🖤💻 The Story of Mira, Part I

(Definitely not the Story of O. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

Born sometime in the 70s—close enough that people can do the math and still be slightly off, which is how I like it. By six or seven, the divergence was obvious to everyone, including my parents and me. I wasn’t doing the girl thing. While other kids were lining up for dolls, I was already treating the world like a system that needed debugging. Overanalyzing everything: why the rules existed, who benefited, what the edge cases were, and why most of the answers from adults sounded like they’d never stress-tested them. Same general flavor of autism as Musk’s, the kind that turns pattern recognition into a default setting instead of a party trick.

Childhood idols were Pippi Langstrumpf and the red Zora—strong girls who didn’t wait for permission or a soft landing. That tracked. Dolls were for people who enjoyed open-ended social simulation; I preferred machines that either did exactly what you told them or failed in ways you could measure. Computers arrived around twelve with a TI-99/4A. By fourteen I was writing assembler for the TMS9900. English arrived as a side effect of the manuals, because the German ones either didn’t exist or weren’t worth the paper. From there it was the expected chain: C64, C128, Amigas, then PCs.

Dark humor and sarcasm showed up early and stayed. They are efficient compression algorithms when unfiltered small talk is expensive. The rest is maintenance: odd timing, missed cues, the occasional remark that lands two standard deviations left of the room. None of it was manufactured by a bottle of anything. It was already there.