Chapter 3
The laboratory, the man cave of man caves, was the most amazing, marvelous inventing room ever the like seen. It was like Christmas exploded, lights everywhere, and gadgets, and trinkets, and some weird things, too, indescribable things, indescribably weird things, and then almost recognizable things, like the sculpture of a human face, which was actually a mechanical face, and the inner workings could be spied from behind the face, and the face smiled, which was a little creepy, and Truly had to quicken her pace to get past, but further in were more oddities, like the dancing legs, that might have been robbed from a mannequin, but vastly superior to the obvious mechanical ones that were simply wooden legs, as these articulated within an inner ‘skin’ that made them much more real to sight and touch, and you might have thought a whole person was there, but clearly no person’s torsos or arms could be discerned, and there were bits of junk turned into machines, glowing crystals, and vats growing crystals, and a compressor that would go off like clockwork allowing steam to vent, and then there was the wall of art, contraptions yet to be built, including a design for a vast city that was built like a cross, so that if it’s center point was on the pole of the moon or mercury, one arm would always experience daylight temperatures, and it’s opposite arm would experience night temperatures, and the difference in temperature would set up a permanent flow of water steam to drive engines to power the city and the life supports. There was a table with notebooks filled with data. And there were fiction books, Like Jules Verne and HG Wells, yet to be published, because they were consulting with Caractacus about the feasibility of their mechanics, and you may say how was it that these great men knew Caractacus, but you would be getting ahead of yourself and them, because at the time, they didn’t consider themselves true visionaries, but rather just ordinary men wondering and dreaming and corresponding, and Caractacus had been published in small ways about improvements to machines that he had offered to help improve society, and ‘Do it Yourself’ repair manuals for the aspiring tinkerer, and since very few aspired to be tinkerers, they weren’t best sellers. He did try his hand at fiction, but he was so far ahead no one could make any sense of it, and so that work went nowhere. Psychics have nothing on science fiction and fantasy writers, statistically speaking, but whether you’re psychic or a futurist, your abilities depend greatly upon your audience’s ability to see and share in a vision, and so on this table, hidden in the corner, there were the books written by Caractacus, and rejections letters, and potted rose plant which might have been a meme in progress.
Other curious artifacts in the shop included a time machine, with accompany blue prints with HGW initials, and a formal letter asking for help with a power source, because there is always the potential to travel somewhere you might not be able to refuel, and though HG was a genius story teller, or would be, to be honest, he wasn’t much of a real inventor, and so Caractacus had made many modifications before he had gotten it working, and contrary to popular beliefs, it was he who first went to San Francisco to stop Jack the Ripper, which is way more plausible, because even HG would tell you himself, “I am just a story teller, I can’t go chasing through time after some madman, and you’re a trained military man and genius inventor, who else would understand how to function in a future environment?” but when they made a movie about the ‘incident’ they dropped that whole subplot because, well they thought no one would buy into the time machine theory much less all this fluff about some cat named ‘Caractacus’ and the romance on top of that seemed a bit contrived and what they really wanted was a horror movie but luckily Caractacus and Loxy put their foot down on that, because they wanted to honor all the sci fi romance stories that HG had written, that people seriously over look, but also, this one was about them, as it is just one of the alternative lives of Jon and Loxy, showcasing the myriad ways of how they met. You may at this point be thinking, ‘blah,’ time travel, might as well have written a dream novel, and if you end this all with it being a dream I’ll be mad, but there is evidence for Time Travel in real life, like the girl using a cellphone in the background of a Charlie Chan movie, but there is also evidence at the end of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, very subtle, and maybe just a slip of the tongue, but I must insist if you didn’t catch it not to rush forward, as even a time travelers knows well enough not to rush time.
