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THE EMPEROR of EARTH
Chapter Five – “Between Mafia and Mahi-Mahi”
It was late afternoon as Tibran and Scooter approached the apartment building, shuffling their feet across the parking lot in front. There was a large pile of furniture next to the stairs, as if someone had thrown it all off a balcony. They stopped for a moment, exchanging a puzzled look before continuing. As they walked past the pile and headed up the stairs, Scooter thought he recognized Bixby’s couch.
Tibran banged on the door. Scooter waited exactly two seconds, and then turned the nob and they walked into Bixby’s apartment together. As soon as they were through the door they both stopped, stunned at what they saw. It was like they had stepped into a whole other world that had no relation to the apartment they had come to know and love.
Where the kitchen table had been there was now a large work-bench. Strewn across its surface were all manner of electronic circuit boards and wires, a soldering iron, and a large oscilloscope. The couch was gone from the living room to make room for more tables that now lined three walls of the room.
More electronics cluttered the tables, except for a couple that seemed to be dedicated to chemical experiments, with Bunsen burners and test tubes and liquids of various colors bubbling and steaming in different beakers. There was music coming from somewhere, playing Steve Winwood’s hit from the 80’s “Higher Love”.
“Think about it, there must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is a wasted time
Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine…”
There were no less than six computer monitors scattered about the room, all displaying different graphs and tables, some of them with data streaming by in real-time. The floor was covered with more electronic equipment, most of which neither of them could identify, some as big as they were. And books. Stacks of books all over the place, filling any empty space that might not already have been taken up with electronics of one kind or another.
There were wires strung up along the walls, dozens and dozens of them, connecting all this equipment, and there were work lights hung from the ceiling in different areas. The entire room seemed to hum with the very electricity being expended within it.
Bixby was nowhere to be seen. Scooter called out, “Bix? Yo! Bix, you here?”
“Higher Love” ended and was replaced by Duran Duran’s “The Reflex”.
“The reflex is a lonely child
Who’s waiting by the park
The reflex is a door to finding
Treasure in the dark…”
Something metal crashed to the floor, and then there was the sound of Bix yelling from the bedroom, “Be right there! Grab a beer!”
Tibran and Scooter looked at each other for a moment, shaking their heads in disbelief at what they were seeing. Bixby Jones had never even owned a smartphone, as far as either of them knew. After a moment, Bixby came out of the bedroom, carrying James Brown under one arm, and some sort of disk-shaped object, about eighteen inches across and about six inches thick under the other arm.
“You’re just in time! You guys gotta see this.” Bix put James Brown down on the floor and walked over to one of the work benches. I just have to make a couple of more adjustments, and this thing should be the balls!”
“What thing?” Tibran asked, taking Bix up on his offer and getting two beers out of the fridge – which appeared to be the only thing in the apartment that Bix hadn’t thrown off the balcony. Bixby didn’t answer, but continued with what he was doing. He reached for a nearby soldering iron and solder, muttering something under his breath as he worked. Then he picked up a small screwdriver and made some adjustments inside the body of whatever-it-was.
“Hey Bix” Tibran said, walking around slowly and taking in everything he was seeing. “I went by the garage, and old man Harrison told me you quit.”
“Huh?” Bix said, looking up from what he was doing as if he was coming out of a daze. “Yea, I don’t have time for that anymore. I quit.” He bent his head back down and returned to what he was doing.
“Where did you get all this stuff Bix?” Scooter asked, picking up various objects off the work tables and examining them. “What the hell is all this shit for?”
Bixby did not look up from what he was doing. “I ordered most of it online, you’d be amazed what you can have delivered to your doorstep these days.”
“And how did you pay for it all?” Tibran asked, looking around for a chair to sit on and realizing there were no chairs in the apartment anymore.
“I’ve been saving up to buy a piece of land since high-school. You guys know that. I cashed it in is all. That, plus I’ve been doing some online investing. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make money that way.” Before either of them could respond, he exclaimed, “Done! I think that should do it.” He turned around to show them what he had been working on, holding it out proudly so they could see. Now that they could get a better look at it, Scooter thought it looked like one of those automatic room-cleaning robots he had seen advertised on T.V.
