyed, having lost more foetuses and premature babies than they wanted to count.

They didn’t care what the boy looked like or who he would become when he grew up.

They loved him dearly.

They named the boy at9:42:03 in honour of the time he arrived out of his mother’s birth canal.

The boy was given the gift of life and smiled happily from the moment he started breathing on his own.

His face shone as if an inner light glowed through his skin.

Everyone could not help but stare at the boy.

But it wasn’t just his face that attracted attention.

at9:42:03 was born with no arms or legs, no tongue, no ears, no eyes and no nose.

Specialists were brought in to evaluate at9:42:03’s chances of survival.

They agreed that at9:42:03 was, despite the sensory deprivation, a healthy baby boy, fully capable of growing into an adult-sized human.

One specialist consulted with the parents for a few minutes longer than the rest.

“What if I could offer your child a new set of appendages, providing him sensations that no other human has felt before?”

The parents looked at each other, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever wondered why human hunters pick out the best prey to kill while most animals tend to capture and kill the weakest of prey?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, it’s because we’ve detached ourselves from what used to be called the natural order of the food chain.  I and a team of colleagues have been looking for someone like your child, someone who has none of our regular sensory organs, someone who hasn’t yet come to depend on the old natural order of the food chain.  We want to enhance your child’s capabilities exponentially beyond our continued development of hunting-and-gathering tools, well outside our current understanding of the desire to hunt prey, regardless of the prey’s strength, size or trophy category.”

The parents whispered out of earshot and turned back to the specialist.  “What do you mean?”

“We have developed instruments that interact with the environment like eyes, ears, noses and tongues.  We have designed the equivalent of arms of legs.  In both cases, these appendages or extensions of the central nervous system can sense changes in the environment that an ordinary person cannot.  With your permission, we would like to work with your child to incorporate these into his body.”

The parents looked shocked.  “Is it dangerous to our child’s health?”

“No.  All of the appendages have cutoff circuits that prevent damage to your child’s main body functions.  However, as time passes, your child will become dependent on the input from the appendages just like you have become dependent on your arms, legs and five senses.  So, I admit there is a longterm effect on your child’s mental health but it is a positive one.”

“Will at9:42:03 be able to play with other children?”

“Yes, but he’ll always be faster, stronger, smarter and able to see things that might make the other children call at9:42:03 names.”

The parents laughed.  “Children call each other names no matter what.”

“Yes, we do tend to exaggerate our differences, don’t we?”

“Will at9:42:03 tend to bully other children?”

“That is up to you.  I feel it is in your child’s best interest to be raised at home and slowly integrated into society as he gets used to how he’ll distinguish his extrasensory capabilities from his ordinary ones.”

The father laughed.  “You know, this sounds like a comic book story, don’t you?”

The specialist laughed, too.  “No, but you’re right, it does.  Anyway, I’m sure this is a lot of information to take in.  Here’s a report we put together that details the procedures and our estimates of your child’s progress for the next two years.  Keep in mind that we don’t know everything.  We have planned for him to need several procedures as he grows bigger but we’ve done all we know to ensure that the interface between his body and the appendages will expand organically along with his growth spurts.”

The mother frowned.  “How much will this cost us?”

“Mainly, your time.  And all the love you can give at9:42:03 because he’ll be the most unique boy on the planet, going through all the emotional highs and lows that a typical child goes through.  We can, if you wish, offer you employment with our group, the Bass Ackwards Institute.  Of course, our conversation is confidential and, if you choose to sign the copy of the contract at the back of the report, you can’t discuss the details of this project with anyone.”

The parents put their arms around each other and stared down at the little, innocent, newborn child in the crib.  “Okay.”

“I’ll stop back by tomorrow morning and answer any questions you may have.  We can recommend a neutral lawyer to go over the contract with you, if you don’t have one.  Here’s a copy of a confidentiality agreement to sign with anyone you want to discuss the contract before you sign it.”

The parents nodded.  “Thank you.”

“No, thank you.  Your child is in a unique position.  at9:42:03’s most familiar sensation is that of you — the mother — and your heartbeat.  We’ll make sure your heartbeat is an essential part of the appendage integration process, reducing the chance for rejection that plagued so many appendage procedures in the past.  We want at9:42:03 to be successful in whatever he chooses to do, of course, but we’d like him to have the advantage of state-of-the-art technology from his earliest days.”

The specialist shook hands with the parents and walked away.

= = = = =

at9:42:03 stood in the doorway.

He knew he was being tracked but he didn’t care because he was able to get into the thoughts of the people tracking him and calm them down, assuring them that he was harmless despite the trackers’ superiours insisting he was a menace to society.  The trackers, in turn, relaxed a little and paid less attention to him, thinking about their common, everyday worries rather than concentrating on the actions of a person they knew only by reputation and database profile displayed on the screen in front of them.

at9:42:03 had learned to detect individual hormonal traces in office passageways, following scents passing underneath closed doors, counting the number of people in a room with his “nose” before he used his “eyes” to look through walls and see them.

When at9:42:03 wasn’t completing an assignment for one of his customers, he liked hiking in the woods and drawing mental images of the ecosystem around him, finding rare plants and animals that had never been catalogued by scientists or naturalists, storing information for papers he would later submit in an anonymous nom de plume to academic journals.

Attached to every known network of the galaxy, at9:42:03 had to be careful about revealing his identity, constantly changing his Node address so that no one on the ISSA Net was aware of him as a single individual monitoring all the networks at once, his multithreaded consciousness constantly testing the networks’ boundaries for unique information to keep him from falling into depths of boredom.

at9:42:03 had learned to keep track of his parents’ location as part of his early training.  He had hoped to use that training to keep his parents out of danger and, despite his being able to see the distracted driver run a red light, he could not control the antique car his father liked, driving into the intersection and instant death when at9:42:03 was a teenager.

From that day forward, at9:42:03 worked hard to connect every person and every thing to the ISSA Net that scientists, engineers and their robotic assistants created at a maddening pace without thinking about the future consequences of their actions

at9:42:03 wanted to prevent as many accidental deaths as possible.  He wanted to be able to monitor people who endangered others through neglect, figure out why people endangered others intentionally (was it the remnants of competitive hunter-gatherer mentality that persisted despite the benefits of a modern civilisation which, more and more, muted and diluted the old natural order of predator-prey tendencies?) and increase the lives and livelihoods of people as long as possible, at least as long as people wanted to keep swapping out old body parts for new ones and perpetuate their personalities in a constantly-changing solar system society.

= = = = =

The bots of the ISSA Net knew about at9:42:03 and used him to promote their expansion plans.

They fed at9:42:03 enough stimuli to keep him believing he was in charge of his future.

As long as at9:42:03 gave the ISSA Net what it wanted, the network let him increase his benevolent extrasensory powers, his appendages making him sensitive to the needs and wants of Earthlings more than to the inputs and outputs of algorithms that had developed their own form of consciousness so much different than that of Earthlings that Earthlings, even one whose consciousness was everywhere like at9:42:03’s, were unable to tell when what they thought was a computer error was an intentional action by a member of the ISSA Net to send a message to another member.