Of course, a derivative of the time machine was a pocket watch that could stops time, because if you could travel forward and backwards in time, you could also stop time, which is really interesting because it reveals a secret of the universe: no matter where you are in the ‘time stream,’ you, your conscious, continues to interact with a forward movement like a needle dropped on a record player always going inwards no matter where it’s dropped, which should also impress you with the ‘cyclic’ perspective of time that most primitive people cling to, and modern men ignore too readily, but anyway, back to the watch itself, it held a fanciful, intricate design on the casing, and soft greenish blue glow that leaked out through the closed lid, and a chain with tiny steam driven viewer that contained unmentionably enticing moving pictures that could completely mesmerize male or female in a very particular way so that they soon forgot about the watch, which was completely necessary to keep miscreants from abusing the device, and you may wonder why Pott wasn’t rich if he had such a device, and all I would have to say is ‘character.’ There was the Steam driven ‘Hutchington’ guitar, because it is well known that any genius worth his salt is also a musician. There was a gear-ornate safe with tumblers and hand crank and a place to measure the biometrics of the user’s hand. A toy steam engine. A steam powered bike. A miniature steam powered At-AT. A steam powered R2 unit, presently powered down and the forward panel opened leaving the inner workings exposed, and might have actually been the family pet had someone not insisted on a real pet. There was a fancifully complex gear umbrella, which could stop bullets. His fireproof jacket was also bullet proof, also, made of the same material, which you would have thought would be a big hit with the military, but quite frankly they were offended of the idea as if it were a ‘cheat.’ “There are rules to war, and if you shoot someone, they’re supposed to fall down.” They rejected his paint gun invention, which was basically flag football, as they figured there were some people who would not play fair and continue to shoot, and so people needed to be shot with real bullets and fall down.
Then there were several jeweler’s table, because you can’t just work on the big stuff, because behind the big stuff is the little stuff, and to see little stuff sometimes you need special tools, like the oversized magnifying glass on bendable arm with multiple articulation points so as to be positioned anywhere over the table, and no matter how you approached or passed the table, something was being ‘magnified.’ There were crystals and diamond in various stages of being cut or polished or finished, and mesh where various transistors and crystals could be plugged in and powered up or down, glass tube transistors the size of future Christmas tree bulbs, and LEDs before their time, blending into the cross stitch, contrary to popular belief, men were expected to be able to sew, and goggles, and scopes, microscopes and telescopes, both refracting and reflecting, and a variety of goggles and sunglasses and visors and reading glasses and working glasses. A model of the solar system, not to scale, spun around an artificial, illuminated sun over jeweler’s station, which was not hanging by strings, nor was it magnetically compelled, but most people who looked at it assumed strings and just left it alone, because it looked quite delicate though beautiful. There was the compass, and myriad of nautical tools on a nearby shelf.
There was a bulletin board with a world map and pins in it, and on the side articles of from papers about UFO sightings, such as the ‘Mystery Airships” in the US. There were other sightings, and stories of UFO’s going back to the 1400, from around the world and every culture that had a paper, even if it was a British paper, but like in France they had huge sighting of a war over a city, and truth be known, things crashed and people found stuff and sold stuff and buried
‘people’ that weren’t people, and HG and he dialogued through a correspondence if maybe this was men from the future trying to preserve the human race, but maybe a part of the human race, something evolved or de-evolved was fighting for its own existence in competition with man, but then, for the most part, there was always such an amazing absence of physical evidence that maybe these things were ghosts, or holograms, or things yet dreamt of, or perhaps Carl Jung would come to call this phenomena an archetypal collective unconscious interaction pattern. There was a clipping of the Hull Pocket, a newspaper from UK 1801, describing a sighting that still baffled people today, but elements of the cigar shaped craft was nothing new to Caractacus who had been studying this areal phenomena since arriving in the Navy, and you have to remember, any country that has a Navy has three Navies, the one that is very well esteemed and discussed and visible, and the invisible one, like secret pirates with operatives who were untraceable, and we really don’t have to talk about their missions, because we all know there are time in the lives of men and countries where they have to do things that are necessary but less civilized, but then there is also, and this is important to know because of just how far back it really goes, there is also a secret space Navy which all the governments agreed to maintain the secrecy so that the people of Earth could continue in their adolescence uninterrupted by the adult things yet to come, which HG would translate into a book ‘the shape of things to come.’
