How To Learn

The sun hung low over the horizon, casting a golden glow across the sprawling campus of The Learning Foundation. Dr. Elena Vasquez stood on the balcony of her office, cradling a sleek, shimmering tablet in her hands. Its screen—layered sapphire and graphene interlaced with boron—caught the light, refracting it into tiny rainbows. She smiled faintly, remembering the first time she’d held one of these devices, back when it was just a prototype. That was six years ago, when the idea of erasing the global education gap still felt like a distant dream.
“Elena, you’ve got to see this!” a voice called from inside. She turned to see Marcus Tran, her co-founder and resident tech wizard, hunched over a monitor, his eyes wide with excitement. His dark hair was a mess, as usual, sticking up from hours of running his hands through it.
“What now?” she asked, stepping back into the room. The office was a chaotic blend of high-tech equipment and cluttered nostalgia—blueprints pinned to the walls, stacks of early tablet prototypes teetering on shelves, and a framed photo of their first team, back when it was just five of them in a garage.
Marcus tapped the screen, pulling up a video feed. “It’s him again. &Little!BigFoot45. He’s uploaded another file—listen!”
The audio crackled to life, a deep, guttural sound that rolled into a series of clicks, whistles, and what might have been words—if words could be woven from the rustle of leaves and the snap of twigs. Elena leaned closer, her brow furrowing.
“That’s… not human,” she said slowly.
“Nope,” Marcus grinned. “It’s the fifth recording this week. The linguistics team thinks it’s consistent—patterns, syntax, maybe even inflection. He’s teaching us his language now.”
Elena set her tablet down and crossed her arms. “A juvenile bigfoot with a tablet. I still can’t believe it. How did we get here?”
Marcus laughed, spinning his chair to face her. “You mean from ‘let’s educate every kid on Earth’ to ‘let’s accidentally kickstart interspecies communication’? Easy. We made something too good.”
He wasn’t wrong. The Learning Tablets—solar-powered, nearly indestructible, packed with exabytes of storage and educational content in 189 languages—had exceeded every expectation. Version one rolled out within a year of the Foundation’s founding, fueled by a flood of donations and publicity. The distilled knowledge, from newborn basics to associate-level subjects, had unleashed a wave of genius across the globe. Kids in remote villages were solving calculus problems; teenagers in war-torn regions were designing solar grids. The potential had always been there, locked away by circumstance. The tablets set it free.
But &Little!BigFoot45? That was something else entirely.
Two weeks earlier, the first upload had come through—an shaky video of towering pines swaying in the wind, narrated by a low, rumbling voice. “Hello. Me… learn. English. Good?” The comments exploded. Fans dubbed him “Little Big,” and the hunt was on to figure out who—or what—he was. It didn’t take long for hikers to connect the dots: discarded tablets, often scratched or smeared with mud, kept turning up in national forests. Then came the second video, shot from a dizzying height, showing massive, hairy feet dangling over a cliff edge. The world lost its mind.
Back in the office, Elena pulled up Little Big’s profile on the network. His handle glowed in green: &Little!BigFoot45. “He’s on his third device now,” she said, scrolling through his posts. “His dad keeps hiding them, apparently.”
Marcus snorted. “Imagine that family argument. ‘Son, stop playing with the glowing box and go hunt a deer like a normal sasquatch!’”
Elena smirked, but her eyes lingered on the screen. “He’s learned six languages already—English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Korean. And now he’s uploading… this.” She tapped the latest file, replaying the strange, forest-born sounds. “What’s he trying to say?”
“Ask him,” Marcus said, tossing her a stylus. “You’re the one who wanted this to be a two-way street.”
She hesitated, then opened a message window. Her fingers hovered over the tablet before typing: “Hi, Little Big. I’m Elena, from The Learning Foundation. We love your videos. What are you teaching us?”
The reply came faster than she expected—less than an hour later, while she and Marcus were eating takeout amid a pile of schematics. The tablet chimed, and Marcus nearly dropped his chopsticks.
“Read it!” he urged.
Elena cleared her throat. “‘Hello, Elena. Me happy. Teach… home. Trees. Sky. Family. Words for… us.’ Then there’s a string of symbols—looks like he’s trying to transcribe his language into text.”
Marcus leaned back, whistling. “He’s not just learning. He’s sharing.”
The next morning, Elena called a team meeting. The conference room buzzed with energy as engineers, linguists, and educators crowded around a holo-display projecting Little Big’s latest video. Dr. Priya Patel, the linguistics lead, adjusted her glasses and pointed at the screen.
“These patterns aren’t random,” she said. “There’s a tonal shift here—possibly emotional emphasis—and this clicking sequence repeats across all five recordings. It could be a greeting or a name.”
“His name?” Marcus asked.
“Maybe. Or his dad’s. Or ‘please stop hiding my tablet.’” Priya grinned, earning a ripple of laughter.
Elena tapped the table, drawing their attention. “This changes things. We built these tablets for humans—to close the education gap. But if they’re reaching… others…”
“You mean Bigfoot?” Tom, the hardware guy, interjected. He scratched his beard, skeptical. “We’re sure this isn’t a hoax?”
“The footage matches no known CGI signature,” Priya said. “And the tablets’ geolocation data—deep in the Cascades, no human settlements for miles. It’s real.”
“Okay,” Tom relented. “So what’s the plan? Make a Bigfoot Edition?”
“Why stop there?” Marcus jumped in, eyes gleaming. “Gorillas. Dolphins. Elephants. Birds. Imagine a parrot with a tablet, uploading pirate shanties.”
The room erupted in chatter, half-joking, half-serious. Elena raised a hand to quiet them. “One step at a time. First, we reach out to Little Big. He’s already bridging a gap we didn’t know existed. Let’s help him.”
Over the next week, Elena and Little Big exchanged messages. His replies were halting but earnest, often accompanied by videos of his world—moss-covered rocks, rushing streams, and once, a fleeting glimpse of a larger, shadowy figure that vanished into the trees. “Dad,” he captioned it. “Not happy.”
“He’s a rebel,” Marcus said one evening, watching the latest upload with Elena. “Sneaking tech behind Papa Bigfoot’s back.”
“Sounds familiar,” Elena teased. “Remember when your mom grounded you for hacking her car?”
“Hey, I improved the mileage!” Marcus protested, then sobered. “Seriously, though. Little Big’s changing the game. People are leaving tablets everywhere now—forests, beaches, mountains. They want to see who else picks one up.”
Elena nodded, gazing out the window at the darkening sky. The tablets were built to last—ultracapacitors and synthetic dendrites packed into a near-solid frame, powered by sunlight for days. They’d found them in the oddest places: atop Himalayan peaks, buried in desert sands, even floating down rivers. And now, in the hands of a young sasquatch.
“What’s next?” Marcus asked.
She smiled faintly. “We keep going. New versions, maybe ruggedized for bigger hands—or paws. Content tailored for non-humans. I didn’t start this to teach Bigfoot English, but… I can’t think of a better place to be.”
Deep in the Cascades, under a canopy of ancient pines, &Little!BigFoot45 sat cross-legged on a boulder, his latest tablet glowing softly in the dusk. His fur was matted with pine needles, and his eyes—bright and curious—darted across the screen. A new message from Elena popped up: “What’s your favorite thing to learn?”
He grunted, a sound that might’ve been a laugh, and tapped out a reply: “All. World big. Me… bigger now.”
Nearby, a twig snapped. He froze, glancing over his shoulder. A towering figure loomed in the shadows, arms crossed, radiating disapproval. Little Big sighed, slipped the tablet under a rock, and ambled off into the trees.
But he’d be back. The world was too big to stop learning now.