“But by the time she was one year old, at the same time other kids were just starting to walk, she was reading the Wall Street Journal and Aviation Week & Space Technology. The first book she read wasn’t Nancy Drew or Power-puff Girls at six years old—it was Drexler’s Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery; Manufacturing, and Computation at thirteen months. The year after that, she was one of the contributors to Drexler’s updated edition.”

Cheryl paused, her eyes adopting a far-off look as if she was replaying all the many moments, pleasant and otherwise, in her memory. “We knew we couldn’t treat her like an ordinary child,” she went on. “By age six she was discussing weapons, theories, devices, and formulas that were making advisers to presidents sweat and four-star generals lick their lips. She’s been asked to teach nanotechnology at Cornell’s Duffield Hall, the engineering research facility my husband built—a nine-year-old professor of nanoengineering, teaching at her father’s school. Do you think she’d be scared to learn how many persons a plasma-yield war-head can kill, or that one of your NIRTSats can direct a two-thousand-pound bomb to hit its target within six inches? She’s already figured out how to build supercomputers the size of an amoeba and turn the Moon into a photonic energy source that will supply the entire Earth with energy for a millennium. She talks to herself about the energy requirements for teleportation while she plays with Barbie dolls. At first I was worried about her being taken seriously—now I’m worried about her talents going to waste or, worse, falling into the wrong hands.”

Cheryl looked up at Jon, then at Helen, and asked in a quiet voice, “Do you have children?” They shook their heads. “All you want for them is the best,” she went on. “You would give your own life to save theirs, sacrifice your own happiness to ensure their happiness. But what do you do if what your child is doing, the thing that makes her the happiest, might upset—or even destroy—your world? Do you let her have that experience?”

Her voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Sometimes when she’d fall off her bike or trip on the stairs or come down with a fever, I’d pray that the accident or illness would turn her back into a normal child,” she said sadly. “But, of course, it never did—in fact, I think it made her even more intelligent, as if the bacteria or viruses were millions of new brains talking to her, telling her more and more of the secrets of the universe.

“But you were a child genius too, Dr. Masters,” she said to Jon. “You understand what Kelsey’s going through. You had parents that encouraged you to think beyond your age, beyond the levels where others thought you should be. We chose you because you’ve gone through what Kelsey is just starting to experience. I think it was hard for you, breaking down all the institutional and bigotry barriers, but you did it. You can be much more than a partner to Kelsey—you can be a mentor, a guide. No one else in the United States can do that for her. Only you.”