The Last Invention Read online

  I slowed down and took the stairs one at a time.

  I finally stopped when I reached a new part of the tower, a wider level that looked like a parking garage. There were no windows or balconies. Flickering lights in the ceiling lit up bones and scuttling bugs on the floor. The hissing of strange creatures came from every dark corner. My footsteps echoed on the crumbling stone blocks. I walked between pillars for hours, wondering if a demon was going to jump me. Smelly water trickled down decaying columns. Melanie would never find me here. In a distant corner I found a pillar and leaned against it. I wiped the tears, blood, and snot off my face. Too much crying and bleeding for one day—my worst since escaping from prison. There I explored my newest thoughts, about whether or not I should obey Melanie. I thought about what she wanted over and over again, replaying her slaps and angry stares. Anger, sadness, love, lust, all swam through my body, mixing together into a soupy mess of total confusion. I had no idea what to do next. I didn’t know whether to hate or love the beast that was after me.

  But this time I was all alone with a better device to play with. The Interrogatrix had first made me think about the universe in a new way—it had given me the teaching that I was missing in school. Combined with Melanie’s tutoring, I had whole new way of thinking. Sorry, Mr. Greenbaum, but my current education was way better than school. Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. With The Last Invention, I could take it even further. I caressed the small silver cube. I only got two reception bars down there, but maybe it would be enough. It was the greatest invention in the universe, and all I could think about was making a Playstation Portable? Lame, Adrian, Lame. Each time I got older and smarter, the previous me seemed so pathetic and child-like. Was this going to happen my whole life?

  Here’s what I made with The Last Invention while hidden away in the darkest corner of the floating tower:

  The Historical Particle Tracker XJ5000: Pick any particle in your body and watch on the screen as a video shows you the path of that particle from the big bang all the way into your body—A 13 billion year journey. Most of my particles once lived inside an old sun near Earth’s current solar system. You can also use the search feature to find out if any of your particles were once inside other people in the past, or whatever else you put in the search box.

  The Best Video Game Possible 720: The last video game ever invented. It’s just a tiny black earpiece that feeds images to your brain, sending you into a virtual world. It was as real as a dream—with smell and touch and all the other senses. I played racing games, adventure games, my senses fooling me into believing that I was actually in that world. Other kids were in there too, playing the game from different planets in other parts of the universe. One little green alien drove me off the road in his car and laughed at me as he raced on.

  The History Watcher 2: Pick any event in history and watch it come to life on the screen. I picked George Washington crossing the Delaware, just to see if he really did fart while in the boat. I zoomed in and raised the volume. I could actually hear one of the farts. Amazing. Nobody on the boat laughed, though.

  Whatever Happened to That Thing XP: Pick any object in history, and the device tells you where it is now—it also creates a replica of it for you. I asked the device where the knife was that dealt the fatal blow to Julius Caesar in Ancient Rome. It told me that it was buried under a parking lot in present-day Rome; then it created one for me—a small dagger with an intricate gold handle. Just for fun I asked it where the knife was that killed Colin. It’s response: “In the hands of one very disgruntled UPS truck driver.” Then an exact version of the bloody knife appeared next to me on the ground. I felt safer having weapons that I could dual wield, in case any of those creatures that my mind invented in the flickering shadows came to get me.

  Butterfly Effect Sequence Analyzer: Pick anything that happened in the history of the universe, and the device tells you a sequence of events leading to that moment. I couldn’t help myself. I asked about Melanie. The device created a timeline of 127,000 events that caused a chain-reaction through time leading to her birth. I scanned some of the events in the timeline quickly: the north and south magnetic poles had changed places hundreds of thousands of years ago, much later an ice age formed, a glacier came down North America and created Long Island, our town had boulders left over from the glacier, Melanie’s parents met one day at a park and had a picnic next to one of the boulders. After that, they met at their rock every Saturday until one day he proposed to her in that exact spot.

