The Last Invention Page 9
I’ll tell you how we got here. I’ll tell you everything. It all started a few weeks after Colin’s death. Melanie was out on bail so she could testify in my murder trial. I was waiting for her to come visit me…
I was lying in my dark cell in the mental institution, wondering if Melanie was ever going to come. I had told her everything, the whole truth, planted right there in her brain. It was even written out in a note, in case she thought the rest was a dream. But she hadn’t shown up, and she barely ever looked at me in the courtroom anymore.
The Roleplaying Ring, its gem solid black, sat in the deepest corner of my underwear drawer. Guilt and fear kept it there. If I became Melanie, then she would become me. She would inhabit my body, and could do anything she wanted to it. Last time that happened she had really hurt me. I don’t know what she did, but she wasn’t gentle like I was inside of her body. When I went into other people’s bodies, I was respectful and cautious (except when I made Colin dive out the window). Melanie just reached for stuff like my body was some kind of breakfast buffet. She bent and pulled on things in unnatural ways. I guess it was exciting for her to be a boy for the first time. I was still in pain two weeks later.
So that night I curled up under the covers, trying to think of some reason to have hope. That’s when I heard the familiar grunting of a pig out in the hallway. I leaped out of bed, wincing in pain, and limped over to my cell door. Ricky and Oinkleberry had come to visit! The pig had another box in its mouth. My heart started beating fast.
“Here I thought the crowd wanted another simple love story between two Earth creatures,” Ricky said. “But this has turned into so much more. You never can tell what an audience is going to want.”
Oinkleberry clawed at the ground with its feet.
“Tell me who you are,” I said. “Tell me already!”
“Shoulda seen that one coming,” Ricky said. He pulled a small silver cube out of his pocket and whispered something into it. A bright yellow rocking chair appeared next to him. He sat down outside my cell and rubbed his beard. Red glowing veins created bumpy protrusions on his fingers—like if E.T. had some sort of alien, mutant disease that spread everywhere. “What would you like to know?”
“Everything! What do you want from me?” A pang of pain pulsated down my leg as I crouched by the door.
“Your story, of course.” Ricky stared at me with eyes that glowed in the dimness. The rocking chair made a silly squeaking noise that echoed down the hallway. I wondered why none of the guards came to investigate.
“What story? I’m thirteen.”
“Thirteen plus, that’s the age range. You’re a perfect fit. Of course, you had to grow into it.” A gravelly, phlegm-filled laugh came from the deepest corner of Ricky’s throat, even though his mouth hardly moved. He rocked faster.
“What’s so funny?”
“You saved the pig, don’t you know? For a dirty, filthy, smelly pig, he was all washed up. Get it, boy. Washed up, but still filthy!” Ricky smiled at me with brown teeth and slapped his leg.
“Tell me the truth or I’ll punch the pig in the mouth.” I grabbed Oinkleberry by the snout and squeezed tight. The pig’s eyes opened wide. A burst of electricity jolted through my body, sending me flying back into my cell and crashing into the toilet.
“Ah, you want me to give away the whole story?” Ricky said. “It’s really quite a tale isn’t it?” He pulled on Oinkleberry’s curly tail. The pig dropped the box and bit him. “Never will I tire of the English language. Never! But it’s because you ask so many questions, Mr. young philosopher, that me and Oinkleberry got you this present. A wondrous device from a far off land. It will tell you everything. Oinkleberry, the box, please!” The pig rolled its eyes at Ricky and then jammed the box through the bars in the door. I crawled over to it and quickly slid it over to my bed, out of their reach.
“This one better fix everything,” I said. “You screwed up my whole life.”
“Hmmm, screwed up,” Ricky said, pulling at one of the screws in the rocking chair. He twisted the screw carefully, until it came out. Then the rocking chair collapsed under his weight. “Or screwed down!” He cackled. Oinkleberry rolled its eyes again, then grunted a strange phrase in the direction of the small silver cube. A big red button with the word “Easy” on it magically appeared. Oinkleberry pressed the button with its snout, and both the pig and Ricky disappeared instantly.
I dove over to the new box and tilted it upside down. A small device that looked like a Blackberry fell onto the floor. It had a big screen and a tiny keyboard. Jammed under one of the box flaps was a small white piece of paper folded into a dense square. I unfolded it quickly and read it:
The Interrogatrix
The Interrogatrix is a device that can answer any question about the past or present. Simply use the keyboard to type in the question you have, and the screen will display the answer to that question. If the device requires further information, it will ask you for it. A class 2 learning chip is installed on its motherboard, so as you continue to ask the device questions, it will require less background information to pinpoint the answer. Please note, the Interrogatrix cannot answer questions about the future, unless the question refers to an event that can be accurately predicted using scientific methods. (For example, when will the sun powering your planet die out? This can be answered based on the amount of hydrogen remaining inside of it, as suns are merely large nuclear fusion reactors).