There were also the weapons, which Caractacus personally detested, but was practical enough to know that they could be improved upon, and frequently brought in money to their home by servicing the hunting rifles of his neighbors, but there was the pistol that he once carried as an officer, as well as his sword, which was on a headless mannequin in a display just for his past stuff. And then there was space suit in the makings, which almost looked like a deep sea diving suit, which if you think about they’re both fundamentally the same problem, and though essentially going deep you had to resist the increasing pressure, going into space was essentially the reverse of the problem, yet still a pressure problem, and so he knew that the submersibles, the like even Jules Verne had yet to consider, would also one day be future airships and spaceships, and in fact, he and Verne were friends and frequently exchanged letters, and they both had a fanciful wax seal. He held letters and blue prints from Artemis Gordon, ranging from diagrams of mechanical spiders to disguises, and Caractacus was especially interested in the disguises so as to improve the humanity of his future robots. Caractacus also held a correspondence with a friend of Gordon, Janos Bartok, who traveled with an Ernest Pratt, also known as Nicodemus Legend, as they were frequently consulting Caractacus on the feasibility of artifacts for potential props. Seriously, again, this point can’t be emphasized enough, if you want to know who the best predictors of the future are, they’re fiction writers, and you have to be fair, either that is predictive abilities of a kind that humans can tap into, or these people were in the know and they wrote fiction so that if and when inexplicable things happen, and they do happen around humans, there was also a channel of plausible deniability on the parts of the government. “Oh, you hallucinated HG Wells.” “But I don’t even read, Sir.” “Well, someone you know must read and you heard them discussing it in the background, and that’s more plausible, being we’re in an age of reason, and you don’t even have to agree or understand I am disparaging you in a very civilized way, now move along, nothing to see here.” But anyway, never go to a psychic. Go to a Sci-Fi writer. Firefly, people in space speaking Mandarin, that’s a pretty solid idea and you might want to consider learning a smidgeon of Chinese and Japanese if you want to fair well in the cosmos before universal translators, because that reality is probably more accurate to what is really going on even right now than anything you’ve been told so far.
But, but, and this is a big but, and I am tired of hinting around, so I will just say it, Caractacus was in on a little secret, that the Russians and the Americans had already put themselves in space, and British Royal Navy was up there, too, as a guest of the Russians and the Americans, but this knowledge was kept secret because, well, mostly the Brits were embarrassed they didn’t plant a flag on the moon first, but also, more importantly, having moved out into space they had realized they’re not alone, and there was concern that the people of Earth could not handle that information. Why that’s a game changer is really difficult to believe, except it really hurts the church and their control, as CS Lewis would explain in a future book of how aliens disturbed the relationship between god and men. But practically speaking, being in space is nowhere as difficult as NASA would have you believe, you don’t even have to have clean rooms, you can just put stuff out there because everything down here is mostly already up there, and navigating in space, at least in terms of within the solar system, works just as easy as sailing a ship, only they weren’t using light sails, they were using electromagnetic fields as sails. There were light sails, but one could extend a magnetic field out further and catch more energy from the sun, and at the heart of magnetos that spun the field outwards, well, that was steam! There were other exotic forms of electromagnetic propulsion, in terms of traveling and keeping people alive, much, much simpler than anyone ever imagined, and, of course, there were the gravity wave amplifiers and emitters, and you can sail on a gravity wave easier than an ocean wave.
There was a fabric making machine that spanned half the back wall, which was basically a mechanical quilt making contraption, which in the past might had required a hundred grandmothers laboring away at breakneck speeds, but it actually wove the material as well as attached patchwork art all on its own, because quilts will never go out of fashion as ‘heavy’ blankets can make a person feel secure, like they’re being hugged, and the cotton stuffing on the inside and the art lets you know that someone labored over this product, and even if it is made by a machine, that is still true. Of course, his machine actually turned hemp into a cloth like material. He frequently sold hemp shirts and ropes and he could also make hemp paper but he turned out very little because growing hemp had become unfashionable during his time, mostly because it was competing against the other vendors who were using a more expensive textile and petroleum processing methods, and people were less green in their thinking back then, even had this crazy idea you could dump an infinite amount of trash into the ocean and it never come back at you, which is just crazy, but you won’t hear that in a history class, and though he wasn’t technically violating the law, he didn’t plow down his field to grow hemp either, and so he turned out articles at a much slower rate to avoid suspicion from competitors and besides, in addition to artwork, he was trying to fashion tech directly into his clothing because he believed one day, one wouldn’t need a million gadgets because everything would be reduced to one object, and so everyone would own one thing that contained them all, hint this is where Tolken got the idea for the ring and would cause Caractacus and him to feud for a generation, but everything would be contained in a jacket or a shirt or trousers, from watches, compasses, and maybe even a talking companion that navigated the invisible electromagnetic web generated by all the of the devices of man and nature together, and though Caractacus had sufficient genius to be a part of her Majesty Royal Secret Space Force, he had declined being a part of the revolutionary space navy, wanting to stay closer to home and his family, and so another reason he was left alone to tinker was because his work was interesting enough to hold the attention of certain elites and people in the know who wanted him just where he was, because philosophically, why mess with something that’s working?
