Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. He's infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic-as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. "I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't decided yet, actually," he explains. As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. He's already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. Nick is building a universe on his computer. Autism-and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome-is surging among the children of Silicon Valley.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |