The air in the sunroom always smelled faintly of burnt plastic and the acrid vapour of melting soldering wire.

Graydon sat cross-legged on the floor, a cracked datapad balanced carefully on his knees. His tiny hands hesitantly hovered over the keyboard, his body was taut with curiosity. Graydon was occupied with a children’s learning app that guided him through loops and basic logic of programming disguised as a game.

A few meters behind him, his father sat hunched over an old circuit board with a soldering iron in hand. A huge magnifier was clamped to the dinner table which once again doubled as his workbench. He was fixing something again. Some old device, a relic, the kind of thing most people had long replaced.

„They want you to forget how things work,“ he said, not looking up. „Easier to sell you the new thing if the old one seems like magic.“

Graydon tilted his head at the screen. „What’s this one?“ he asked, pointing at a tangle of symbols he didn’t yet understand.

His father wiped his hands on an old kitchen towel and walked over to join his son. He looked over Graydon’s shoulder. „That’s a conditional loop. It checks if something’s true before it does anything next. Like asking a question before taking a step.“

He tapped Graydon’s temple lightly with the back of his hand. „Same rule applies up here. Good coders always ask the right questions first.“

Graydon nodded and smiled. Small but sincere. „Can I try writing one?“

His father grinned. „Of course you can. That little screen taught me more than half the people I’ve worked with.“

Just then, Graydon’s mother appeared in the doorway, arms folded, lips forming a line as she scanned the room. Her gaze moved from the overflowing baskets spilling wires to the half-disassembled housing unit on the dining table-turned-workbench.

„Let me guess: Another obsolete interface box you ‚rescued‘ from the recycling centre?“ she inquired, arching an eyebrow.

„It’s not obsolete if you can fix it,“ he replied without missing a beat. „At least this thing remembers a time when you didn’t need a license just to power something on.”

„And clearly, the floor is helping with that process?“ she added, stepping carefully over a pile of tangled wire.

„Better than learning how to iron curtains,“ her husband muttered, adjusting a micro resistor on the board.

She rolled her eyes but smiled all the same. „At least curtains don’t try to reroute your biometrics while you sleep.“

She stepped over a coil of wires and made her way to Graydon, brushing a hand gently over his shoulder, then tousling his thick dark hair with the same same practiced ease she used to smooth shirts and straighten lampshades.

Her gaze lingered on Graydon’s screen. „Is that the program I brought home?“

He nodded.

She smiled, brushing an invisible thread from his sleeve. „Well… at least one of you likes things that follow order.“

Graydon straightened unconsciously, fingers already moving to test what he’d just learned. His loop compiled cleanly, the cursor blinking at him like approval.

His mother turned to go and stopped in the doorway before leaving. She looked over at Graydon. “Sweetheart, if your father starts telling you to program your own AI, come get me first, okay?”