[Original Novel] Pariah of the Little People, Part 12

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My mood lightened somewhat when I remembered what day it was. Truly a rare occasion, nobody’s ever invited me over before. I had Jennifer over a few times way back when, but mostly to work on that project together.

That was the pretense anyway. Half remembered images of the mushroom cloud returned again and again to the forefront of my mind as I washed up, brushed my teeth, got dressed, then made my way to the kitchen.

“Oh good, I was about to come roll you outta bed.” Dad now wore not just the company cap, but a jacket the same color with a logo on the left breast pocket. I winced, but as I didn’t want to fight on the drive to Tyler’s, kept my mouth shut. While I ate breakfast I noticed a light, airy feeling. Relief, like a compressed sponge being allowed to expand back to full size.

I realized on my last bite of choco puffs that it was simply the feeling of not being at school for once. Normally by now I’d have my nose in the Bible, taking notes in preparation to write the usual supplicatory essay. Instead, having survived my first week more or less intact, I had an entire sunny, free Saturday ahead of me.

A short drive later we entered an overgrown forest road blocked by a motorized gate. Unsure what else to do, Dad got out, pushed the button on the little intercom to one side and explained why he was here. Sure enough, a moment later the motor whined to life and the gate clumsily trundled off to one side, screeching along the way.

The road continued well into the woods until we came upon a gorgeous three story home in a clearing. The first floor was cobblestone, or at least made to look like it on the outside. The floors above were polished white wood with grand, sweeping inclines that intersected to form the roof.

“This is the kind of house I’ll be able to buy us when business picks up” Dad commented. Again I bit my tongue. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him glance at me a few times, perhaps expecting more of a reaction.

Soon a familiar face appeared in the panoramic front window, then Tyler emerged and greeted us. His father, a stout muscular man of perhaps forty, followed close behind him. My dad and Tyler’s made introductions, then got to talking about general Dad stuff. Sports, stocks, politics, that kinda thing.

We were given the OK to continue ahead into the house and told there were healthy snacks on the dining room table. There were, and the inside of the house was every bit as lavish as the outside led me to believe! “You didn’t tell me your Dad’s loaded” I mumbled through a mouth full of fancy cheese cubes.

“Oh, yeah. I suppose so. I don’t really look at it like that. This is just how I grew up.” I then asked if there was any soda in the fridge. “No, no. He won’t allow it. No sodas, no processed foods, no unfiltered tap water. Says there’s contaminants in everything. Estrogen gets in the water from prescription drugs people flush, from BPA in plastics and so on. He says that’s why I turned out like this.”

Like what? I mulled over it trying to connect the dots while scarfing down chilled prawns. His dad entered and let me know mine had left. “I forgot to ask him if you had any allergies. Probably should’ve done that before I let you eat anything.” I shook my head, mouth still stuffed, and he smiled.

“So how’d you get so rich?” I asked after belabored swallowing. Tyler shot me a stern look, which his dad also noticed but waved off. “Fine question. That’s how to learn, and if you want to succeed in life you’ve got to find out how others do it. Have a seat in the livingroom. Tyler, why don’t you get out the movies and games for later.” Tyler ran off while the two of us settled into facing recliners.

“Before we get into any of that” he started, “I’d like to know the nature of your interest in my son. You must know by now that he has a certain problem. I need to be sure you don’t have it too, or that you won’t encourage it.” I looked bewildered and answered that I simply liked spending time with Tyler and feel like we have a lot in common.

“You like girls, don’t you kid?” Weird question. I nodded, which seemed to put him at ease. “That’s all I wanted to know. I had a good feeling about you anyway, and I’m rarely wrong. You’re a straight shooter. That’ll get you far.”

I wanted to argue that in fact it’s only a good quality until you run into people with power over your life who don’t like what you have to say, but I kept it to myself, not wanting to alienate my host.

