I had a fully autistic cousin, myself. Nathan. I’d met him only once, when we were both children. He was one of the lucky few who’d suffered no other congenital brain damage, and at the time he was still living with his parents in Adelaide. He’d shown me his computer, cataloguing its features exhaustively, sounding scarcely different from any other enthusiastic thirteen-year-old technophile with a new toy. But when he’d started demonstrating his favorite programs – stultifying solo card games, and bizarre memory quizzes and geometric puzzles that had looked more like arduous intelligence tests than anything I could think of as recreation – my sarcastic comments had gone right over his head. I’d stood there insulting him, ever more viciously, and he’d just gazed at the screen, and smiled. Not tolerant. Oblivious.

I’d spent three hours interviewing Rourke in his small flat; VA had no “central office”, in Manchester or anywhere else. There were members in forty-seven countries – almost a thousand people, worldwide – but only Rourke had been willing to speak to me, and only because it was his job.

He was not fully autistic, of course. But he’d shown me his brain scans.

I replayed the raw footage.

“Do you see this small lesion in the left frontal lobe?” There was a tiny dark space, a minuscule gap in the gray matter, above the pointer’s arrow. “Now compare it with the same region in a twenty-nine-year-old fully autistic male.” Another dark space, three or four times larger. “And here’s a non-autistic subject of the same age and sex.” No lesion at all. “The pathology isn’t always so obvious – the structure can be malformed, rather than visibly absent – but these examples make it clear that there’s a precise physical basis to our claims.”

The view tilted up from the notepad to his face. Witness manufactured a smooth transition from one rock-steady “camera angle” to another – just as it smoothed away saccades: the rapid darting movements of the eyeballs, restlessly scanning and re-scanning the scene even when the gaze was subjectively fixed.

I said, “No one would deny that you’ve suffered damage in the same part of the brain. But why not be thankful that it’s minor damage, and leave it at that? Why not count yourself lucky that you can still function in society, and get on with your life?”

“That’s a complicated question. For a start, it depends what you mean by ‘function.’”

“You can live outside of institutions. You can hold down skilled jobs.” Rourke’s main occupation was research assistant to an academic linguist – not exactly sheltered employment.