0.34.0.1

Jack was not ADD - his ability to focus was not in question. With a minimum of relevant information Jack could grasp and recall the mitigating factors and consequences behind a precarious decision more quickly and adeptly than three men with a balance or even surplus of attention. It would be more appropriate to say that Jack was post-ADD, functionally unstuck in consciousness. Presented with an urgent scenario Jack’s field of awareness wrapped nimbly around the tangled constellation of advanced business topics at his disposal, and in this his active mental faculty became less and less about focus and more about the feverishly asymptotic pursuit of omniscience. Jack’s internal deliberation formed a fragile lattice-work of cogitation, both amazingly intricate and unfailingly brittle, from which he could be easily loosed by any sudden intrusion from the world - a new person, a door slam, a loud clap. His elaborate but hastily configured deck of neural connections then immediately fell, only to be rebuilt if the first card in the deck could be placed back in his hands, from which he could follow the still fresh connections back to the outer reaches of his previous mental diagram. Deprive him that first link, however, and Jack may as well have never started the conversation. Over-clocking the brain to produce such a complex process cost him the ability to log his mental activity; he lacked any ability to retrace the steps of his consciousness, to recall what thoughts had passed through his head only five seconds prior, to know with any certainty how much time had just transpired and whether time even worked like that. Without his spigot constantly flashing the current topic of discussion Jack might forget that he’d ever attended business school or that he’d ever owned a flashing spigot. His very vocabulary might leak out completely and leave him devoid of words, dribbling meaninglessly onto his soiled collar.