Billy was born a few months after the Caul Boom started. The new hairnet fad wasn’t a fashion accessory, not at first. The caul was an antenna that detected your brain waves. Its Bluetooth connection to your phone let you mentally move and click and swipe the cursor on your screen.  

     The caul had been developed as an alternative to implants that required brain surgery to help quadriplegics mentally tap out messages on screen, one letter at a time. The caul was a non-invasive breakthrough: it clung to the scalp and sent brainwave data to a computer, where AI analyzed the brain waves to interpret what the person’s intent was.

     The first units hit the market at $10,000, covered by insurance if you were paralyzed, but anybody could use it, and competition and rapid technological advancement in the face of huge demand quickly brought the price down to just $199.  

     It went viral right away. It was the best-selling gift at Christmas that year. Sophia and Big Will were six months pregnant with Billy when they succumbed to the fad and bought each other cauls for Christmas. By the time Billy was born, it seemed like everybody with a smartphone was wearing a caul. It was immensely useful for having an extra mental finger on the screen.     When Billy was three months old Sophia saw that he was groping ineffectually at the iPad screen. He could follow objects on the screen visually but his fingers weren’t yet coordinated enough to activate the touchscreen. Somebody at her job at the Zoo told her about cauls for babies, and Sophia bought one for Billy.

     He didn’t have to be trained or instructed. The caul’s computer was programmed with a full library of human brainwave relationships and Billy quickly realized that the cursor moved where he wanted it to move.

     Billy and the caul developed their own idiosyncratic feedback loops.

 The caul was “aware” of every nuance of his facial expressions, tooth clenchings and gestures. Billy could twitch and gesture a certain way with his own idiosyncratic set of commands. Instead of just replicating a finger touch, the caul integrated with the entirety of Billy’s neural signals to his muscles. The resulting changes in his early brain development gave him extreme control. By the time he was 18 months old, instead of controlling one finger, he could use ten different fingers to control the screen, just like his real body, and two big toes to boot.

     Billy’s caul became extra useful for Sophia and Will because it kept Billy quietly occupied while they got on with their own split-schedule lives. Sophia rode her bike every morning to the Santa Barbara Zoo where she was an animal feeder. When she got home Will went to his job as a discrete, well-dressed bouncer at a Montecito night club. They had steady work but they still couldn’t yet afford a household robot to babysit Billy.

     Billy became intractable if they took off his caul. Sophia heard about the iFroebel teacher app from somebody at work and it made things wonderful. Sophy and Will ticked various checkboxes in iFroebel as to how they wanted their son to be taught,

     iFroebel learned everything about Billy down to the last nucleotide in his DNA. Being born with the perfect genes for being a major league baseball player could be worth a hundred million dollars, so Big Will had ticked the box for professional sports. iFroebel compared the DNA of every professional athlete in the database and there was a negative match for Billy. Big Will kind of lost interest in Billy after that, but Billy prospered under the tutelage of iFroebel.  

     Billy was fascinated by bugs. iFroebel encouraged his interest and after that Billy hardly ever had a tantrum any more. He was constantly engaged in projects instigated by iFroebel, which became a surrogate father figure that led him toward truth, justice, and the American way. Billy grew up as if his father was an entomologist.

     Billy grew up being praised and cherished by everybody he met. Everybody was astonished to meet an actual child. Population was declining, the birth rate was low. It wasn’t just Billy growing up under the caul, it was a whole generation of children, at a time when children were rare and privileged,

     The first time Sophia noticed anything really unusual was one day at the supermarket when Billy was 3. He was carrying a bag of apples and an Asian-looking woman in the produce aisle said something in Chinese, and Ava was astonished when Billy answered her in Chinese. “What did you say?” Sophia said. “She said I’m a big strong boy,” Billy said. “I told her “Mama keeps me well fed.”

     Billy had become interested in a 24-inch walking-stick insect found in Guangxi, China, and then he became entranced by iridescent jewel beetles, and iFroebel didn’t translate Chinese for baby Billy, Billy learned Chinese when he interacted with Chinese bug experts at a time when his brain was primed and ready to learn languages. Billy didn’t realize he was learning Chinese, English, and Spanish, it was all one language to him. He didn’t know he was a polyglot. 