“Tyler also tells me you talk about technology a lot. That’s actually how I made most of my wealth, as an inventor. I bought this house with investment money. My inventions sometimes attract the wrong kind of attention from the government and big oil, so we have to move around a lot, change our names. It’s kept Tyler from making many friends. I’m glad he’s found a good one in you.”

The stuff about changing their names perked my ears up, though I couldn’t say why. I did appreciate the praise though, and really did feel a connection with Tyler. “You given much thought to your future, kiddo?”

I nodded and told him that someday I want to own a sailboat. He looked impressed. “That’s more of a plan than I had at your age. You’ll need some cash in the bank to buy one of those, however. Any idea how to raise it?”

I answered that I’ve always liked fine, intricate machinery and often take apart broken stuff to find out how it works. I didn’t tell him that it was building the settlement for the little guys that really ignited my interest in such things, as I’ve learned not to be so forthcoming about it.

“Good, good. You have a bright future ahead of you then. Especially going to the school you’re at. A lot of guys I’ve worked with in the past went there. It’s all about who you know and what church you go to. That’s the code, y’see. Just a friendly off the cuff question they’ll ask you during job interviews around here. To make sure they’re hiring the right kind of people.”

I asked what happens if you answer the wrong way. “Why would you? Just go with the flow and you’ll be taken care of. All the big employers around here are run by entrenched Christian families. Go to the right school, make the right friends, attend the right church and you’ve got it made. Everybody else, well...they deserve what they get for turning their backs on Christ, know what I mean?”

He flashed a conspiratorial grin that I realized a few seconds in I was meant to return, so I did. His tone changed after that. Formal until recently, but now more chummy and familial. We’d crossed some interpersonal threshold I couldn’t understand the nature of. I put it down to copying his expression and made a note to do that more frequently in the future with other grown ups.

“So what is it you invented that people invest big bucks into?” I pried. “Must be pretty high tech.” He grinned. “Do you want to see it?” Of course I did. He led me to the garage, then pulled a tarp off of what looked to be a pretty standard motorcycle, albeit with some weird stuff bolted on where the fuel tank should be.

“All my investors are fine, trusting, churchgoing folks. My bread and butter. With anybody else you get all sorts of whiny nitpicky questions about how it works, why I haven’t mass produced it yet if it’s so great, blah blah. The trick is finding people with deep pockets who are willing to believe. Granted, this is pretty unbelievable technology. It’s a motorcycle that runs….on water.”

He studied my face. Then frowned. Had I not reacted correctly? I did the same grin from before but it only further confused him. “You realize what this means, don’t you? Our planet’s covered in water. Seventy percent of it! All of it usable as fuel for any car or bike outfitted with my technology.”

All sorts of alarms were going off in my brain. I could feel something was wrong but wasn’t yet certain. So I asked for an explanation of how it works. “Oh, you’ll appreciate the elegance of it. You pour water into the fuel tank, then it’s broken down into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is then fed into the fuel cell, which powers the motor. It can also use a regular combustion engine, some people like the noise.”

I narrowed my eyes and studied the contraption. Something was missing from the equation. Then, in a flash, it dawned on me. “How does the water get separated into oxygen and hydrogen? That can’t just happen by itself”

His friendly smile vanished, and his next words were very carefully articulated. “Clever kid. Well you see, there’s a standard car battery that provides the current necessary to perform electrolysis.”

Electrolysis. I know what that is, I thought. The little guys use it to make rocket fuel. But they’re always pumping energy into the process, it’s very lossy. If they could get more energy out of the hydrogen than they used to extract it from water, they could just use the hydrogen to power the electrolysis in a feedback loop that would output a constant excess of hydrogen gas.

“The best part” he continued, “is that the only exhaust is water!” I scratched my head, looking over the bike a few more times to make sure there wasn’t some part of it I didn’t understand, then asked him why not pipe the water from the exhaust back into the fuel tank and run it forever on the same water.

I’m not the best at reading faces. But I recognize irritation very well. I’ve seen plenty of it and it has a sort of Pavlovian connection with impending suffering for me. My anxiety grew as he wiped some sweat from his forehead with a monogrammed silk handkerchief, stuttering a few times before deciding what he wanted to say.

