Throwback Thursday: ‘Chip Runner’ by Robert Silverberg

He was fifteen and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separately — they were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companies — and separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-grey and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were grey too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.
 
The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His IQ was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasn’t anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.

“So you’re planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me,” I began. The usual let’s-build-a-relationship procedure.

He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. “Is that your standard opening? ‘Tell me all about your favourite hobby, my boy’? If you don’t mind, I’d rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. You’re supposed to ask me about my eating habits.”