Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (13 page)

He
looked at it. It looked at him back, unflinching.

He wore
his protective glasses and turned up the intensity. “All I need is
a Eureka moment. A bit of luck,” he thought. He knew of course that
the eureka moment was a myth. Real science was slow and steady, or
not so steady and full of dead-ends. At most, you would have a
Huh-that’s-funny moment that would lead somewhere.

It
wouldn’t hurt to try his luck though.

He began
inputting random values to the variables he was working with,
testing the laser after each one. His apodeixis was dependent on
Maxwell’s equations, which, in their simplicity, had infinite
permutations. He had a better chance of scoring with Kate Upton
than randomly typing the variable that would validate his
proof.

Type.
Enter. No change.

Type
again. Enter. Same.

Then he
tried their anniversary, no use holding back on superstition
now.

Nada.

Georgie’s birthday?

Then the
phone rang. Thankfully.

The text
from Nikos said: "A person who has not made his great contribution
to science before the age of 30 will never do so. Albert
Einstein."

Yanni
started texting back something along the lines of, “Gee, thanks for
twisting the knife,” but a car honked from the street below and it
was obviously Nikos.

He
rushed outside, eager for the change of scenery and closed the door
on Thalia’s “No drinking” comment. He felt bad and peeked back
inside the house and told her, “Ok honey, no drinking.
Promise.”

Nikos
was waiting in the cabrio, leaned back and with eased hands as if
sitting on a sofa. He was smiling at some girls crossing the street
and they were smiling back.

“
That was your chick maneuver, sending the text and then
honking a few seconds later while I reply. Don’t do that again to
me,” said Yanni with spite, not getting in the car.

“
Hey, you invented it man. I simply raised it to perfection!”
said Nikos and they both laughed loudly.

“
Yeah, that seems to be the pattern lately,” said Yanni with a
sad worry on his face.

Chapter
i^3

“
What’s done is done,” she replied for the tenth
time, while folding the curtains from his office/lab. She had taken
out anything untouched by the fire because it would absorb the
smell. Then her face showed legitimate worry and she asked quietly,
“Will Demokritos replace the laser?”

Yanni
sat down and puffed a few long breaths of air, as if the answer was
to be found in the molecules around him. “Nai. Yes, they have to.
But it will take forever to get the documents and approval. It will
never be in time for the funding review.”

Thalia
tucked the corners of the curtains as perfectly as she could. This
was something she could control and she calmed herself by doing the
work flawlessly. I know the laser is expensive, can’t we get that
money from somewhere in the meantime? From Nikos, for
example?”

Yanni searched for spite in her voice but found none. Her
suggestion was cold and logical, not vindictive. And she was right.
“We can. Yes. But the problem is not the cost, it’s the
availability. The parts are both expensive
and
not available to the public.
It’s not enough having the money, you also need to be a research
centre to even obtain something like it. Or a big corporation’s
R&D department, something like that.”

“
Can’t you explain the setback to the review
committee?”

Yanni
thought about the call earlier, the associate who warned him about
the new administrator who was determined to cut his funding. He
decided not to tell that to his wife, to leave a shred of hope. She
was calm but she might need nothing more than this new piece of
information to tip her over. “Yeah, sure. They are not
unapproachable, I’ll call them first thing tomorrow
morning.”

He
forced a smile, kissed her and went upstairs to his office/lab. He
sat on his chair as he always did and inspected the damage. It
wasn’t much but it could be a lot worse. The laser had a big burn
on the top of the case, obviously from overheating. The wiring was
burnt and smelling bad, plastic always does that. The edge of the
desk was singed, his chair in one corner and the carpet. Mr.
Andreas really did try to avoid spraying the laser, he managed to
foam a circle around and choked off the flame’s oxygen. Practical
man, his thinking might had saved tens of thousands of euro in
repairs. The carpet was destroyed though. It’s ok. Yanni even
entertained the thought of debating his wife and leaving the room
exactly like that.

Scars of
a failure.

He
thought about turning the laser back on or not. Maybe that was his
lucky accident. Maybe this was to be his Eureka moment, the part
where an accident in the lab leads to a new world-changing
discovery. It was foolish of him, but the temptation to try was too
much.

He
argued that the laser was already damaged so he couldn’t make it
worse. He brought an old blanket just in case, explaining it to
Thalia that he was keeping the window open and it was chilly. It
was already dark so that wasn’t far from the truth.

He held
the blanket in hand in case of another fire and turned on the
laser, hoping for the life-altering Eureka moment of his
dreams.

Chapter
i^4

When the
laser arrived, it was like Christmas. His eyes lit up while
unraveling the extreme protective packaging.

“
Is the effect visible to the naked eye?” asked
Ourania.

Yanni
blew away some leftover Styrofoam. “No, I have the polarized
glasses to see the moire effect. The math predicts that when the
equations work, that particular wavelength will produce a moire
effect when seen through glasses.”

And then
he added with a hint of pride, “I came up with that.”

“
That’s brilliant Yanni!” she said. “That way you don’t need a
quantum computer chip to actually test the theory.”

“
Correct. It’s part of the reason I managed to keep my funding
all this time, because the test was relatively cheap.”

He held
the laser like a kid would hold a shiny toy train and ran upstairs
to hook it up.

Chapter
2i

Yanni
paced up and down the empty room and he was
furious
.

What was
Hermes doing with these kids? Were they using them for some sort of
human interaction experiment? Was it safe? If it wasn’t safe, would
anyone ever know? What morals were they teaching those kids? If one
of them hurt the other, what did their adoptive mother do about
it?

All reason left him and all he wanted was to yell at the
cameras for putting them up to this, for putting
Alex
up to this, and
take the little boy back home, where he would be safe, where he
would grow up in a real home with a real mom.

