About the book: 2007 / The story "Understanding", first published in Asimov's, is dedicated to global problems - superintelligence and the Internet as an extension of the human mind. Its obvious literary source is Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon. You might think that Chan, after reading the text, wondered: “What would happen to the main character if he got smarter and smarter and this process was endless?” The answer is the emergence of a superintelligent hero. It is interesting to compare Greg Egan’s interpretation of a similar problem in the story “Reasons for Happiness”: both writers depict the distant future, when the treatment of neurological diseases leads to unpredictable consequences.