The Dark Matter Matrix
When anything physical occurs in the universe, from the smallest quark particle floating in space, to the large-scale explosion of a supernova, that information is permanently recorded on an energy field known as the Dark Matter Matrix. Similar to the electromagnetic field, the Dark Matter Matrix spans the entire universe. When answering a question, the Interrogatrix taps into this energy field to retrieve the previously recorded data. It then interprets the data and presents it in readable form on the display screen. The Interrogatrix will have perfect reception anywhere in the universe. However, its screen will still display small reception bars, of progressively larger size, just so you can experience some comfort as you discover brutally cold and scientifically precise facts about the universe.
Warning: The Uncertainty Principle within Quantum Mechanics prevents the dark matter matrix from precisely recording the tiniest particles due to what’s known as superposition—the phenomenon that particles do not have fixed, recordable locations at the smallest levels. These particles are still recorded, but they are mapped in a wave of all their possible positions simultaneously. In such cases that a question requires analysis at such a minute level, predictions will be made using known heuristics. This often happens when a question requires analysis of a brain or similarly complicated structure.
Bonus: If you ordered the interrogatrix with the treasure-finding module, you will be notified when one of its answers mentions a location nearby to one of the 271,889,234,239 buried treasures in the universe.
I grabbed the little device and hopped into bed. I was back in action, with a cool new device to play with. I hit the power button and watched the small display come to life. There was a little sing-song-sound as it powered up, and a bright blue display lit up the cavern I had created under my covers. The screen read, Welcome to the Interrogatrix V. 14189a. Type in Question here----|
I decided to start with a simple question, just to test out if this thing really knew what it was talking about.
How old am I?
Insert full name in place of vague pronoun.
How old is Adrian Matthew Smith?
82,137 Adrian Matthew Smiths found in universe. Please type name of home galaxy.
Milky Way Galaxy.
32,127 different results found. Type in your home planet.
Earth.
32,126 different results found. Type in your home town.
Edgeview.
The age of Adrian Matthew Smith is variable depending on the part of the body selected. The follo
wing charts break down individual body parts and provide their respective ages:
Particle makeup: The quarks inside Adrian’s body are 13 billion years old, created at the inception of the universe.
Bones: The calcium inside the bones of Adrian Matthew Smith was created 4.721 billion years ago by a supernova, or exploding star, that once inhabited space near Adrian’s current planet. When a star explodes, its hydrogen atoms fuse together to form heavier elements such as calcium. This calcium spreads through space in a cloud, eventually becoming part of the planets that form there, and finally makes its way into the beings that develop on those planets.
Structural makeup: The general blueprint for the 47,379,239,129,299 cells that make up Adrian’s body is 3.4997 billion years old. All living cells use the same basic set of nucleotides and amino acids, dating back to the very first cell.
I skipped through pages and pages of tiny text and diagrams showing the age of every last part of my body. I was starting to feel nauseous.
Vestigial elements: Certain parts of the human body belonged to evolutionary ancestors and have little modern function. Goose bumps, for example, serve two purposes. They raise the hair on the body to a standing-up position, making the body look larger and scarier to potential enemies. The raised hair also traps a layer of air protecting the skin below from cold air. Since humans have very little body hair, this function has not been used to full effect for 8 million years—by a previous common ancestor of humans and gorillas. The Coccyx bone is another remnant from the past, when human ancestors had tails…
I skipped another twenty pages.
Consciousness: Adrian’s brain was formed 13.34 years ago.
Without reading the rest of the pages describing the age of my body parts, I turned off the Interrogatrix, closed my eyes, and lay in the dark for a few minutes. I had the greatest invention ever made in my hand. A big smile stretched out the skin on my cheek—all that smiling was probably going to give me early wrinkles. Each time I got a gift from Ricky and Oinkleberry, I thought it was the greatest thing ever—but this was really IT. There could be nothing cooler than this.
I could barely decide what to ask it next.
I turned the Interrogatrix back on, splashing me with blue light. I typed in a little question that I had been wondering for a long time.
What is the fastest car in the world?
Please rephrase question with the name of a specific world.
What is the fastest car on Earth?
Suddenly, in the lower right-hand corner of the screen a little paper clip with googly eyes appeared. A bubble came out of its mouth with the words, “It appears you are from Earth. Would you like to set Earth as your default planet?” I typed, “NO.” The paper clip stared at me for a little while, blinked a few times, and then disappeared.
The fastest car on Earth can only be determined if certain additional variables are considered. For example, even if a car is sitting in a garage, it is still moving at the same speed that the planet is moving through space. Earth moves at a speed of 18 miles per second in its orbit around the sun. In addition, the solar system containing Earth is in orbit around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This orbit is completed once every 226 million years. The solar system is traveling at 135 miles per second in its orbit. Finally, the Milky Way galaxy itself is traveling through the universe at 361 miles per second. Everything contained within it is also moving at that speed—such as our solar system, the Earth, and the car in question. If all of these motions align with each other, a seemingly stationary car is moving at a speed of 514 miles per second.
