BabyWorld

BabyWorld is a mystery, soft science fiction that explores the psychological dysfunction occurring in families suffering from untreated trauma. With its taboo-breaking subject matter, tempered by an almost children’s fairy tale-like style, it is written for a mature, literary audience.

Toronto, September 2067. Ten percent of babies born are SMARTED; physically, emotionally and sexually they grow at normal rates, but cognitively they develop so fast that by six years old they graduate university and enter the heavily-taxed workforce, thus supporting Canada’s high standard of living—the highest in an otherwise polluted, politically volatile and over-populated world…

Sinika Reichman is a nine-and-a-half-year-old lawyer having problems determining whether she is a child or an adult. When the case of a raped and murdered, non-smarted, five-year-old girl is outsourced to her firm, Sinika is put in charge of the prosecution. Partnered with twenty-five-year-old Nathan Towers, the office wunderkind, who is non-smarted and hates those who are, Sinika’s augmented abilities are put to the test as she skilfully dismisses one suspect after another. Her unregulated emotions become strained, however, as she encounters events she can’t handle and concepts she can’t process.

Only by venturing out to Adult Island (old Centre Island), where children are not allowed, does she, aided by her recluse of a grandfather, Jonathan The Second, and her spirit-like great-grandfather, Jonathan The First, discover the true culprit, expose the core secrets about her neo-Dickensian society, and reveal the source of her own anxieties and her family’s dysfunction.