The Red Ring
The red ring was his enemy.
It was plastic, primary-colored, and perfectly circular. It was, in Aris's two-year-old opinion, an insult.
He was sitting on the plush beige carpet of the living room, a prisoner in a onesie. His new legs, which he'd only mastered coordinating six months prior, were splayed out in a clumsy 'V'. In front of him was the "activity toy": a yellow plastic cone with a series of colored rings.
He'd already done the math. The number of permutations for stacking the five rings was 120. He had tried every single one. He was, to put it mildly, bored out of his mind.
"All right, my little genius." Elara's voice, warm and melodic, pulled him from his stupor.
She sat on the floor opposite him, tucking her legs. She wore a simple grey t-shirt and yoga pants, her dark, wavy hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. To Aris, she was the primary operator of his universe, the source of food and warmth. She was also the source of the red ring.
"Let's try our colors again, okay?" she said, her brown eyes soft with the uncomplicated, baffling love she always aimed at him. "Can you find the... blue one?"
Aris stared at the rings. The pigment is reflecting light at approximately 475 nanometers. Yes, Elara, I can identify the blue one. I could also derive the relativistic Doppler effect for you, if I had the vocabulary and the fine motor skills to hold a pencil.
He picked up the blue ring.
"Good job!" she beamed, as if he'd just split the atom. "What a smart boy!"
Aris felt nothing. He dropped the ring onto the cone. Thunk.
"Okay, okay, now..." She paused, looking for a new challenge. "Can you stack them... from biggest to smallest?"
He'd done this. He'd also done smallest to biggest, alternating, and by spectral order. He picked up the large purple one. Then the green. Then the blue. Then the yellow. Then the small, offensive red one.
The tower was complete. It was stable. It was finished.
Elara clapped. "Perfect! You're... you're just so fast, Ari."
He saw it, then. The briefest flicker in her smile. It wasn't just pride. It was... confusion. A hint of that same "wrongness" he'd seen on Marcus's face. He was completing the tasks too quickly, too clinically. He wasn't playing. He was executing.
Error, his mind supplied. This is not the expected output.
He looked at the stable, perfect tower. He was bored. He was frustrated. He was a physicist trapped in a toddler's body. He wanted to experiment.
He pulled the rings off. He picked up the smallest one—the red ring—and painstakingly, with clumsy, pudgy fingers, placed it on the bottom. Then the yellow. Then the blue. His tongue stuck out in concentration—not because the task was hard, but because his hands were such blunt, unruly instruments.
He placed the final, largest ring on top.
The tower was a mess. It was an inverted pyramid. It was teetering, defying its own stability.
"Oh, sweetie, that's... that's a new way!" Elara said, her voice hesitant. "But it's going to fall. See? It's all wobbly."
Aris looked at his creation. A perfect, unstable system. He looked at his mother. And, without thinking, he stated the simple, obvious fact. His two-year-old lisp mangled the words.
"No. Center o' gwavity... too high. 'Un-'table."
Elara's hand, which had been reaching for the tower, froze.
She didn't move. Her smile didn't vanish; it just... stuck. Her head tilted, her brow pinching just slightly. She was no longer looking at "her baby." She was looking at him.
"What... what did you say, sweetie?" her voice was a thin, careful whisper.
He saw it. The look. The "human-looking-at-a-talking-dog" look. It was a system-glitch. It was confusion. It was wrong.
He felt a hot, sharp jolt of panic, the first social fear he'd felt in this new life. Abort. Abort!
He did the only "logical" thing a two-year-old could do. He broke the reality.
He drew back his chubby arm and, with a sudden, uncoordinated "RAAARGH!", he swiped the tower.
The plastic rings clattered across the hardwood floor.
The "weirdness" in Elara's face vanished, the tension breaking like a bubble. She blinked, and a wave of relieved laughter burst out of her.
"Oh, boom!" she laughed, falling back onto her hands. "It did fall down! You knocked it right over! What a silly boy! Are you a little monster? Raaargh!"
She lunged forward and buried her face in his neck, "attacking" him with a flurry of kisses. He shrieked—a genuine, surprised, sensory-overloaded shriek—and fell backward onto the carpet.
As she tickled him, her laughter now real and ringing, Aris logged the data.
Complex concepts = bad. Causes system freezes.
Loud noises and simple, chaotic destruction = good. Causes positive reinforcement.
He had to be simpler. He had to be... a kid. It was the hardest equation he'd ever had to solve.