  I looked up more events on the device. The Assassination of President Kennedy. The fall of Rome. My own birth. Each one was part of a sequence dating back to the big bang. Nature just wanted things to happen a certain way. The universe was way more powerful than the puny humans that ended the sequences. My icy breath made a strange cloudy shape in the air, and within it I could see Melanie’s face. Who was I to fight against the entire universe? It had given me Melanie, our perfect sequence of love and romance, and now I was trying to rebel against it. I wasn’t some evil demon, so those girl fantasy, R-rated, uncontrollable, don’t-talk-about-them-ever, supremely mushy feelings had to be just as good as the rest of me. Adrian. The end of a sequence dating back thirteen billion years. Nothing that took so long to make could be bad. Why had I bottled all those urges and hid them away? I patted the solid stone floor of my awesome tower. My mind was made up. I couldn’t wait to see Melanie again and tell her.

  But first I needed some more stuff.

  Pimple Blaster DS: Like it’s not bad enough I’m turning back into an ape. No way I was seeing Melanie with the huge zit on my face that popped up from all that sweaty running. At least this thing works.

  Disease Curer 5000: Wave this over someone, and it cures any disease. I waved it over myself just to make sure that demon disease was completely out of my body. Wouldn’t want to infect her with anything.

  Relationship Improver Version 1: Press the button on the device and it produces something that will help improve your relationship with someone. I pressed the button, and it gave me a jar of lip glue. It’s for keeping our lips glued together even after getting an electric shock while kissing under the green sun. Cool.

  A bag: So I could keep all my stuff in. It asked me whether I wanted paper, plastic, or Axion Zion Icoscilide.

  I began to pack up my stuff for the return journey. That’s when I spotted something in the distance, between two pillars, under one of the flickering lights.

  It looked like a book.

  I picked up the knife and dagger, got into a samurai stance, and made my way over to it, my feet crunching bugs on the damp stones. The ceiling light buzzed loudly. As I got closer, I noticed that the cover was filled with white words on a black background, and I could make out the title: The Last Invention – Recommended for ages 13+ due to sci-fi romance, paranormal violence, emerging sexuality, crude humor, and techno-pubertal fantasies. Volume 1. Beyond the book was complete darkness. Footsteps approached from the black void. My palms got sweaty, and I held my weapons higher, ready to strike. I wondered what was coming, and why I didn’t ask for the Lost Ark instead of these metal blades. That thing can melt faces.

  Out of the darkness walked a decaying skeleton with skin hanging off its bones. It was carrying its own head in rotting hands. Logan! I lunged at the beast with both my blades, but my weapons went right through him and clanked against a stone pillar, sending a trail of dust to the ground. More footsteps approached. From within the gloom Colin appeared, holding a bloody wound on his chest. I held my weapons ready, but his sad look made me feel bad for him. He limped right through me and disappeared into another part of the room. A whole parade of people came out of the blackness—the S.W.A.T. team at the mental institution, the helicopter pilot, innocent pedestrians—everybody who was killed because of me. They passed right through me like ghosts and then vanished.

  Hallucinations. Visions. Illusions. I was really losing it. I stood perfectly still, sta
ring into the blackness, waiting for whatever was going to come at me next. A rat scurried out of the void and nearly gave me a heart attack. I stuck my blades in my new custom leather belt and grabbed the book. Then I ran back to my safety pillar. I don’t know why I felt any safer near that pillar. The stone was still warm, and I had survived there for hours. If anything wanted to kill me, why hadn’t it done it already?

  It felt good to have a regular old-style hardcover book in my hands. The cover was a little boring, though. Weren’t there any devices that could draw cool pictures at the end of technology? I cracked open the spine.

  Part 1: The Superhero Maker

  Hey. My name is Jacob, and I’m twelve years old. I’ve been in love with Holly, my next door neighbor, for over a year already. She’s fourteen and already beautiful. Sometimes I look out my bedroom window for hours, just for a one second glimpse of her getting dressed for bed. Summer nights when she forgets to put the shade down are the best.