“You built a Rhoomba?” Scooter asked.
“What? No! Something way better than that. Check this out.” And with that he reached underneath the object and flipped a switch. There was a soft humming sound, and the object seemed to move in Bixby’s hand slightly. He smiled at them, savoring the moment just a little. Then he simply tossed the object aside as if he was throwing it away. It sailed towards the floor, destined to break into pieces on impact. But then, when it was about a foot off the floor, it just stopped and hovered, suspended in the air, moving across the room slowly from the momentum it carried when Bix tossed it. I was messing around with some electromagnets and came up with this idea. This one is just a scale model. I could build a bigger one. I called it the Hover Chair.
Tibran and Scooter stared, wide-eyed at the Hover Chair, drifting slowly across the room without touching the floor.
“What the fuck?” Tibran muttered. “How-how did you do-do that?” Scooter stammered.
Bix was smiling ear to ear. “You haven’t even seen the best part yet.”. He walked across the room and retrieved the Hover Chair from the air. He turned around and walked back to where Tibran and Scooter were standing.
“Now check this out.” He said, holding the object steady in front of them, and letting go of it before stepping away. Instantly, as if part of a choreographed event, James Brown came running out of the kitchen, headed straight for the Hover Chair. When she was close enough, she jumped in the air, landing right on top of the little round robot, and sitting down. The platform dipped for a moment under the added weight, and then settled back where it had been.
Tibran and Scooter were appropriately amazed. “How did you teach her to –” Tibran started. Bixby cut him off by holding up his hand. “Wait for it.” He said, staring down at James Brown sitting on the Hover Chair. After a moment, James Brown leaned forward, and the little flying disk dipped forward too, and began to move slowly across the room. With James Brown still sitting on top, it began to move around the room a little faster, and then a little faster. Before long James Brown was flying around the room on the Hover Chair, her ears trailing behind her in the wind. She seemed to be controlling it by leaning her body slightly one way or the other, and it was obvious she could make it fly wherever she wanted to.
Tibran and Scooter just stared, their mouths open and their eyes wide, watching James Brown fly around the room. After a few minutes the robot returned to where they were standing and came to a stop. James Brown hopped down to the floor as naturally as if she were jumping down off a couch and trotted back to the bedroom.
The three of them stood there in silence for a moment. Tibran and Scooter because they could not believe what they had seen, and Bixby because he was letting them have a moment for what they had seen to sink in. After a bit, he broke the silence.
“Pretty cool, right?”
“Cool? Cool? Bix, what the fuck did we just see?” Tibran set his beer down deliberately, turning to face Bixby. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“What, this?” Bixby asked, retrieving the Hover Chair from where it was still hovering and turning it off. “This is nothing, really. It’s just simple reverse-polarity magnetism. I was reading about magnets, and the magnetic pull of the Earth. And I remembered some other stuff I had read about electromagnets, and how they could be tuned for specific magnetic fields…” he looked at his friends, realizing they were staring at him like he had two heads. “Okay, never mind. The short version is that I ripped the guts out of this thing and built a small, highly sensitive and tunable electromagnet that is powered by the onboard batteries. I had to get the electromagnet sensitive enough to respond to the natural magnetic pull of the Earth. That part was tricky. Once I figure that out, then I just installed some gyroscopes that respond to weight shift and configured them to adjust the repulsing effect of the electromagnet accordingly, allowing it to be steered by leaning one way or the other. Simple, really.”
Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” began filling the room.
“Your lights are on, but you’re not home
Your mind is not your own
Your heart sweats, your body shakes
Another kiss is what it takes…”
Tibran and Scooter were still staring at Bixby, wide-eyed. “And how did you teach James Brown to…” Scooter started to ask.
“Oh that.” Bix said, cutting him off. “Never mind about that. The important part is that this thing works!”
Tibran walked over to where Bixby had set the hover chair down on a workbench, resting his hand on it, he turned to his friend. “This thing could make you rich Bix”.
“What, that?” Bixby said, dismissing it with a wave. “I’ve already moved on. I just wanted to show you guys it worked. No, that was just for fun.” A smile was spreading across his face again. “Now I think I’m onto something really big.”
John Taylor Scott 