Human Hacked

CHAPTER 1The Human Years

My story didn't start in the cold sterile environment of a body mechanic's studio or doctor's office. It started while I was sitting in a dark basement on the west side of Detroit, Michigan, in the bedroom of my childhood home. I am the oldest of three boys. My father worked the third shift as a technician for the auto industry, and my mother cleaned houses during the day. There was a rule in my house: “Nobody in, nobody out when your dad's asleep and Mom's not home,” which left only my younger brothers as companions most of the time. The four-year age difference was too great a chasm to bridge in my youth, so I spent most of my time alone. This living arrangement provided a place where I was left unsupervised to explore and satisfy my insatiable curiosity by whatever means I chose. If I wanted to understand electricity, I would take apart a piece of electronics, look at how all the pieces fit together, and then (most of the time) put it back together.

From a very young age my understanding was that the world is nothing more than a series of questions or puzzles and that knowledge was the ultimate power. If you looked behind the mundane outer package, you got to really see what made it function and what made it run. The relentless pursuit of knowledge became an obsession; I always wanted to understand the inner workings of everything I saw. Gears, cogs, transistors, wires, capacitors—it didn't matter if it was electric or mechanical; I would dismantle, ...