In 1967, the computer scientist Ascher Opler needed a word for the deep layer of instructions that told a machine how to read every other instruction. It wasn’t hardware, the fixed physical stuff, nor software, the programs that come and go. He called it firmware.

Firmware is written into the machine rather than loaded onto it. It wakes first and changes rarely, because a change gone wrong can leave the whole device unable to start.

Applied to people, it beats its neighbours. Software suggests a self that can be wiped clean, as if grief could be uninstalled over a weekend. Hardware suggests a self fixed at birth. Wetware names only the clay, not the shape pressed into it.

Temperament, attachment and the flinch learned in childhood are written early and deep, acting before thought arrives. Love, therapy and hard years can rewrite them, but slowly, and never from a blank page.

Animals carry this layer too: a hatchling turtle finds the sea untaught. Humans are born unfinished, though, and kept open by language and story. Something like a riverbed, cut by the first waters, reshaped by every flood. Firm, not fixed.