Luna was too tired from her long flight to watch TV on the
home theater or even turn on all the special lighting in the bedroom. She did spend a few minutes
watching the colors change in the Flame Face image above the sink in the bathroom as she brushed her
teeth and got ready for bed. She was asleep before she knew it and her dreams were vivid and
chaotic.
Luna dreamed about Koda as a restless young boy around
eight-years-old, sitting in his third grade classroom on the lower level of an old, 3-story
building. He is a good kid who does what he is told, but he is also very bright. He learns
quickly, and that means he becomes bored easily. He sat at his desk fidgeting with his feet as he
stared out the widow into the empty playground, watching the tetherballs slowly roll from side to
side against their poles in the wind. He studied the clock as it clicked off the seconds in
agonizingly slow motion, waiting for the bell to announce the recess period. It was a fine spring
day after a long winter and he couldn't wait to get outside to play.
When the bell finally rang all the kids exploded toward the
door but Koda stopped to get his coat and that meant he was late getting in line to play tetherball.
The minutes floated away as he stood there waiting for one kid after another to end the game by
getting the ball to wrap tight against the pole. At long last he finally got both hands on the ball
and was about to serve when the bell rang again. His opponent and all the other kids instantly took
off running to get back in the building and Koda felt depressed and frustrated.
He hit the ball and watched it swing from the rope tied to
the top of the pole, then hit the ball in the other direction, all the while trying to time his
delay so he wouldn't be the last kid in the door. The last kid in always got in trouble.
"Look at them," he thought as the kids all bunched together
in a huge mass in front of the double doors. "They all act like a heard of sheep."
But he had no time to lose. Koda let go of the tetherball
and ran toward the building as the last few kids were passing inside. It was too late. He was
already going to be the last one in. Then Koda stopped running.
"I am already in trouble," he thought, "so I may as well
just stay out here and have some fun."
The teacher standing by the door waved and yelled at him to
hurry up, but Koda just turned around and went back to the tetherball pole. The teacher yelled a
few more times then gave up and went inside the building.
"I am really in trouble now," he thought, "but what are they
going to do to me? They aren't going to beat me up or anything."
Koda knocked the tetherball around for a few minutes, only
to realize that playing alone was no fun, so he walked back to the building and looked at his
classroom through the window. The lowest level of the old building was a half-basement, so when
Koda sat on the wide window ledge he could look down at his classmates sitting at their desks below
him. Now and then someone would turn around to look at him and Koda pulled faces at them, causing
the kids to laugh, which made the whole class look at him. The teacher came to the back of the
class and pulled down all the window blinds.
Luna felt herself first hovering above the scene, then
sliding into Koda's consciousness as he turned around and sat on the window ledge thinking about how
much trouble he was in, but then something amazing happened. Koda came into true self awareness,
and so did Luna.
"I am not a sheep," he thought. "I am not going to do
things just because some adult tells me I have to do it. I have as much right to make my own
decisions as anyone else. I am a whole person, not just a kid, and I can think."
At that moment a feeling came over him unlike anything he,
or Luna, had ever experienced. He felt a power inside him that made him sit up straight and proud
and breath deeply. The air around him felt like it was filled with invisible energy. He looked up
at a big, white, fluffy cloud against the dark blue sky and the cloud seemed to almost glow, and
suddenly he knew something beyond all doubt. He knew he was going to be famous, like George
Washington, that he was going to do something amazing like invent anti-gravity. The feeling was so
profound he knew it would completely change his life.
Luna woke up, but only partially, feeling like she suddenly
understood why some people strive to achieve the impossible, but it was only a feeling and a moment
later one of the male teachers appeared at the nearby door to the school. Koda took off running
with the teacher hot on his trail. Koda ran into a different building, down the hall then out into
the playground again, leaving the man chasing him far behind. Thinking the chase was over, Koda
walked toward his classroom again, but the teacher burst out through another door. Koda ran into
the three-story building with the man right behind him. Koda raced up the wide, wooden staircase to
the second floor, then the third, then across the building to the stairs on the other side with the
man falling far behind. Down the stairs he went, back down to the first floor. Not knowing where
to go, Koda ran into into his classroom, slamming the door behind him and rushed to sit at his desk.
Everyone in the classroom was so stunned they just stared at
him. The door flew open and the teacher who had been chasing him bust in.
"Where is he?!" yelled the man.
