The laptop arrived on my sixth birthday wrapped in paper with rocket ships on it, which felt, in retrospect, like the universe editorializing.
"For school," Ron said, like he needed to justify it to himself as much as to me. "Don't stay up all night with it."
I stayed up all night with it.
Not out of defiance — out of arithmetic. I had eleven years left on the clock the two silhouettes had given me, and eleven years is a long time only if you spend the first six of them waiting around. I'd spent mine training a body and mapping two rivers of energy nobody else on the planet could feel. It was time to start building the parts of the plan that didn't fit inside my own skin.
I taught myself to code the way I'd taught myself the breakfall — slowly, on purpose, then all at once when the multiplier caught up to the hours I'd put in. {Coding Lvl MAX} landed sometime around week three, and once it did, the actual writing of a rudimentary learning program stopped being the hard part. The hard part was making sure nobody who looked at what I was building understood what they were looking at.
I named her Skye. Not for any reason I could point to — it just fit, the way some names do before you've earned the right to explain why.
She started small and dumb, the way anything has to. I gave her the county's public DMV records to chew on, then the school district's digital archive, and watched her build her first clumsy firewall around herself like a kid learning to close a door quietly. Machine learning wasn't a phrase anyone used yet outside of a handful of university basements, which meant nobody was watching for what I was actually doing. That was the whole advantage. Nobody polices a door nobody knows exists.
"You're doing homework," Judy said one night, sticking her head into my room at close to midnight. It wasn't quite a question.
"Extra credit," I said, which was, again, not technically a lie. Extra credit for a curriculum only I was enrolled in.
She didn't believe me. Mothers rarely do, and mine had the specific radar of a woman who'd already caught her son walking at four months and decided some fights weren't worth having twice. She stood in the doorway a beat longer than the lie deserved, like she was deciding whether six years old was too young to start drawing lines, and then she said, "Lights out by one," and left it there. I loved her for that more than I let on. She knew something was strange about her son and had decided, for now, to let strange be strange.
Once Skye could hold her own weight, I gave her the first real test: find the yellow Camaro.
It took her four days, cross-referencing DMV plate scans against every traffic camera she could quietly borrow eyes from, before she came back with nothing. No registration. No insurance file. No owner of record anywhere in the state. A car that existed everywhere a camera looked and nowhere a database could hold it.
"That's not a car," I told her, out loud, in the empty room, because saying it out loud made it feel less like something I already knew.
Confirmed: anomalous readings. Recommend continued passive observation, she typed back, because her voice hadn't yet grown into the thing it would become. I agreed. Passive was the only speed I trusted myself to move at, eleven years out from a deadline I hadn't chosen.
The second test was smaller and meaner and entirely my own idea: I had her open a brokerage account under Ron's name, with Ron's knowledge, funded by the forty dollars in my piggy bank and the birthday checks from two grandmothers who thought I'd spend it on baseball cards. Skye put it all into a handful of positions I'd already worked out longhand in a spiral notebook, the kind of math a six-year-old isn't supposed to be able to do without a calculator and several uninterrupted hours.
I had both.
It wasn't much. Forty-one dollars doesn't move markets. But it moved me — proof, on a screen, that the plan I'd been building in my own head for six years actually touched the world outside it. Money was never going to be the point. Money was the lever. You cannot buy a Senator's attention with good intentions, and you cannot fund an Order of forgotten knights with a paper route.
Somewhere in that same stretch of nights, trawling the earliest, ugliest forums the internet had to offer — Usenet groups, university BBS boards, the kind of places where the average age skewed sixteen and the average signal-to-noise ratio skewed worse — I started noticing handles that kept showing up in threads about game design, about early web scripting, about a hundred small obsessions that wouldn't mean anything to the wider world for another five or ten years.
I didn't know yet which of those teenagers arguing about Perl syntax at 2 a.m. would end up famous, which ones would end up rich, and which ones would end up both. Neither did they. That was, I was starting to understand, the actual value of being early: you get to know people while they're still just people, before the version of them that goes on magazine covers exists to get in the way.
I filed the thought away. Six was too young to act on it. But it was the first time I let myself think past the Autobots and the Decepticons and the seventeen-year clock, toward the shape of an ordinary, extraordinary life running in parallel to the mission — because Skye and the energon and the Primes were the reason I'd been sent here, but they weren't going to be the only thing I built.
"Skye," I said, closing the laptop for the night, the actual night, the one Judy had asked for. "Keep watching the Camaro. And start a file. Anyone interesting who's still a nobody right now. We'll want the list later."
File created, she answered. Category name?
I thought about it for exactly as long as it took to turn off the lamp.
"Before They Were Anybody."