“Flowers for Algernon? That story happens all the time, without the involvement of anything other than accident and wonder. But the effect doesn’t fade for the reasons outlined there — because it isn’t caused by, for example, a drug. It’s a developmental response. We call it fastlearning, and it can happen as a result of crisis or trauma or for causes that require sudden and momentous leaps of intelligence. It’s one of the many hidden developmental conservations your cultures will neither admit nor allow. In fact, they respond to most of them with combat or derision.”

— an a i