Chapter 2 — Patterns Beneath the Skin

Chapter 2 — Patterns Beneath the Skin

I was ten years old the day the cast came off. The doctors called it remarkable. My father called it luck. I called it — inevitable.

But the true healing wasn't the bone. It was something quieter, deeper, and still unfolding.

The human body, in its simplest terms, is a network of cells: self-repairing, self-replicating. Injuries trigger complex chains of chemical signals — cytokines, growth factors, white blood cells — rushing to the site like a well-rehearsed emergency crew. But that crew has limits. Mistakes. Weaknesses.

Mine didn't. My cells had corrected themselves with such precision it felt less like healing and more like… rewriting. Not just fixing damage, but improving the blueprint. Even the callus, the usual scar of a broken bone, was absent. The tissue was indistinguishable from untouched bone. Stronger, smoother. As though the break had never happened.

When school resumed, the world expected me to return to normal. I pretended. But I no longer saw things the way I had before.

I noticed the smallest cracks in the world's design. A bird's wingbeat slightly off-rhythm before rain. The microtremble in a teacher's voice when she was lying. The delay between a light switch's click and the bulb's glow. My senses didn't feel stronger, only… clearer. As if something had fine-tuned the settings.

At first, I thought I was imagining it. Then I began to test it.

One evening, curiosity drew me to a book lying on the living room shelf: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I didn't fully grasp it on the first read. But the idea lingered: that life wasn't a grand design, but rather the result of self-replicating molecules optimizing their survival over billions of years. Genes — not souls, not fate — wrote the rules.

It explained something I had only begun to suspect: my body was following a different rulebook. A rewrite from the ground up. But not magic. Logic. Biology. Evolution, only… accelerated.

I began to borrow more books from the library, moving from biology to physics, from human anatomy to chemistry.

Each one revealed another piece of the puzzle.

And the more I read, the more I understood — my mind wasn't just remembering these facts, it was reorganizing them. Cross-referencing. Testing them against real-world observation.

I wasn't smarter because of some innate genius. I was simply… unburdened by human inefficiency. My brain was beginning to treat information like a living organism: evolving it, refining it, discarding what was flawed.

By winter, I had also noticed a shift in my emotional responses. The human brain uses chemical messengers — dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine — to control mood, desire, fear, and pleasure. But I could feel those signals growing quieter, as if their influence had lessened. Not gone, only muted.

This didn't mean I couldn't feel. But the emotions arrived slower, and left faster. Detached, like a distant observer. As though a filter had been placed between me and the world.

It wasn't long before I developed the habit of sitting in silence, staring at objects and mapping their structure in my mind. Not just their shape — but how they fit into the world. How light struck them. How sound bent around them. How their molecules vibrated, even though I couldn't yet see them.

The world had become data.

I was still only ten years old.

But age, I realized, was just another human measurement. My growth wasn't following the same path. Not anymore.

I didn't yet know the end of this path. But I could feel the direction: forward.