“This is a machine that will teach you,” he was told. They rolled a metal box over to his bed. The box had numerous colored lights which looked like captive stars, and a headband that was attached to it by a long cord.
“We’re going to put this on your head,” they told him, showing him the headband. “It will feel odd but it will not hurt you.” When they slipped it over his forehead it made all his muscles jump, as if he’d been startled. Then sleep came with a rush.
Through his slumber he dreamed of a stampede of mad oxen trampling through the farmlands, through the town, through his very home. They were possessed by the god of oxen, and that god was furious. The oxen were everywhere, jabbing their horns and crushing with their hooves. They swept everything away; his home, his sons, his grandchildren. He heard women crying in anguish.
When he awoke, it was abrupt. He felt dizzy, and his forehead was damp with cold sweat. He stared up at the boxes with the colored lights and said, “Computer!” The word, even as he said it, startled him, and the concept behind it was bizarre. “Microchip!”
he said. “They’re made of dirt!” Disoriented as he was, this fact gave him a spasm of joy.
A great understanding seemed to be trying to catch up to him.
He could feel it coming up from behind, thundering along on a hundred-thousand mad hooves. Technica! he thought. A church of science! Truth! Great thought! The understanding swept over him, trampling him. Crushing him over and over again. Technica collected the great minds of humanity. They thought he was one of them. They thought he had invented the wheel! Either the god of good fortune was in love with him, or the god of practical jokes.
This was a prank of horrible proportions!
#
Elko sat at the table by himself with his plate of gourmet cafeteria food in front of him, untouched. That day Professor Burns had taken him out on a balcony on the top floor of the West Tower, and let him behold the wonders of 22nd century civilization. It spread like a carpet across the Livermore Valley, covering the mountains to the west and continuing on to the sea.
“Wheels,” Raymond had told him. “Everywhere you look, you see wheels. It all started with you, Elko. The cart you built for your father. You are the father of everything you see today. The day you put that cart together was the decisive moment in the history of Mankind.”
Even with his new found understanding of this alien world called “The Future,” this concept still boggled his mind. These people had build a devices that, though manipulating the basic fabric of reality, was able to reach back through the ages and scoop him out of the water. They saved his life and brought him here so they could honor him as the father of technology, and allow him to teach a class in pottery in the Great Hall of Learning.
Here he was, elbow to elbow with the great minds of the ages, just because he put four wheels on two sticks and attached a basket to the top. It didn’t make sense to him.
“So, you’re the inventor of the wheel.” Elko looked up at the man who spoke. He was tall and had a charming smile, and his name tag read, “John Kennedy, Great Political Leader.” John introduced himself and shook Elko’s hand, then indicated a short, dark-haired man standing next to him. “Elko, this is my good friend Franz.
Franz Kafka. He’s a famous writer.”
Franz shook hands with Elko. “I program computers, now,” he said.
“Computers made of dirt! Digital logic!” Elko blurted. He covered his mouth with his hands, and shook his head.
“Recent language upload, eh?” John said. “Don’t worry, it calms down after a few days.” He and Franz sat down across from Elko, each with their own cafeteria trays. “The foods here’s great, isn’t it?”
“Preprocessed cloned non-cholesterol!” Elko blurted.
“Fabricated meat food product!”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“I never did like greasy food,” Franz said. “It always gave me indigestion.”
“It must be a real change for you, Mr. Potter. Food-wise as well as everything else. I heard you made an over seven-thousand year leap.”
“Eight-thousand,” Franz said. “He’s from around six-thousand B.C.”
“Before Christ … imagine that!”
“Millennium!” Elko blurted. “Cosmos!”
“Wasn’t that right around the time of the invention of the written word itself?” Franz said. “Did written language exist during your time period?”
“Hieroglyphics!” Elko’s mouth spat the word out violently, then he was able to control himself. He drank some water and took a deep breath. “Crude writing was around. It existed. We regarded it with a mixture of suspicion and awe.”
“What do you think of it now?”
“Alphabet!” Once again, Elko put his hands over his mouth.
“Information!” he shouted into his hands. “Immortality!”
“In a few days they’re going to have you start writing your thoughts and reflections down,” Franz said. “It’s to give the students a database of quotes they can attribute to you as they’re learning.”
John leaned forward and whispered, “If you need any help, give Franz here a call. He wrote half of mine for me.”
Elko cautiously moved his hands away from his mouth. In a low, uneven voice he said, “Ill keep that in mind, thank you.”
#
Elko attended his first cocktail party as Raymond Burn’s special guest. It was his first time outside the Technica campus, and his first ride in a car. He kept closing his eyes because things seemed to be coming at him too fast, and by the time they reached Raymond’s large round house in the hills he was feeling nauseous.
There were several different levels to Raymond’s house, each one reached through the wide circular staircase in the center of the structure. Elko was dazzled by the architecture, and kept running his hands over the smooth, hard surfaces. Concrete! his mind shouted, but by now Elko had learned how to keep it to himself. Clay so hard it turned to stone! The top floor was one large round room with a shallow domed roof ornamented by a spectacular stained glass skylight. There were over-stuffed chairs, leather couches and ornate wooden cocktail tables everywhere, as well as white-uniformed butlers ready to serve. One white piano stood out near a large window, and next to it stood a large golden harp. To Elko’s amazement they played themselves.
Computerized! he thought. Automated!
The reason for the party was that Raymond was celebrating his elevation in status from 5th to 6th level professor at Technica.
The reason for his elevation, so Elko gathered, was the discovery by Raymond of Elko himself. Elko was considered a very important discovery for Technica, and he was honored as one of the most important additions to the Great Hall.
A cocktail party, as Elko soon discovered, was a loosely-conducted ritual where many people stood around sipping alcoholic drinks and saying meaningful things to each other. Elko was at a loss trying to ascertain what his part in it was, though people kept coming up to him and asking him all sorts of disturbing questions.
“How long did it take you to develop the wheel from concept to working model?”
“How far have you ever tried to calculate the value of p ?”
“Were you inspired by the moon?”
“Man, what I would have given to be your patent attorney.”
“When inventing the wheel, how many different shapes did you go through before deciding on a circle?”
In the middle of this, a very large, imposing man made his way over and stared at him with cold blue eyes. The man had an impressive mane of long white hair, and a deep, grumbling voice that seemed loud even when he was whispering. “You didn’t really invent the wheel, did you?” he said. “You got the idea from somewhere else.”
The room seemed to be utterly quiet just after the man asked this, and Elko gazed across the room to see Raymond. Raymond looked like he was choking on an ice cube or something. Elko knew instinctively that a lot was riding on this, and he shrugged and said, “My table gave me the idea. It fell over and rolled around the room.”
The white-haired man seemed a bit deflated by this answer, but across the room Raymond looked like he could breathe again.
Elko guessed that he’d said the right thing. The white-haired man, who’s name he found out later was Professor Gibson, muttered something about ideas having to come from “somewhere” but he didn’t argue the point.
A week later Elko ran across Raymond at Technica, and Raymond excused himself from a crowd of professors and went to go speak to him. “How’re your classes coming along, Elko? Any problems with the students?”
“Oh, no. The students are very bright and respectful.” It was true enough, as Elko was thrilled with the electric pottery wheel and the other new developments such as the plastic-based clays. He created bowls, vases and urns so fluid and beautiful they awed the students.