He was nine and had a working vocabulary of maybe nine hundred words, sixty of which were not English and did not mean anything. At the dinner table he narrated in the cadence of grown men he had never met, every sentence pitched up at the end, and he laughed roughly three seconds before the joke, at a screen nobody else could see.

His mother took the tablet at seven and gave it back at 7:40, because the sound he made was not a tantrum, it was nearer to grief. During the ad auction that ran while he brushed his teeth, four companies bid against one another for his next four seconds, and the winner paid eight-tenths of a cent. In March he had wanted to be a marine biologist and had said so, unprompted, twice.