So his back is against the narrative wall from the start. With 'Understand', Chiang starts with an intelligent protagonist, in a strictly realistic universe other than the superintelligence, where he's well aware there would be major societal consequences and military implications and the protagonist can't simply sit around and play with his lab mouse. Any societal implications are simply ignored. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week.

'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet.' 'What's an Internet?' 'uh.') ('Then he used his rifle -' 'what's a rifle?' 'it's a stick which is like throwing a rock.

No one can.' If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. As Vinge was famously told, 'you can't write this story. That's the problem with any superintelligence story they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. I'm going to go and pet my dog, I think, until this reaction passes. Ms Kinnian cared for him, but they spent so little time able to meaningfully interact that friendship didn't have the chance to properly form. They didn't understand, they were worried. The saddest part of all of this is that even when Charlie became smart enough to understand the world around him, he spent so little time in the relatable range of intelligence that the people he cared about struggled to communicate with him. Charlie was a genius, but in his infantile state it's brought him nothing but pain. I could be happier than anyone, but in the end some part of me is always dragged back into anguish. I'm disabled not mentally, but emotionally. In myself, I see my own inevitable cycle of depression and elation. I've worked as a mental health support worker, and this short story poked at some of the darker parts of the field: the dream of people getting 'better' and wanting to 'fix' them, the subtle (and not so subtle) jokes made out of their failings, having to deal with the basic human urges they don't fully understand, subjects consenting to treatment they don't have the capacity to understand, etc. I've just been emotionally effected by this work at a deep, almost uncomfortable level.

Chimpanzee hand drawn