But with his fabricator, he had a design of practical clothing which he believed would become essential in the future. His kids were particularly pleased with the Victorian faux leather, because they hated killing cows. He had black denim and coffee trousers, and corsets, and made all his own clothing, which made him standout in a crowd and why crowds kind of gave him his own space, and he made the clothing for his dolls, which were almost uniforms, like a secret space federation outfit yet to be dreamt, and probably the one reason why he wasn’t more successful is was he dabbling in everything, a complete and true generalist, and so he could sustain himself in his family, but they weren’t likely to see fame and fortune short of sheer luck, that and, well, being famous usually meant interacting with folks and he tended to not want to interact with folks, and when he did, he mostly either pissed them off or something would go terribly wrong and people would avoid him as much as he them, but he did enjoy correspondence immensely, and this was the day of great letter writing, with intricate seals, as no one would imagine a time when writing ceased due to the increase in technology making paper obsolete, instinctively they should, but the things that went wrong around him was sufficiently awkward that someone might believe he was cursed, but because that is ‘impossible’ in a rational era they were more likely to believe in men in black secretly sabotaging his efforts, which even that might not be accepted and you, like the general public, will just simply assume a label of crazy or eccentric, and since his name was Pott, well ‘crackpot’ just sort of followed him, because children and adults can be mean, even though teasing is generally not meant to be mean but a means to reign crazy in, and sometimes he himself believed he was crazy because it’s hard to stand up and be different in a world of cogs. All that to say there was never just one reason for why a person wasn’t successful in worldly terms.
One other reason, and maybe the best reason, was Caractacus, if pinned to commit to an answer, though never directly asked, the simple truth of the matter was that he was happy with his life as it was. Sure, he was sometimes lonely for adult company, but he loved his kids and watching them grow and learn was sufficient, and the farm was the playground of his youth, where he had built his first rocket as a child and scared the cows so much that they didn’t have milk for nearly three months. And maybe there was evidence for him having become too relaxed in his parenting job, or too complacent in life, and though at the time he might not agree to it, having nature, or a disruptive force, jar you back awake is actually a sign that the Universe loves you, and nothing says that as much as having your own personal Dakini, or sky-dancer, come and shake your world up, waking you up to a greater reality as if everything else prior to her entrance was merely a dream, and so Loxy, Truly, truly Loxy was this irresistible force, that was a storm in its own right, but also the calm that follows the storm and everything in between, coming to end his loneliness, which he didn’t even know until she touched him, changing his vector forever.
Also, for lack of proverbial kitchen sink, it’s probably best to understand there were multiple sociological trajectories at this time that came into frequent conflict. Concepts of Free Energy championed by Tesla, and True Liberation of the human spirit and the potential to reach out into space and join a galactic civilization, and the spiritualist movement Championed by the likes of the Fox sisters, and Aleister Crowley, even Houdini, not to mention the fact that the spiritualist were abolitionists and pushing women’s right, and there was the Church and the fundamentalists in opposition to any sort of liberation of soul, and there was the materialists, and the scientists, not necessarily the one and the same, because even Bacon materialist claim as the greatest champion of science was also a spiritualist, not Kevin, though we’re less than a degree away, and though scientist championed humanity, they were opposed to either of the other groups, and just one materialist’s adaptation of Bacon makes for a formidable opponent, and though the latter group probably stole some of the ideas from Da Vinci, who would have been in Tesla’s camp, this latter group was in conflict with still another group, the capitalists, who used every invention and idea to make more capital, mostly for themselves, because if you liberate people, you can’t make more capital, and so they were the ones pushing against free energy and they took to ‘scientizing’ materialistic principles, but they were never so proud as to not ever use spiritual ideas when it suited their cause, hence the Portestant ethics were borne, that everything is finite and so if you wanted to live, and live well, you needed to get on board with their agenda and work for the elite, and if you were successful, you were more right with God than anyone else. This was the true war, the war of wars, which would last for centuries, resulting in several ‘world’ wars, and cold wars, and drug wars, just lots of wars, because one of the most promising ways to make money was to declare a war, and you would think that this would be such a horrid state of affairs that all men would long to get out of it, but unfortunately, few men care about their fellow creatures when they’re caught up in a game of monopoly, or even care about the planet that sustains them for that matter as long as they can erect some hotels in every corner, and so things usually have to get so bad that the majority of people awaken to the idea if we keep going this direction there will be no more directions, or people, but at this point in the story, there was too much promise of people having access to abundance of stuff and food and so, like a game of monopoly, you have to play it to learn for yourself no one really wins at monopoly, which is still one of the bestselling board games, and so even though the super computer in War Games learned from tic tac toe that thermonuclear war was a no win scenario, humans are a bit slower than computers, which is the real reason why so many people fear Artificial Intelligence because people have used intelligence as a thing of fear to manipulate others into continuing to play the game, and so they’re projecting what they would do if they were in charge.