The Bugatti Veyron with a 1200 horsepower 8 liter engine holds the Earth record for fastest production car with a recorded speed of 267 miles per hour. That equates to .074 miles per second. If the car is traveling in the same direction as the Earth, the Solar System, and Milky Way Galaxy, that would place its top speed at 514.074 miles per second. This would translate to 1,850,666.4 million miles per hour. Of course, this is all relative to a theoretically fixed point in the universe, using the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation as a comparison. Since the universe is expanding…
I hit the reset button. My mind was ready to burst. Couldn’t this thing answer a simple question without rambling on and on? I typed a new question.
Did O.J. do it?
YES.
That’s better. But that question made me think of knives again, and murder. And…
Melanie!
If this little device knew everything, then it could tell me what I wanted to know about her. It could answer the question that would make her feel good about herself, once and for all. My fingers were shaking, and could barely hit the tiny letters on the keyboard. I tried to be as specific as possible in my next question.
Is Melanie Judith Jones, who is fifteen years old and lives on the planet Earth, in the state of New York, in the region of Long Island, in the town of Edgeview, the most beautiful girl in the world?
Beauty is objective and related to mathematics. Human beauty can be measured by a matrix of average distances between fixed points on the face and body. After all calculations have been retrieved from the Dark Matter Matrix, the verdict is that Melanie is mathematically perfect—that is, she is currently tied for the most beautiful human being on Earth with 17,178 girls and 1,786 boys. (The little paper clip with googly eyes also wanted me to tell you that Melanie reads Physics books for fun, giving her the third best personality in the world among female adolescents, if you care. The paper clip would have told you himself, but you so coldly rejected him the last time that he appeared.)
I knew it. Melanie is the most beautiful girl in the world. At least there’s nobody out there that’s more beautiful. I couldn’t wait to tell her. She would never have to be sad again staring at herself in the mirror.
Is she the most beautiful girl who ever lived on Earth?
Assuming “she” is referring to the Earth-born human female specified in the previous question (and not, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton), then a search of the Dark Matter Matrix shows that no human female in history has ever been more beautiful than Melanie. It is not mathematically possible. However, there have been many other human beings in history—both boys and girls—who have displayed mathematical perfection in their physical attributes. A total of 217,956 boys and girls have possessed mathematical perfection since the last evolutionary advancement in the human species 3,000 years ago.
How beautiful am I?
You are currently ranked 2,278,189 in the world. You are tied with young girl in Tibet who many believe is the reincarnation of Buddha.
My finger quickly clicked off the Interrogatrix.
I finally knew for sure what my body had been telling me all these years. Melanie was Miss Infinity, supreme hottie of the universe. And I was ranked two million-something out of billions of people. Not bad. I suddenly realized that I could keep asking the Interrogatrix questions for the rest of my life. Time didn’t seem to mean anything anymore because there was nothing else to look forward to other than getting more information from this little computer. What could be better than the truth? For each answer that I received, ten more questions popped into my head. My mind seemed to be the only part of me that was important anymore—I couldn’t even feel the rest of my body. The pain that Melanie had caused me had completely disappeared. I wasn’t hungry, or tired, or thirsty. I just wanted to know more. With this machine, I could escape from my dark fantasies and live just inside my brain. On our floating tower, Melanie and I could cuddle and kiss under the stars and explore the mysteries of the universe together, finding out everything we ever wanted to know about life’s hidden secrets. Alone in my dark cell, that would be my new fantasy.
I turned the machine back on.
That paper clip with googly eyes was waiting for me in the center of the screen. It untangled itself into a straight piece of metal, and then snapped back into place. A bubble came out of its mouth with the words, “It appears that you
and Melanie are 3407th cousins. Would you like to know more?” I typed “NO” immediately. The paper clip’s googly eyes fell off and then bounced back into place. Then it blinked at me and disappeared.
Why are Ricky and Oinkleberry so interested in me and Melanie?
Ricky and Oinkleberry come from a planet called Asekz 13. They once owned a publishing company there that produced young adult science fiction novels—highly prized stories that have won many awards throughout the universe. Unfortunately, Asekz 13 is such a technologically advanced planet that scientists there recently made the last possible discovery in the universe. There are no new scientific formulas to prove, no fresh contraptions to invent, no theories to propose. It’s all been discovered and documented—interdimensional space travel, time travel, artificial intelligence, eternal life, perfectly efficient fuel, roleplaying another’s body, the dark matter matrix, and much more. This destroyed the genre of science fiction for all the eager young readers on the planet. There is no fantastical future, no advanced technology beyond what is already known on their planet. Ricky and Oinkleberry were washed up—their company fell into ruin, and they left the planet, traveling through interdimensional vortexes on their silver surfboards in search of fresh story ideas
While searching an interdimensional dumping ground on Earth for discarded inventions, and hoping to find a new story idea, Ricky and Oinkleberry discovered a revolutionary new business model—stories with Earthly protagonists. Science fiction still exists on Earth since so much has not been discovered yet, and people can dream of a fantastical and technologically advanced future. So the duo began writing science fiction books again, ones that are entertaining even at the end of technological evolution. The stories have real human characters, and their fates are determined by how they use the high-tech gadgets which have been discarded from the distant planet of Asekz 13. The audience for these stories are the teenagers back on Asekz 13 that eagerly await the fate of the human characters they are distantly following.