  But one night she saw me staring at her. She shouted something and closed the shades. I was heartbroken. I was hoping that if she ever discovered me, she would smile and do a little dance in her nightgown. I flopped onto bed and clutched my heart. I imagined us on our secluded island in the middle of the Pacific. Our clothes would turn to tatters, and eventually we would just lie together on the soft sand, our bodies nearly crushing small baby crabs. We needed each other there.

  That’s when I heard a strange noise from outside my window. It sounded like a pig!

  I flipped through the pages and realized that this was one of the six previous books about Earthlings written by Ricky and Oinkleberry. I turned to the information page at the beginning. It said “Copyright 12379th sun, Roinkleberry Publishing Company. Central Caverns. Asekz 13.” All those two did was take the kid’s narration and print it! The boy was twelve, just like me when my whole story started. That little noob didn’t have any style at all—flashbacks were way better. The image of the baby crab was pretty cool, though. At least I wasn’t the only boy out there crazy about some older girl.

  I wanted to read the whole book, but first I had an idea.

  I grabbed The Last Invention and asked for one more device: The Book Maker Y2k, capable of reproducing any already existing book in the universe, or writing its own book (not recommended due to artificial intelligence computer limitations). I programmed it to produce all the other books that Ricky and Oinkleberry wrote. They appeared in my lap. They all had the same title, but with different volume numbers. The highest number was seven, so I read that one next.

  Part 1: The Body Builder

  I got my nickname in three distinct and horrible stages.

  In third grade my group wrote a skit about a puppy who went on a great adventure to find its favorite squeezy toy that had run away to avoid further pain. I played the puppy. I was in a group with all girls, and they dressed me up in a shaggy wig and put eye shadow on me. After that, all my friends called me “Puppy.” That name stuck for a long time.

  I flipped to the end. All the pages after Part 3 were blank. My palms were sweating. I wondered what was going to fill in on those pages. Forget the rest of the high-tech toys. I was going to spend my time doing nothing but reading. I quickly grabbed another book and flipped through it. The stiff paper gave me a paper cut, which started oozing blood into the margins. I couldn’t believe that regular books still existed even at the end of technology. E-books never finished them off?

  The Disease Curer 3000 fixed my cut, and then I settled down with the first book I had picked up. I wanted to flip to the end, but that would ruin the whole story. So I just read for hours. It was the first time I hadn’t thought about Melanie. That kid Jacob had so much in common with me. I really bonded with him, and it made me feel less lonely hidden in the dark depths of my impossibly high tower, in an unseen corner of the universe. I left tears on one page when I found out that Jacob had only one lung from Pneumonia that he got when he was five.

  Jacob showed a device called The Superhero Maker to Holly, hoping to impress her. They became friends, and at night the two of them transformed into superheroes and circled the world doing good and evil things—rescuing children or robbing banks. Whatever they felt like. They used The MindReader XLT to get inside the heads of the FBI and CIA, that way they could always stay one step ahead of the law. Finally, the Universal GPS 3.2 helped them find a secluded island in the Pacific where they could hide out. They were too tired to fight anymore. They had fought off secret agents with Eye Blast Rays, Ice Freeze Bolts, and things like that. In the end they were happy to just fall in love under the tropical sunsets on their secluded island. Nobody knew about them because the U.S. government covered the whole thing up.

  One day they found a wormhole deep in an ancient voodoo cave on the island. They traveled to Asekz 13, where they found thousands of teenagers waiting for them. The alien kids had followed every moment of the story, and they were even allowed to influence parts of it.

  Jacob and Holly ended up in an Intergalactic Zoo down in the belly of Asekz 13. They were given The Last Invention and promised their freedom if only they would satisfy the curiosity of those powerful aliens. The alien kids wanted to learn about different species. The zoo had thousands of strange creatures in small alcoves decorated as their natural habitat. Jacob and Holly sat in one that looked like part of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. They loved each other there, but they wouldn’t give the alien teenagers what they wanted.