“Well, obviously that wouldn’t work. You’d lose water vapor over time, it’s not a perfectly closed system. I did work on something like that once! I sold kits for a permanent free energy magnetic motor back in the day until the Fed stepped in and shut me down. Didn’t want such revolutionary technology making it to the people, you see. They’re always stifling honest, hard working entrepreneurs and suppressing all sorts of miraculous innovations.”

It seemed to me that all he’d built was a spectacularly inefficient electric motorcycle which performed an unnecessary and highly lossy conversion of energy from electrical to chemical, then back to electrical. I’d be surprised if he could get five miles out of it. Maybe those few miles would be enough to demonstrate it to investors though.

He seemed like a smart guy. How had he not already figured out it wouldn’t work the way he described to me? Surely he’d given it a test drive and run out of battery pretty quickly. It didn’t make sense. Unless he was somehow making money by deliberately misleading people.

But that couldn’t be true. He’s Tyler’s father. Tyler’s wonderful, there’s no way his father would be somebody like that. I couldn’t leave it alone, though. I never can. It always destroys me but I never learn from it, something in me just forces the issue every time. Even when I can tell it’ll just bring on a world of hurt.

“I don’t think this can work. The energy is ultimately coming from the battery, and if I remember right, splitting hydrogen out of water is maybe 10% efficient. Even if it were 100% there’d be no point, you could just use the energy from the battery to directly power the motor.”

He scowled for a moment before recovering. When he replied it was in a disturbing singsong tone, like a radio personality or the narrator in a commercial. “Revolutionary technologies are never recognized in their time. Neither are the men who invent them. They laughed when Galileo said the Earth orbits the sun! They laughed when Columbus said he’d sail around the Earth.”

I started to reply but he wouldn’t let me. Cut right in, put a hand on my back and led me to the living room. “You know what your problem is, kid? You pick everything apart. Tyler told me the other kids don’t like you, now I see why. That’s really something you should work on. You won’t get far dissecting and scrutinizing every little thing.

You gotta learn to just let a good thing be a good thing. It’s all about having faith. All of my investors have powerful faith, I couldn’t have interested them in such an exciting business opportunity otherwise. It’s the very best virtue you can have.”

I had a good sense of why someone like him might think so, but didn’t agree. Sensing I was on thin ice, I simply nodded, told him I’d give that some thought, then ran off to find Tyler. He’d amassed an impressive stack of both DVDs and games for the newest console. I’d never met anyone until then who owns it.

It’s a real marvel to behold. Clean lines, shiny finish, glowing disc slot and touch sensitive wireless motion controllers with little screens in ‘em. Nothing I’d ever dream of asking Dad to buy. “Just more shit to clutter up the entertainment system cables, waste your time and rot your brain” he’d say. No doubt he felt that money was better spent on cases of oil.

I first perused the games, excited to put the advanced beast of a machine through its paces. “The Bible game?” I murmured in confusion. I flipped through the cases. Ultra Noah’s Ark 3D. The Zoo Race HD. Catechumen 2. Bible Adventures 3. Captain Bible in The Dome of Darkness HD. Left Behind: Eternal Forces 2. The You Testament 3. It just went on like that!

“Don’t you have any normal games?” Tyler seemed confused, then aghast. “You mean….secular ones? Of course not. Dad wouldn’t allow that trash in the house.” We played the Noah’s Ark game for a bit, trading off every level. It was a reskin of a popular shooter but everything from textures and weapons to sound effects and music had been replaced.

The goal seemed to be putting unruly animals to sleep with a slingshot. It was unbearably dull, so at my request, we switched games. Left Behind was some sort of isometric strategy and combat game where you try to convert bad guys by singing, and kill the ones who won’t turn to Christ. Though of course the game stresses that it’s in self defense. Yet more of that familiar perspective, where the entire non-Christian world is an enemy to be feared and fought.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 13!}