Intelligence Embellishment

By: submission | July 23, 2026

Author: Mark Renney

It didn’t take us long, as a group, to work out that Jonathan had been fitted with an implant. It wasn’t that he’d changed, he was still our same infuriating friend. Unfocused and unreliable, Jonathan was the group’s party animal, the one who didn’t put in the work and who became frustrated and disappointed when we did.

Jonathan was failing, of course he was failing, that is until he wasn’t. Suddenly his grades were better than ours. We were baffled as to how he was managing this. He still wasn’t attending any of his lectures and none of us saw him settling down with his tablet and engaging with the syllabus.

Eventually we simply asked him and he stared back at us, perplexed.

‘I’ve got an implant, an Intelligence Embellishment,’ he said. ‘I thought you guys all knew.’

Well yeah, we assured him, we were all aware of this but even so, we exclaimed, surely you need to make a bit of an effort and do some revision?

He started to laugh then, gawping at us as if we were idiots.

‘I don’t have to do anything,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I replied (guess I was a beat or so behind the others).

‘I just access the Embellishment,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit tricky at first, but once you get used to it, it’s easy and everything just sort of pops up. All the info, the answers, everything I need whenever I need it. ‘

It was in that moment something in all of us diminished and we realised that the game now was rigged and it really didn’t matter how talented and gifted we were or how hard we might work.