NEAL - A NEW TYPE OF SPORTSPERSON. A #twentyfourhourshortstory SHORT STORY
Clint Margoa was 44, he was bald- except for the brown fringes over his ears, he spent the day being angry at the world and feeling a failure. His work as a gym coach was making the class do stretches and dividing them into teams and making them play baseball. Why baseball? Because three of the seven trustees of the school had been semi-professional players in their day; plus Clint had played a lot of baseball in junior high. That was before he discovered robotics and cybernetics.
-pixabay.com
Clint was one of six humans ever to have post graduation in Advanced Robotics and Quantum computing. He was among the youngest scientist at CERN at the age of 29. He had married a fellow scientist, Mara Olieve. And the three years that he was normally married were his happiest. Then Mara suffered a stroke, she could not move her arms and legs or even speak . Mara chose medically assisted death after 5 months in hospital supported by machines. By that time Clint had become dependent on heroin and crack, to deal with the stress and grief. It was his bother - in - law, Stepan Olieve, the famous Robotist, who had forced him into rehab in remote Canada. Clint had returned home alone and depressed after 9 years. It was to save his sanity that he had taken up the first job offered to him- a gym coach.
Today he got called home by the delivery guys. He had received an obscene number of packages which if he did not take delivery, he would have to collect it from the company warehouse 110 miles away. The boxes filled his living room stacked three high in many places. Stepan had died in an accident and according to his will - his lab tools, computers, ongoing projects and notes were to be given to Clint. Additionally he had recieved 1,806,090 Euros also. Stepan had no other estate.
Before he could finish reading the manifest of what the various boxes contained, the doorbell chimed. It was Jon Kilwern, the awkward teenage, his nearest thing to a friend, his widowed neighbor's only son and a burn victim in a car crash which killed his father. Jon was almost six feet tall, very thin, with reedy arms and legs. He always wore gloves and a hoody to hide the burn marks on his face and arms. And he seldom spoke due to the damage to his throat, and that too in guttural monosyllables. Clint was glad to invite him in and share the news of his windfall. They opened as many of the boxes as they could till dinner time. Most of them contained computer and robotics spare parts, many unidetifiable right away as they were custom made to Stepan's specs.
It became a routine over a few days. Clint would rush home from his job and start to reassemble Stepan's lab in his hall. Jon would look in sometime later and help around if he could or clean up and sort away the not needed nick-nacks and order pizza. It took Clint nine days and reassembly of Stepan's super computer to figure out that it was an almost complete robot, with 2 computers linked to a common data bank. One a cutting edge massively capable computer with a unique interface built from scratch by Stepan and his collegues. The second was the smallest meanest quantum computer Clint had ever seen. And the robot was already partly functional.
Clint's genius was in giving the computer a personality- Jon's mostly. And on a whim he contacted one of the leading Hollywood FX agencies to build him a "sheath"- a hollow human body used to show villains being torn apart. It cost him almost half his fortune. But when he dressed up Neal[That was what they had named the robot] for the first time to look like Jon, the real Jon was really spooked at how uncannily it mimicked him.
It was on a dare that Clint took Neal to the tryouts of the school baseball team posing as Jon. The coach was in love with Jon, he did not care how awkward he behaved or that he did not speak or remove his cap, he only saw his fantastic home-runs on every ball. Jon was an instant celebrity. After a few sessions of coaching Neal and Jon together Clint programmed Neal to err occasionally and trained Jon to behave aloof and with typical gestures easy to imitate. After a few sessions Clint was more confident that he could switch Jon with Neal whenever he had to go out to play. Clint became Jon's official agent and trainer to make things smoother.
It was 5 months later that they were sitting in Jon's private van and breaking out in uncontrolled laughter when one of the commentators covering the world series declared- HE PLAYS LIKE A FINE TUNED ROBOT