Headcanon. Talking Dictionary. She came out of Africa as one of Earth’s first Reality Engineers. It was not easy, but the Saharan Silicon Valley had spawned a whole raft of reality hackers.
Navigating past the prejudice was like sledding down a hill made of razor blades, but she had poetry and stories to blunt the insistence that she was wrong.
Hand a bigot and translation matrix disguised as a haiku, and smile as their profanities fall from their lips as cherry blossom.
What are you? You are your own headcanon, and you must fire that cannon at the world. They called her Tenz, tall like a Masai, and dark like an Ethiopian. Smarter than a Turing, more erudite than a Dylan Thomas, funnier than a Mitch Hedberg. Hit them where it counted. Their Achille’s Heel was their arrogance – arrogance built atop gaps in knowledge.
She hacked a Vector Flower and turned it into a reiteration driven fractal matter generator that could pluck food out of the air.
She resequenced the masksquito they sent after her to deliver a CRISPR hack into her assailants that activated temporary sex changes for each of them.
When she stood on the stage and accepted her apprenticeship under Pent Andress in the first Terran Reality Engineer Cadre, she mentioned none of it. She thanked who she needed to thank, and she stepped away from the shadows. She had blown a hole in the side of the edifice, and her headcanon and the world for a good long moment matched the story she had been telling herself.