A six-year-old girl named Chelle put two hands on my back and shoved me toward the water station on a blazing valley morning. "It'll be fun," she said. This was her Field Day on the second to last Friday of the school year, so the "fun" was for her, not for a substitute teacher she'd only known for a day. By her direction, I weaved past dozens of kids and (probably) frowning adults, to the dripping and dumping water station. I went through what felt like a localized island rain shower, then found myself smiling. When I returned to my standing area behind the disorganized columns of kids, she was there laughing and jumping around, "See, you got soaked!"
The week before field day, I had been spending hour-long stretches inside Google Docs forging classified document templates for a sub-command in my upcoming novel: TS // SI // ULTRAVIOLET, ORCON, NOFORN, all the signals of government informational gatekeeping.
This part of the novel is about an intelligence sub-command that encounters something it has no working category for and chooses, reflexively, to label it a Chinese psychological operation. Not because that's what it is, but because that is more easily sortable. The bureaucracy needs the artifact to be a PSYOP product because the alternative— that there are categories of being it has no working definition for, that non-extraterrestrial civilization is a phrase that excludes a thing the institution has not yet admitted exists— compromises its authority.
I was building those containers all month. Then I walked across the street and a six-year-old shoved me under a dump bucket to get soaked.
—
For nearly four hours I stood in the sun. That wasn't all I was doing though. There was considerable fog of function in the chaos of the morning. First grade was the assignment today, and because they are so young, leaving them alone for a minute is a risk. Multiply that by ten when you factor in rotating stations, keeping track of accountability, parents present with the ability to take their child home at any time, and dealing with water and bathroom breaks. This was easily the most difficult day of subbing I've ever signed up for. Another teacher said I was brave to show up on such a long and hectic day. Escorting the little ones around in a line, constantly counting heads, waiting for them to go to the bathroom, and keeping them moving, it was First BCT (Basic Cadet Training) Flight Command again.
After my meager fifteen minute lunch I was sufficiently blackened and completely roasted. Even keeping my eyes open was an active task. But then it was time to collect my remaining students. By twelve thirty most of the class had gone home early with their parents.
I was left with two first-grade boys, Walter and Logan, who treated my exhaustion as a tactical advantage. This was a typical first grade classroom with knee-high desks, colorful learning aids and high-energy motivational posters smiling at kid level. There were also a lot of games. Seeing as the teacher was gone and they were the only two left, they immediately hit the shelves. Logan asked me, "What are you gonna do?"
"Probably read my book," I responded.
"Oh, we can build a house," he said.
Walter chimed in, "It's not so fun without everyone here. But we can get the dinosaurs. Hey, what's down there?" He pointed at my feet.
I flinched when I noticed a figure of a large spider.
Walter noted my reaction, then went to Logan, "I scared him." The games had begun. The next two hours was ruthless playtime, that admittedly I resisted at first. I had near zero enthusiasm to play with two COVID-born kids. But they kept coming over, showing me their computer, this toy, how the drew this monster, showing me their books. If I didn't give them enough attention, they began wrestling or bouncing around on yoga balls. Eventually I participated. I passed on my secret technique for making aerodynamically impressive paper planes. Walter watched attentively, then improved the design stability with tissues and glue. His paper plane engineering design. Then they got their hands on yardsticks. A swordfighting match began. I cautioned them to be careful between slow feints, blocks, and thrusts.
Unexpectedly, a door knocked from across the hallway. In an instant, the yardstick swords resumed their ordinary measuring tool form. This was without any instruction or coaching from me. The knocker was another student (fortunately). After he left, both boys looked at the door, looked at me, and waited. The swords reappeared.
Children intuitively understand that the world has two layers— the public rulebook and the private agreement. Fluency develops between these worlds when they poke the edges of what behavior is tolerable under certain conditions. As adults, we default to regulation for survival, approval, and status. Private agreement is restricted to known allies or dreams. The waking world is always functionally responsible, but without adaptation or exploratory testing. We forget to play.
—
Two years ago I almost replaced my own novel.
The original Cereus & Limnic released in 2021. I drafted it in 2019 and 2020 — pre-AI, pre-commercial aspirations, written at the pace it wanted to be written. The process was patient and wandering. And the result was a novel that was difficult to classify and even tougher to sell. This was a frustration that I thought time could help me solve.
So three years later I retooled the manuscript. In 2024 the AI gold rush hit indie publishing and I was all in. The goal was tighter prose, faster openings, cleaner hooks and an overall easier reading experience for more mainstream appeal.
I rewrote the entire thing in about two months and called it Cereus & Limnic: Second Evolution. By craft metrics it was better: the sentences were shorter; pacing made more fluid.
But after a muted launch and cover redesign, I decided I hated it. The reason why was embarrassing. I had reenacted on myself the exact dynamic the novel was warning about: I let the institution dictate my output. Cogs deform to fit machines. People deform to fit categories. The book that was supposed to be a critique of institutional frailty had been quietly rewritten to satisfy the institution of publishing. I had built a container around my own book and then crawled into it.
Eventually, I pulled the rewrite. The original is the one I want people to read. It is rough at the sentence level in ways I would fix now, but it carries something the optimized version doesn't— the recognizable signature of a person working without a handler.
—
Walter glued a strip of tissue to his paper airplane to stabilize the flight path, because somewhere in his small head he had figured out that the tools an adult labels for one purpose are actually variables you can manipulate against gravity. His teacher, if she had been there, might have told him that glue is for worksheets and tissue is for noses. She would not have been wrong inside the box of accepted elementary education standard. But his actions meant he was willing to step outside of that box to explore a "what if."
That is the difference. Destructive misuse and creative repurposing look identical from a distance. From two feet away, with your attention actually engaged, they are obvious. The hard part is resisting the adult tendency for the safety of status quo or avoiding getting in trouble in some way, to stay close enough to tell them apart. Resistance to retreat into the smaller box is on occasion the more mature position.
Restriction is cheap. Engagement is expensive. Most adults— me included, on a tired enough day— pick the cheaper option and call it responsibility. Kids need boundaries, but they also need supervised play to discover their interests and gain first-hand experience with the world.
—
Online life rewards evaluation without tangible participation. It's nothing to post a hot take, how-to, or rant from the latest hate-read or watch.
Subbing in elementary school doesn't allow that. You've got to improvise, have courage to ask, assist, or at times look foolish in front of faculty and students.
On social media you watch the system, generate a take, and can abstractize everything into a brief post or video short. Then you close the tab.
Field day does not let you close the tab. A kid pushes you toward the water. A yardstick becomes a sword and then a yardstick again. You have no choice but to feel the friction of contradiction.
In Cereus & Limnic, I wrote about the concept of the barter market. It is a place where the ancient human practice of trade clashes with mid-21st century technology. There are sputtering buses, biohacked humans selling t-shirts next to farmers trading almonds among the cracked highways of the early 21st century, it is an image of how our modern world works; undergirded by tech-infrastructure that was once the stuff of sci-fi, yet run on pre-historic hardware.
The future does not arrive cleanly. It arrives as life unfolds a slow disjointed advance of time until what once was becomes unrecognizable. It is layered over the old world, and the people who live well inside the present are the ones who learn when to stay inside the box, when to break it open, and when to let two little hands push them toward the water.
—
Walter walked across the blacktop after dismissal. Logan was already standing with his older brother on the other side. He crossed the asphalt and hugged Logan. A perfect departure from protocol, 100% human.