  Months and years went by. At the end of the story Jacob and Holly were fed to two Zaga Beasts from Nebulon 5. The alien teenagers had gotten bored of them, and a new book in the series was about to come out, promising them a better story with a more exciting climax.

  I closed the book. Poor kids. They were gone, and all because of those sick aliens. I wished for Melanie’s warm hug. No way we were going to meet the same fate as Jacob and Holly. My eyelids became heavy. I wanted to read the other books, but I couldn’t stay awake any longer. That’s when I drifted off to sleep right there against the uncomfortable pillar. Nightmares filled my brain—about secret treasure rooms in distant floors of the tower, guarded by beasts holding silver scythes; or getting lost in a labyrinth on the loneliest floor of the tower and running out of food. In one nightmare Melanie was a four-legged beast who guarded the bottom floor of the tower, and she ate me with sharp teeth when I refused to become evil.

  I woke up with two arms around me. My body was paralyzed. I whimpered softly.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just me,” a voice said. I smelled Melanie’s futuristic perfume. She had found me in my dark, hidden corner. My loneliness was over.

  “Nightmare,” I said, my face drenched with sweat.

  “It’s ok, try to stand up, you’re too heavy for me to carry.” She helped me to my feet. I grabbed my bag, and we trudged through the maze of pillars, back toward the stairwell. The darkness and flickering lights and strange shadows didn’t seem scary anymore. My dagger and knife clanked together with each step.

  “Are you still mad?” I asked.

  “That demon roleplayed me using the ring he got from us,” Melanie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.”

  “You made knives. I thought you would make an Uzi or an M16 or something. Like in that video game you’re always talking about.”

  “Good idea.”

  Melanie laughed. My beautiful companion was back, and she wasn’t a radioactive zombie psycho-raged adolescent pubertal demon. She was just plain old Melanie, the most beautiful and smartest girl in the universe. I breathed a sigh of relief, and all the fear, loneliness, anger, and confusion that had haunted me that whole journey deep into the tower disappeared. Our love wasn’t wrecked after all.

  We climbed the stairs, illuminated by light from the glowing dust in the planet’s rings. Every once in awhile we rested on a balcony and ate from a small pouch of food that Melanie brought along. She fed me nectar and ambrosia from a small silver jug
, then wiped away the drips on my chin. I kissed her once on the 33rd balcony we stopped at. Then she kissed me on the 66th one. Every 33 balconies we kissed, and at one of them, we also played that super-advanced video game I made. Melanie had no chance to beat me in my favorite racing game.

  Exhausted, we finally made it back to the top of the tower.

  We fell into each other’s arms and bobbed up and down on the waterbed. The night sky was quiet—no exploding stars, no comets—just a few twinkling stars in the distance and some slowly moving pillars of colorful dust. It was the longest we had been apart since coming to the tower, and the only time we fought and chased each other and dripped foam from snarling mouths and stuff. So we made up right there under the starlight—kissing for hours, hugging, cuddling, and crying. Melanie apologized over and over again for going all mutant on me, and I kept telling her it didn’t matter. It was ancient history.

  In the middle of the night, when Melanie was pecking my lips and apologizing in a repeating rhythm, a cloud of alien spores floated over the turrets and overtook the entire tower top. They looked like greenish soap bubbles, but each one had a small stalk extending from it with a white ball on the end—like a million tiny micro spaceships enveloping our nighttime home. Had alien Summer arrived? When I breathed, the spores rushed into my mouth and melted on my tongue. They tasted like flavored sugar. The tiny white spheres brushed against my cheek and bare legs, tickling me and making me feel lightheaded. We giggled, causing even more of the spores to fly into our mouths.

  In one of our kissing sessions, I got braver than I ever had before, putting my hand under her shirt and exploring new territory. I couldn’t resist the sight of Melanie in her space-tight blue jeans lying on the fluffy cotton sheet. I wanted to see her without the jeans. So I put my other hand on her thigh and moved it up her leg, creeping slowly toward the zipper area. My heart pounded, and I could hear the spores sizzling as they touched against my warm cheeks.