Koda had been holding his breath so his rapid breathing
wouldn't give him away, but he finally had to gasp for air. The man grabbed him by both arms but
Koda hung onto his desk. Koda, the desk and the attached chair were lifted high above the other
kids as the teacher carried him to the front of the room then scraped the legs of the desk against
the floor, forcing Koda to let go, sending the desk and its contents tumbling. Many of the kids
were screaming as the man dragged Koda out of the room by his arm.
"That's how Koda began his new life as an independent
thinker," thought Luna, as she drifted into another dream.
Boris Chrochenko was also an independent thinker. He was
only 22-years-old when he received his doctorate in engineering and became a cosmonaut. He met his
wife Nadia when they were both training to work on the International Space Station and it is rumored
that they were the first couple to have sex in space, but they may not have been the first. After
their first mission Nadia helped train new cosmonauts and Boris worked his way up the ranks to
become head of procurement for the entire Russian space agency.
Boris was both ambitious and clever, so it wasn't long
before many millions of rubbles allocated to the space program had somehow found their way into his
secret offshore accounts, and into the hands of his many mistresses living high all across the
world. Kickbacks to many people in power, and his fame as a cosmonaut, insured Boris would never go
to jail, but he had many enemies. His way of manipulating the books had caused several senior
project managers to lose their jobs under charges of corruption and nearly everyone in the agency
hated him. His wife Nadia was among them, yet they remained together to keep up appearances.
Boris was nearing retirement in 2031 when the head of the
space agency discovered that Boris had been sleeping with his wife for many years. It just happened
that a disaster on Mars enabled the head of the agency, along with Nadia, to devise an ingenious
plan to get even with the famous cosmonaut.
The four men who recently landed on Mars discovered that a
valve on one of the fuel tanks had malfunctioned and all the fuel had slowly leaked out without
anyone knowing. They had no way to return to Earth unless a supply ship was launched immediately.
That is how Boris "bravely volunteered" to fly alone to Mars and avoid going to prison. He was on
the launch pad a week later, and during that week many of the people who hated Boris found their own
ways to get even.
The entire food supply consisted of nothing but frozen
salisbury steak meals, the music library contained only Russian folk music and the video library had
only Chinese musicals without subtitles. The more than 1,000 ebooks were all identical copies of
the Tibetan Book of the Dead written in sanskrit. Aside from his spacesuit the only clothing on
board was women's lingerie, and Nadia supplied the coup de gras by spiking the water supply with
estrogen and human growth hormone.
Boris was on his way to Mars before he discovered most of
the details of his unusual accommodations, and it took about 3 weeks before Nadia explained why his
nipples were so sore and swollen. As his breasts continued to grow Boris began to drink his own
urine to avoid dosing himself any further, till the ground crew let him informed him that excess
estrogen was also in his urine.
The hero cosmonaut had to pretend all was well in his
broadcasts back to adoring fans on Earth, but after 8 months he finally snapped and blurted out the
facts during a "live" broadcast, which was delayed by over an hour so his outburst could be edited
out.
By that time Boris had a fine new pair of breasts and his
penis had shrunk to a third it's normal size. He was also speaking with a bit of a lisp and his
behavior had become rather swishy, though he hadn't really noticed. The audience back home noticed
and the great hero was becoming a laughing stock. Nadia and the head of the agency liked to uplink
videos of the two of them having sex in Boris's magnificent bedroom, one time pointing the camera
out the window to praise Boris for allowing a refugee camp to be set up on the sprawling grounds of
his estate.
Luna felt like a voyeur watching the sex tape scene, which
made her uncomfortable and confused. The scene in front of her dissolved into the blackness of the
bedroom at Koda's place, and she wondered what happened to the little boy.
A moment later she was a waitress pouring coffee for a long
haired man in his fifties, sitting at the counter in a restaurant writing in a notebook filled with
text next to little diagrams.
"What do you write in that notebook all the time?" she asked
the man.
He looked up and flashed that million dollar grin.
"Mostly I just think on paper," he said, "but sometimes I
get stuck for hours working on an invention that is supposed to be impossible. I'm sorry I take up
the seat for so long. I know you need the turnover to make tips."
"You tip 100% of your bill, so I don't mind, though it would
be nice if you had something besides coffee sometime and tipped that well."
Koda had been going to coffee shops pretty much every day
since he was a teenager. Now in his mid-fifties, his habit was to go alone and sit at the counter,
chain smoking and writing in his journal. As a starving-artist who had dedicated his life to
creating music, going out for coffee was about the only social activity he could afford.
