The Autists: Brigitte (Speculative Fiction Modern Parables) / Speculative Fiction Modern Parables (ePub)

The Autists had failed as an "evolved" race.

While they could out-think and out-strategise, and out-everything the older Homo Saps, their own calculations showed that their race of Homo Transire only had a couple of generations at most before they were terminal. No new savants, no new super-empaths, only dead-end mediocrity.

How could such brilliant minds get it so wrong?

Brigitte was the Founder's only savant offspring and even her own children were happier to just live mundane normal lives with average grades in school and only aspire to get college degree, a house, a car for each of them, and a mountain of debt. Watch TV, consume fast food, be average.

No breakthough research, no soul-inspiring artwork.

Her own children, now grown, couldn't understand her any better. She could empathize their feelings from anywhere on the planet. While they had a hard time empathizing with their pets, let alone their own growing children.

Mundanity had struck back - with a vengeance.

She was looking for someone who could tell her why - or be one of the last few of her race on this mudball called Earth.

Excerpt:

They'd run the calculations thousands of times, with millions of permutations. The best math minds on the planet. And they all agreed. Homo Transire was dying out.

Terminal. That's when your offspring aren't useful anymore. Not that we didn't love them. But they didn't understand us. They couldn't. We were wired completely different.

Once my children were on their own, busy making me a grandmother, I got back to work. Started collecting new datasets, checking for new equations, something we had to have missed.

For all the work we'd done in finding and matching the most brilliant among us as mates for the others - none of these 2nd and 3rd generations turned out to be anything hardly better than average. Sure, there were some pretty bright kids in all that. Beautiful babies. Talented in their cribs. But once they got past 7 or 8, all that talent started showing limits. Kids who were progidies as babes couldn't draw or play music any better than their peers of that same age.

It didn't matter what school or who the teachers were. Or what books or computer programs. No amount of money thrown at them produced any better results that the "free" public schools we all paid for.

And I talked to myself as I drove this back gravel road which my GPS said was the fastest route to the remote research station out in this Gawd-forsaken Flyover Country.

I could see putting our campuses out in the suburbs. But dust and gravel roads weren't designed to be driven with any speed - not unless you wanted to...

Oh no. No, no, no. NO NO NO.

The car swerved and I was forced to slow down, cresting to a stop on the top of a hill. Over into a grassy entrance to some farmer's field.

Sure, now the "low air pressure" light and tacky dinging started. I had one, if not two flats on this thing.

My bad luck was holding. No bars on my cel.

And no empath within sending distance.

So I rested my head against my steering wheel and swore against the ancient gods in alphabetical order (using the Greek alphabet, of course.)

And right before I could muster up my courage to face the inevitable, a shadow flooded across my window and a rap on it startled me into double-checking the locks everywhere. There was no face behind that glare into my auto-tinting windows. Yet rolling them down could be perhaps the last thing I'd remember.

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