Franklin took the toothpick out of his mouth and inspected it. “Well, yeah. Couldn’t study in the beige.”
The next morning the registration clerk told Jacque he would have to wait until next semester to get a new roommate. Four months.
Actually, Franklin moved out a few weeks early. He left three teeth behind.
2 – Autobiography 2062
I’ve never used a voice typer before but I know the general idea you’ve got to damn you’ve got to press the character button and say period. . . . There. Comma,,,, It works, how about that. Paragraph button now.
My name is Jacque, spelling light comes on, Jacque Lefavre. If it were a French machine it probably would have spelled out “Jacques” and the hell with it, but no, that’s right the way it is up there, without the final ess.
This is for the archives, I mean ARCHIVES damn. Got to touch the capitals button then get off it before you say the word. Starting over.
This is for the Archives of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. Motivational analysis and training evaluation survey. Highly confidential, so get your eyes back where they belong.
Begin at the beginning, my freshman composition teacher used to say, and I could never figure out whether that was profound or stupid. But all right, the beginning. I was conceived sometime in the spring of 2024. We’ll skip the next eighteen years or so.
But I should say something about my father because that is important. And if what they say is true, that this won’t be read (spelling light again, crazy language) for another twenty years, then people will probably have forgotten who he was.
My dad’s-Robert Lefavre’s-shining hour was the paper he delivered at the 2034 American Physical Society meeting. It was called “The Levant-Meyer Translation: Physics as Wishful Thinking.” Look it up, it’s very convincing. It was well-received. But the next month, Meyer sent a mouse and a camera to Kruger 60 and they came back alive and full of exposed film, respectively. Via the LMT.
So in one day my father was reduced from Nobel candidate to footnote.
Even as young as I was, I could see that something broke in my father when that happened. Something snapped. With hindsight, now, I have sympathy for him. But he was a ruined man, and I grew up disillusioned with him, contemptuous and hostile.
It’s kind of a kick, watching this machine spell. I couldn’t spell contemptuous if my life depended on it. Now if they could only program it to put the semicolons in where they belong…
So as far as motivational analysis, I guess the main reason I became a Tamer was to hurt my dad.
After his anti-LMT thesis was demonstrated to be wrong, Dad took a sabbatical from the Institut Fermi and never went back. Maybe they asked him not to return, but I doubt it. I think it was just that he would have had to start work on applications of the Levant-Meyer Translation, like everyone else at the Institut. After spending six years trying to prove that there was no such thing as the LMT; that the freak accident that happened to Dr. Levant had nothing to do with matter transmission, but could be explained in terms of conventional thermodynamics.
So we gave up the nice Manhattan brownstone and moved upstate, away from Institut Fermi and the weekly seminar at Columbia, to a little junior college where Dad became one-third of the physics department.
He hated the job, but it gave him plenty of time outside of class. He would stay locked in his study all morning and evening, oblivious to us, trying to find where his thermodynamic proof had gone wrong.
Mother left in less than a year, and I left as soon as I was old enough to take the Tamer examination.
My nineteenth birthday came just three days after I graduated from gymnasium (we’d moved back to Switzerland in 2042), and that morning I was the first one in line at the AED employment office in downtown Geneva. The testing took two days, and of course I passed.
I went home and told Dad that I’d been accepted, and he forbade it. Those were the last words he ever said to me. I didn’t even see his face again until his funeral, nine years later.