"So what is this mysterious invention?" asked Luna.
"Inertial propulsion," said Koda, smiling broadly because he
knew she had no clue what he was talking about.
"It's similar to anti-gravity, but different," he said. "Do
you know what centrifugal force is?
"Ummm, not really," said Luna.
"Imagine you fill a small bucket with water," said Koda,
"then you tie a rope to the handle and swing the bucket in a circle around you. You can even swing
the bucket upside down above your head and the water won't come out, because centrifugal force
pushes the water back into the bucket. Centrifugal force can appear to defy gravity, and I am
trying to figure out how to design a machine that would convert the inertia of spinning masses into
directional momentum."
Luna stared blankly.
"I'm sorry," said Koda. "I can't expect most people to
understand those terms, so it's my fault if you don't understand. Let me put it another way.
"When you throw a baseball upward as high as you can," he
said, "the ball keeps going up even after you stop pushing on it, because your hand put a form of
energy called inertia into the ball. Gravity acts against the inertia, and when the inertia runs
out, the ball falls back down. What I am trying to do would be like building a little machine you
put inside the ball that keeps adding inertia, so the ball would keep going, all the way to outer
space and beyond."
"I think I get it, sort of," said Luna. "Have you figured
it out yet?"
"Yes, and no," said Koda. "I think I know how to make it
work, but the design requires a lot of machine work I can't afford, and no one will finance it
because every scientist and engineer out there knows that inertial propulsion is impossible. It's
because Newton's third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
If you push something up, something else gets pushed down, so in a closed system no net motion can
occur."
"So why do you even try?" asked Luna.
"When I was eight-years-old I had this experience that
changed my life," said Koda, "where I was certain I would do something great like invent
anti-gravity. Then about 20 years ago I had this dream where I saw some gold colored balls moving
in a circular pattern that was beautiful to watch. I got out of bed and walked across my dark
bedroom and suddenly realized I could still see the balls moving in that same pattern, while I was
wide awake. I have never experienced a vision like that before, or since, and because it happened
about a week after I started wondering how UFOs might operate, I knew that vision was some sort of
metaphysical message telling me how to build something that worked like anti-gravity."
Koda continued talking but Luna wasn't listening. She found
herself in complete darkness watching about 6 gold-colored balls the size of soccer balls moving in
a spiral pattern as they followed each other around in a horizontal circle about 6-feet-wide. As
the balls moved counter clockwise in a horizontal circle, they would come up near the center of the
circle then move outward over the top, go down on the outside then come back up near the center of
the circle again. The balls were moving in spirals as they went around in a circle.
Luna found herself back in the restaurant with the coffee
pot still in her hand.
"If the balls were moving in a circle really fast," said
Koda, "centrifugal force would make it really hard to push those weights down on the outside of the
circle. But when the weights are lifted up again they are near the center of horizontal rotation
where the centrifugal force would be much less. The means it would require much more force to push
the weights down on the outside than to lift them up again on the inside. Since every action has an
equal and opposite reaction, when you push down with more force the device has to go up. I win… I
think."
"Can't you build some sort of test device to find out if it
will work," asked Luna.
"I did, sort of," said Koda. "Like I said, it requires a
lot of machine work to spin weights around without everything going out of balance and shaking
everything apart, so I built something I hoped would be similar enough to work. I made a box-shaped
frame with a motor spinning a vertical shaft in the center. Then I mounted 2 wheels vertically on
opposite sides of the shaft. The first motor would rotate the wheels horizontally. Then I used two
separate motors to spin the wheels vertically. If you painted a dot on the top of the wheels, those
dots would move in a spiral pattern around a horizontal circle.
"I didn't have to make the thing fly to prove it would work,
it just had to move in a straight line across the floor. So I put some marbles on the floor to act
as ball bearings, turned the box on its side, turned on the motors that spun the wheels, then turned
on the main motor."
Koda paused to create a dramatic effect.
"Yeah, yeah," snorted Luna. "What happened?"
"The box moved!" said Koda with sarcastic enthusiasm. "It
just sat there wobbling and slowly rotating in place. Total fucking failure."
"So why do you keep working on it?" asked Luna, finally
setting the coffee pot on the counter because her arm was tired.
"I keep trying to come up with a different way to do it, a
different method that would be easier to build and test, but all my other tests have failed. But
here's why I still think it might work.
"Imagine an astronaut inside the space station," he said.