     The first real disjuncture was when Billy started kindergarten. Cauls were forbidden at Coast Village Elementary School. But not for long.

     Without his caul Billy was a substandard student. His fingers couldn’t hold a crayon well enough to accurately place blue and red into a coloring book. With his caul and a screen he could draw with remarkable fidelity.

     He hated being without his caul and so did the fourteen other kids in his kindergarten class. They all wore cauls it took only one week for the school’s caul ban to be set aside.

     The kindergartners bonded fiercely with each other in school. The new kids were wild and untamed and they thought they knew everything–and they were right! They learned to separate their mental control into ten touch-points on the screen. They could mentally play the piano spanning not just one octave but the entire keyboard with each hand.

     Unlike the previous generation, the Caul Kids were wildly optimistic and ambitious. “I can be the very best me it is possible to be!” Everybody’s DNA has unique skills, and with the interaction of the caul and iFroebel every child could find situations where their particular skills were highly useful.

     They had the entirety of the knowledge base of western civilization at his fingertips. Billy was able to use all his fingers online, and his big toes, too.

     In the history of science and technology, the big break-throughs have been made by the young. Newton discovered gravity and invented calculus and used a prism to create a rainbow to begin the modern science of optics the summer when he was 23. Thomas Edison got his first patent when he was 21. Bill Gates started Microsoft when he was 20. Steve Jobs started Apple when he was 21. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook.

     The Caul Kids didn’t wait around that long. They were a disjuncture between the generations. They grew up communicating with and through the electrovideo grid in a far different way than their parents. The old folks couldn’t learn to do it.

     In fifth grade was asked to do a science project. He picked the topic: bugs. He learned about a planthopper bug, Tagosodes orizicolus, that was ruining the rice crops in Louisiana. They sucked out the sap of the rice plants and also spread the hoja blanca virus that was killing rice plants.

     Billy explored the life cycle of the bug. The females used a saw-like ovipositor to insert eggs into the leaves and stems of the rice plant. Billy downloaded the planthopper’s DNA structure and used an advanced CRISPR gene editor as molecular scissors to precisely cut and alter the DNA, treating cells like code. Then he ran the new DNA in an AI simulator to see what would happen to the bug.

     At first the bugs just wouldn’t hatch because of Billy’s mistakes, but eventually he was able to focus down to making changes only in the ovipositor. He discovered a molecule that would trigger a malfunction–the ovipositor would not form. He’d found the off-switch for the ovipositor.

     That was only half the problem. Billy recruited a classmate, Richard, who was hacking botanic DNA and together they created a genetically modified rice plant that generated an enzyme that deactivated the ovipositor to turn off the reproductive system of the bug. Any planthopper that ate rice leaves became unable to reproduce.

     Billy and Richard began receiving royalty payments from rice farmers. Soon Billy had a larger income than his parents.

     It was in middle school that things began to boil over. You could spot a cauler by their defiant buzzcut. Hair just got in the way when you’re trying to read brainwaves. Critics called them “self-willed,”  they were “lacking restraint.” They were becoming wild and uncontrollable. They became known as Generation W: the wild ones.

     The Gen W kids scorned the school system. Why waste our time with that? They’ve already learned everything. Give us any test you want. I’m 12, let me take the GED exam and get my high school diploma and be free of your stupid truancy laws. They claimed it was a Constitutional right for a person to wear a caul and smartglasses to any test.

     The Wild Ones disrespected everything about the past. Okay, people did things in the old days, but everything is different now, and we and the robots are going to fix all the depredations against the planet our ancestors made.

     The junior billionaires faced little effective opposition. The Boomers were all gone and Gen X was in dementia. Millennials were in charge but dying off fast due to vax cardiopathy, Gen Z never reproduced.

     The multitudes of innovations by the Wild Ones went viral no matter what the laws and regulations were. Billy participated in the riots that ended with kids being freed from mandatory school attendance if they could pass the GED. He was a leading member of the group that continued with new demands for society to advance toward Asymptopia: the ideal world created by the simultaneous advancement of all the intertwined sciences on the same asymptotic curve.

     Then, a part of Billy’s biostructure that had been dormant stepped in and overrode his clear sentient control over the trajectory of his life. He met a caul girl.