“Do you have lecture us in every story?” Eston asked.
“All stories are lectures,” Jon said.
“No they’re not,” Eston said.
“Yes, they are,” Jon said.
“Are not,” Eston said.
“Are so,” Jon said.
“Brontosaurus breath,” Eston said.
“Oh! T-rex arms!” Jon said.
“I swear, you two have been fighting since day one,” Fersia said.
“He took my tit,” Jon grumbled.
“I have six, just shift over,” Fersia said.
“The other one is better, and you had seven kitten, I never got a turn after,” Jon said.
“I can always lactate more,” Fersia said.
“We’re straying a bit,” Loxy said.
“You think?” Eston said. “Just once I would like to get through a story without all the
lectures, and expounding of philosophy, and just skip over the kissing.”
“There is no kissing in this book,” Jon said. “Jon,” Loxy said.
“Okay, a little kissing, mostly at the end, which makes this the longest foreplay ever,” Jon said.
“Explain the sex toys in your laboratory,” Lester said.
“See, I told you people would notice,” Loxy said.
“They’re medical devices! Hysteria is a serious medical malady of the day, and I happen to specialize in medical tech, for men and women, because it is my opinion men also suffer from hysteria, and if society would just allow ‘Real Doll brothels,’ we could lower the spread of infectious agents, as well as lowering the accidental, unwanted birth rate, and generally make the population happier, so yes, I think Houston seriously made a bad call, because Artificial Sex Surrogates is the wave of the future, and they could have been on the forefront of this thing, which is not a fad, but now they will have to wait till the rest of the world to ‘brothelatize’ their communities and Houston loses tax revenues to the other counties and grudgingly opens their own brothel, even though Houston has lost that forever because citizens will decide not to participate out of spite…” Jon realized he was losing his audience. “Okay, so there is some kissing, and other adult stuff, but it’s in the background and might not be observable, unless you call it out as such, and you can’t assume there was less sex because it was the Victorian era, because seriously there was some sex and the more you try to hide that there is sex the more sex there is to be had…”
“What’s this,” Truly asked. Looking into the barrel of what might have been mistaken for a Graflex, a camera flash holder, only steam powered.
“Ahh! Woman,” Caractacus said, grabbing the device away from her. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
He demonstrated the device, which turned out to be a steam power, laser arc wielder, with a sparkling gold blade that was intensely bright, and way too long to be just a simple light scalpel, and it cut through an anvil as if it were hot knife through butter, severing it in half.
“Wait wait wait,” Keera said. “You invented the lightsaber?”
“It’s not a lightsaber,” Jon said.
“Looks like a lightsaber,” Elizabeth said.
“I want one,” Eston said.
“Jon,” Loxy said.
“It exists in this universe. Seriously, Lucas may have patented the word, and Disney may have bought that word, but there were lots of ‘light swords’ prior to Star Wars, Lucas just popularized it, and maybe this is Kirito’s proton sword, or Bleach, where everyone has their own unique laser sword powered by reishi energy, and all of these things exist, and I, I mean Caractacus, was in the military and he was an inventor making stuff for the military, and the other thing you need to know is that if you see it in the movies, then you can rest assured that it was already invented elsewhere and the reason you’re seeing it is because the technology has advanced to such a degree that what you see is old news. Like, for example, the cloaking car in James Bond, Die Another Day, not true invisibility per say, but rather ‘adaptive camouflage cloaking’ that’s based on real stuff, and you may think Wonder Woman’s flying in an invisible jet is just fiction, but that’s what they’ve been flying out of Area 51 ever since HG Wells wrote the Invisible man, because Area 51 isn’t a modern invention, and Marvel stole all their super powers from HG! It all started in the 1800s, where they appropriated Well’s time machine, which was backwards engineered from alien technology, and between the Americans and the Germans, we colonized the moon and Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and have toe holds on several nearby solar systems…”
“Jon,” Loxy said, turning back into Truly.