The
reasonable part of his brain took over and had him think that they
engineered that. The toy was exactly the same as his son’s, the kid
could pass off as Georgie’s brother if he had to. They fixed the
whole thing for this response, this was a test. Even if he could
take the kid and adopt him and give him a loving family, what could
he do about the rest of them? And who was to say that they weren’t
better off this way? They must have assured colleges and any
academic paths they set their minds to when they grow up, as true
corporate offspring and loyal to the bone. Who was he to decide to
take this away?

He
couldn’t save them. Especially not now. Maybe in the future, when
he had finished his proof. When he had the same pull with this
company like Nikos had. Maybe then he could do something for this.
Threaten with telling the media. Anything.

But he
had to win this battle. For him, for his family, for science, for
everyone. This sadistic battle, built as if it was meant to torment
him.

He
calmed himself and sat down. He hoped he hadn’t scared off the kid,
but if Alex was startled, he didn’t show it.

“
Alex,” he said with the sweetest voice he could muster. “I’m
here to teach you something, would you like that?”

Alex
smiled and bobbed his cute head up and down in
acknowledgment.

“
Okay. Here it goes. You know about computers, right? They
must give you tablets and things like that to play games, right?”
he asked with an anticipation matching the one of his marriage
proposal.

Alex
nodded positively.

“
Great. Those computers, have a machine brain inside them. We
call that a processor. Are you with me?”

“
Yes. Pro-scissor.”

“
Let’s call it that, it doesn’t matter. The pro-scissor needs
to be fast for the games to play fast. We hate it when the games go
slow, right? Great. So we make faster and faster pro-scissors but
the stuff we put in there cannot go too fast. They are lazy and say
‘
Oh! Don’t push us so
hard
’ and they sit around not doing the
job.”

Alex
giggled and nodded yes.

“
Great. So, we need to put faster stuff in there, ones that
are not lazy. And you know what the fastest thing in the whole
world is?”

Alex
shook his head and his eyes demanded to know the answer.

“
Light. Light from the sun is the fastest thing in the whole
world. It’s not lazy at all. But sunlight is
so
fast that you need something
clever to keep it in,” said Yanni and cupped air with both his
hands. He shook his palms still closed together as if he was
holding a wasp. That seem to entertain Alex a lot.

“
When I tell the sunlight to do a job, I need to see if he did
it or not, right?”

“
Right.”

“
So I take a peek,” he said taking a peek in his hands and
Alex leaning close to see as well, “but the sunlight finds the hole
and spills out!” He opened his hands and let the light
leave.

“
Heehee! Like. Like the flour.”

“
Just like the flour.”

“
Then mommy is mad at the mess we made!”

“
Yes! So, we need to find a way to make the sunlight roll
around in circles. So when we take a peek, most of the sunlight
will stay inside. A man named Maxwell, who had a great big bushy
beard, thought of tricking the sunlight into knots. Just like my
shoelace, here see? I made a knot, so it won’t leave my
foot.”

“
I can’t tie my shoelaces yet and that’s why I have scratch
shoes.”

“
I know, I couldn’t tie my shoelaces either when I was little.
But now I can, I learned the trick. And I am also trying to learn
to tie the sunlight into knots, so it stays there and not spill
out. I just need to find the trick.”

“
And then you can throw away the scratch shoes for sneakers
with shoelaces, who are faster and then you can be
faster.”

“
And?”

“
And then you can be fast enough to do the trick to the
sunlight to plup-plup around in little… in little knots like the
shoelaces and take a peek fast enough to close your hands again,”
said Alex, peeking into his tiny hands.

So this
was how a Eureka moment looked like.

“
And then?”

“
And then the pro-scissor won’t be lazy and do the job fast
and I won’t have to wait for the slow game!”

Someone
clapped. A slow, full clap. Yanni turned around and saw the smart
woman from before. “Excellent Dr. Tsafantakis. Come with me. Don’t
worry, they will come pick up the child in a moment.”

Yanni
waved goodbye to Alex. The child looked up and asked, “Are you
allowed to bring Georgie to play with me?”

“
That is the first thing I am going to ask this nice lady.
Goodbye Alex,” he said.

“
Goodbye Mister,” said Alex and went back to playing with his
toy truck.

Yanni
followed the smart-dressed woman in the next room. At this point,
he was prepared for anything.

Chapter
2i^2

The sun was going
down but it was still bright. Yanni enjoyed the wind on his face
and the sound of old music on the radio. Nikos drove them along the
scenic route, going up to Parnitha Mountain. It got noticeably
chilly as they went higher but it was invigorating.

The
casino was Nikos’ idea, all of their old haunts have been closed
anyway, and all of their new ones were kid-friendly so Yanni
wouldn’t even dare suggest them. Nikos brought the cabrio to the
entrance, the valet greeted him by name and parked the car next to
the other expensive two-seaters.

Nikos
showed him in with open arms as if he was selling the place. “Now,
isn’t this more manly? Look at the view”, he said and they sat down
on luxurious leather.

Yanni
looked at the city below as Nikos ordered whiskey. The northern
suburbs were pretty much the same as always, a place of relative
safety and costly big houses with gardens or cozy three-bedroom
apartment buildings for families. Athens extended in the south but
got lost in the horizon, which was seemingly brought closer from
the humid air and the gray smog. Peeking through the lowest level
of the atmosphere were the new skyscrapers at the city centre, tall
beasts of glass and steel getting erected with impossible speed,
seemingly forming like crystals out of thin air. He thought of his
light crystals, imagined how they looked in reality. Would they
seem so beautiful, formed into lattices out of the foundation of a
computer chip? Were these skyscrapers as ephemeral as his light
crystals, or were they here to stay?