Unpopular Science

Chapter 29

The gods rewarded Jacob Fastbinder III for his skillful deeds. They presented him with the gift of a son.

“Weren’t you an intern last summer at zee headquarters in Tucumcari?” Fastbinder asked the teenager who showed up on his doorstep.

“Yep. Wanted to check you out. You’re an impressive dude. Pops.”

“I seriously doubt I am your sire,” Fastbinder said, and began to close the door in the boy’s face.

“Remember when you were scouting New Mexico for the new U.S. division? Like about sixteen years ago?” the kid blurted. “Remember the blond real-estate agent with the huge hooters? That’s my mom. I turned fifteen last Thursday. You do the math.”

Fastbinder did the math. Yes, that was about right. “Hey,” the kid grinned “I know it’s gotta be a real humdinger of a development. You probably wanna do a DNA test.”

“Yes.” Fastbinder was quite thoughtful. “That would be best.”

“What would you like? Blood? Urine? Sem—?”

“This will be sufficient.” Fastbinder snatched out a small handfull of the boy’s shaggy blond hair.

“Jeez Louise, Pops!” The kid grabbed his head. “That smarts!”

The kid showed up again three days later. “Heard you rushed it through the system,” the kid announced. “I’m legit, huh, Pops?”

Fastbinder was still feeling thoughtful. “Yes, zee tests confirm you are my progeny. How do you know I rushed it through zee system?”

“Pops, your email is totally unsecure. I’ve been eavesdropping on you for months! Nice to meet you. Dad, by the way.”

Fastbinder abruptly found himself in a wiry, unbreakable bear hug.

After that, Fastbinder played nice, inviting the kid inside.

“So, then, how is your mother?” He struggled to recall her name. He could not even remember her face, although the image of her lace-clad bosom was forever burned into his memory.

“Carla. She’s fine.”

“Er, and your name?”

“Jack. Jack Fast. Like it?”

“I am not certain.”

“My mom’s last name is Ashland, but she made my last name Fast. After you.”

“All right, Jack Fast, let us be frank with each other. What is it you want from me?”

Jack Fast looked disappointed. “Aw, Pops, I don’t want nothing from you, I mean, not like money or anything. I just wanted to get to know my old man. After all, you impress the heck out of me.”

Fastbinder became even more suspicious.

“Besides, if I was after cash or something, well, I wouldn’t go yanking your chain with all this family reunion stuff. I’d just head straight into extortion.”

Fastbinder glared.

“You know, the Culbreadth Control.” The kid laughed. “Whatsamatter, Pops, I throw you for a loop?”

Fastbinder was thrown for a loop. Maybe several loops. “How do you know about it?”

“Listen, Pops, you’ve done some really swift stuff, but you know diddly about internet security. You know that there’s all these electronic trails out there linking you to Culbreadth? It’s gonna get your ass into a serious sling if anybody ever starts looking. See, this guy Culbreadth comes to you with the control, right? That’s twenty-one months ago. You see the potential and make an offer, but Culbreadth wants way too much. So you hit-and-run him.”

‘It was not me who ran down Mr. Culbreadth,” Fastbinder retorted defensively.

“Whatever. The good news is, he’s met his maker, and you’ve still got his hard-copy files, so all you have to do is make sure the files in his computers are erased. Right? Which you did, fine, and you overwrote them really good and the hard drive was all shot and everything. But here’s what you forgot, Pops—there’s an electronic record of you getting into his system over the Net.”

“Where is this record!”

“Where ain’t it, Pops? Your ISP. His ISP. Every damn place between here and Albuquerque, and over the internet that can be like a hundred places.”

With that, the kid showed Fastbinder how to hack into the records of his internet service provider. To his astonishment, there was a complete record of every keystroke his computer made while he was tied into the remote PC belonging to Mr. Culbreadth. “Here’s where you overwrote all his CAD files. Here’s where you overwrote all his email. Here’s where you visited Tits of the Week. Don’t worry, though. I’m Jack the Hacker. I make it go away.”

With that, the teenager opened up a high-level Telnet connection into the servers and began tapping out commands that Fastbinder didn’t know. He watched the lines of his activity records evaporate. “Watch the record of the CAD file go away,” the kid said. They disappeared. “Now watch the email files erase command.” They vanished.

Fastbinder looked at the kid, who was looking cagey all of a sudden. “What about zee last one. You know, zee Tits of zee Week?”

“Oh, I’ll erase it, Pops,” the kid said seriously. “But that one is gonna cost ya.”

Fastbinder stared at the boy in disbelief. The kid exploded into hyena howls of hysteria. “I’m kidding, you dope!”

“I see.”

“Wow, Pops, you have got one humungous stick up your butt!”

“I suppose I do.”

“You need somebody like me around to help with butt-stick removal.”

“And to assist in butt-sling avoidance,” Fastbinder added. “By zee way, I like zee haircut.”

The grinning kid felt his new crew cut. “Had to do something. I had a big empty patch. Can I move in with you? Cause Carla is heading for Vegas.”

The kid moved in and Fastbinder went through culture shock, but the rewards far outweighed the annoyances. Jack Fast was as independent as they came. Fastbinder found himself with a son he didn’t have to be responsible for.

Fastbinder also discovered his kid was brilliant— like no other Fastbinder before him. “All of us were nothing but reverse engineers. You’re the first creative genius we’ve ever had,” he told Jack a few months later.

“Aw, jeez, Pops,” Jack said. “I just like fiddling with stuff is all.” He closed the small aluminum door on the power unit. “It’s just a proton beam chisel, really. Not even an accurate one.”

“This could be the greatest leap in portable power technology in decades,” his father insisted. “No one knew that proton beams could be used for this. They are too busy using zee technology to carve computer chips out of old porcelain teacups.”

“Let’s see if it works before you get all gushy,” the kid protested. But the proton beam generator worked very well. That was the thing about Jack—whatever he set his mind to create, he created. He told Fastbinder how, when he was eight, he had formed a boys club that played unbelievably sophisticated jokes on the townsfolk. The other boys couldn’t hold an interest in the club and girls at the same time, so it all fell apart when puberty hit the group. Jack had been more or less a highly sociable loner since seventh grade.

With access to Fastbinder’s desert workshop, Jack went into creative overdrive, churning out amazing— and sometimes amazingly useless—technological creations. Like his father, he loved old mechanical junk.

Fastbinder had brought all of the marvels from the old family home in Cologne, and for years he had been accumulating more antique apparatus through a global network of buyers. His collection was vast.

When Fastbinder saw the potential in the boy, he started coming up with funding. He even bought the boy a proton beam chisel, an obsolete experimental model that had to be shipped from Singapore. The shipping cost was more than the device, which the National University of Singapore Research Center for Nuclear Microscopy considered to be scrap.

The research center had enabled a whole new realm of microscopic chiseling to be performed with its research, but Jack Fast made it into something else entirely. His miniaturized devices, based on the technology from Singapore, created a microscopic burst of high-speed subatomic particles channeled into a tiny electric generator, converting it into large quantities of available electricity for extended periods.

“Will you patent it?” his father asked.

“Nah ” Jack said. “I’m keeping it a secret.”

“For what purpose?” his father asked.

“Pops, think about it. Ironhand will run for months with this baby inside him. Think what he could do. He could walk all the way to White Sands without needing a battery change. All the way and back.”