"The astronaut is a closed system. If he (or she) is floating there and the astronaut kicks and
twists his arms and legs, jerking himself around as much as possible, according to Newton's third
law of motion he should be incapable of moving anywhere, but chances are he will drift in one
direction or another. If this were not true, any astronaut who happens to find himself out of reach
of one of the walls would be stuck there till some other astronaut came over to help him move. Any
movement at all is evidence that a closed system can move. Every action still has an equal and
opposite reaction, but there would be time delays between the reactions and that might explain why
the astronaut can move just a little.
"But there is a simple test ," he went on, "that will prove
whether my main design will actually work or not.
"The experiment involves two astronauts on the space
station. The first holds masses of equal weight in each hand while another astronaut gets him
spinning like an ice skater. The spinning astronaut starts out holding the masses directly above
his head, then quickly spreads his arms out to his side and brings them down near his knees in one
long motion, like a swimmer doing the breast stroke. Because the mass in his hands has moved lower
on his body, the astronaut will have moved in the direction of his head. Everyone knows this is
true. If he moves his arms back up over his head by reversing the initial movement, everyone agrees
that he will return to essentially the same place he started.
"But here is how we find out once and for all if inertial
propulsion is possible. After the spinning astronaut quickly pulls his weighted hands down from
above his head in a wide, sweeping movement where his arms are extended straight out from his
shoulders before being brought down toward his knees, he then raises his hands back up far over his
head while keeping his hands as close to his body as possible.
"If I am correct," says Koda, " when the cycle is complete
and the hands are once again at the starting point, the astronaut will have moved slightly in the
direction of his head. By repeating this process the astronaut should be able to swim through the
air to reach the other side of the cabin.
"It is a very simple experiment to do," says Koda, " and if
it works it means it will be possible to take huge payloads into space, and to travel to other
planets, using nothing but solar power. If it doesn't work, a couple of astronauts will have wasted
5 minutes of their time -- and one of them might get pretty dizzy."
Luna began laughing much to much to be a response to such a
slight bit of humor.
While Koda was talking about astronauts in space, Luna
remembered her dream about the cosmonaut on his way to Mars and she suddenly found herself looking
right at him.
Boris was wearing his french maid outfit while cleaning the
spacecraft and doing his laundry when his wife contacted him on the video link. (By 2030 quantum
entanglement was being used for faster than light communication so the 20 minute delay in the radio
signal wasn't an issue and they could talk in real time.)
"Nice outfit," said Nadia. "What have you got clipped to
your waist?"
"A couple of urine bags," said Boris. "I was taking them to
the recycler and clipped them on when I pulled the laundry out of the washer. The fucking bra is
caught on the spindle inside the washer. Damn! I'm stuck again."
Boris had moved away from the walls of the spacecraft and
couldn't reach anything, so he was just stuck there, floating. He jerked around trying to float in
one direction or another but it didn't seem to help.
"See if you can reach the bra," said Nadia.
One end of the black bra was floating outside of the
circular opening of the recessed washing machine, fluttering slightly in the breeze from the air
circulation system. Boris stretched out his hand as far as he could but could barely manage to tap
the bra strap with the tips of his fingers. He finally managed to squeeze the material between his
thumb and forefinger and give a little pull, but the material slipped away from him. Still, it was
enough of a pull for him to very slowly float toward the washer. When the bra fluttered outward
again, he grabbed it in his hand and pulled. He moved toward the washer with the bra still in his
hand, which hit the start button, and the bra began to spin rapidly. Afraid to let go because he
didn't want to be stuck floating in the cabin again, Boris hung on and soon found himself spinning
faster and faster.
"Let go you moron!" yelled Nadia.
Boris let go but by then he was spinning rapidly in the
center of the cabin.
"This is just fucking great," said Boris, sarcastically.
"Now what am I going to do?"
Nadia laughed and laughed, then she called over the other
engineers in the control center and everyone was practically rolling on the ground. Boris was
spinning in the middle of the cabin, swinging his arms and kicking the high heels on his feet, with
the spinning causing his french made outfit to pull far away from his bra-less boobs,
"Wait. Wait," said Nadia, trying to catch her breath. "I
remember reading this book called Crazy Genius years ago. All you have to do is hold those urine
bags in your hands while doing the breast stroke and you should be able to swim to the wall.
Boris unclipped the bags, wishing one of them was a gun so
he could kill himself.
(a "like" or "share" will refer your friends to the first chapter)