Chapter Nine
Maxwell spent the entire evening
tossing and turning under his covers. He couldn't quite manage to get
comfortable, and when he finally did manage to pass out for a couple of
minutes, he'd have the most intense and realistic dreams. Strangely, it was all the same dream over
and over. He dreamt his father was still alive, and that they were doing
the things they used to enjoy doing together such as watching movies and
playing chess. The dreams made Maxwell about as happy
as he could ever remember being. His mother was there as well, and
for one long evening it no longer mattered if he was poor, awkward, or
misunderstood, because his whole family was there and they loved him very, very
much.
Sadly, each dream ended
with his father leaving against Maxwell's wishes. His father had to do something 'very
important,' and in the blink of an eye was gone.
Once he'd woken up to the
shrill squeak of his alarm, the hard reality that he would never see his father
again weighed heavily on him. The
thought was almost more than he could bear.
He was starting to miss his father very much, and bizarre as it was he
wished he could go back to forgetting the whole thing. In light of this
all, Maxwell saw no reason to even get out of bed.
As he looked at his alarm clock one more
time, he realized that for better or worse he was going to have to get his
behind moving. After he turned on the light, he jostled around on his
desk to get his bookbag ready and uncovered a familiar piece of paper that just
so happened to be a report card from the last grading period. Under his grades
in red ink, Ms. Butternut had written, 'Student is not meeting
expectations'.
Why'd he leave his grade card on his
desk like that only to remind him of how he was such a screw up? Why
didn't he just throw the stupid thing away when he had the chance?
Once he was completely dressed, he remembered
that he was suspended. This prospect actually brightened his spirits a
bit, for he wouldn't have to listen to any boring lectures or worry about any
humiliation he'd have to endure at the hands of his classmates for at least the
remainder of the day.
His thoughts gradually shifted
to Premi, and how he would probably never see her again. For
whatever reason, this stung Maxwell very deeply. He wasn't the sort of
kid to develop crushes very easily. And speaking of crushes, how was he
going to deal with his report on evolution now that Jenna Myers was in his
group? He was surely going to bumble his way into making a complete ass
out of himself in front of her, there was no doubt about it. His eyelids, of course, continued twitching
relentlessly.
Since he was already awake, he knew
he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep, so he proceeded downstairs. His
mother was already sitting at the table with her newspaper of course, sipping
away at her coffee.
"I want you to spend some time
studying today, you got me? Just because you aren't going to go to
school, doesn't mean you get to sit around and not be productive."
"I know, mom," Maxwell
grumbled. He poured a bowl of cereal and began to eat. He had a
project to prepare for anyhow.
Once his mother left, he grabbed his
books and began reading. He was going to have to prepare if he had
any plans of not looking like a retard in front of Jenna Myers.
Science. Maxwell
knew science. It was probably
the one thing in the whole world that he was actually good at, and he was very
good at understanding science. As he
thumbed through his text book he began to realize, to his own amazement, that
he hadn't once in the entire school year cracked it open, and yet science
was the class that he consistently received 'A's in, never failing.
It was automatic; for as long as he could remember, he had a knack for
science and would greedily devour any book his mother would get him,
whether on physics, chemistry, or biology.
He loved the organization of it all,
how everything could be taken apart and reduced into component parts.
He felt like that somehow, when he looked into the whole messy world, that
at least he could find something clean and straightforward where things could
be broken down and understood. It was his secret hope to someday
become a scientist, for he believed, as most scientific thinkers, that the
natural world is knowable and all can be understood through science.
Maxwell wanted to know everything about the universe, from quasars to quarks,
it didn't matter.
He began scanning through the first
chapter when something caught his eye. It was a computer. There was
nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the machine, however it did look eerily like the very same computer that
he had in his bedroom. The computer he had in his bedroom was so very
old, and was a hodgepodge collection of components that he had assembled himself,
with the help of his father. All the other kids in the class had newer,
sleeker, faster computers. Maxwell tinkered with his all the time, and in
this way was able to upgrade it to the point where it worked as well as any of
the newer models.
On closer inspection, Maxwell noticed
something extra peculiar. Was he seeing
things again? Maxwell rubbed his
eyes. The computer on the page was blinking. He looked up from the
book and out the window, and rubbed his eyes again. The twitch was
gone. He looked back down at the book
and the computer was back to normal.
Must have been a hallucination, he
thought to himself. He started reading the text underneath the picture.
His eye lids started flickering once
again. So much so that it became incredibly difficult to see what was on
the page below.
Then, the most extraordinarily crazy
idea popped into his head. Maxwell believed at that very moment that he
might be onto something huge. It was a crazy idea as well, by all
conceivable means it was an absurd idea, but Maxwell was beyond caring about
absurdity at this point. He had a psychiatrist afterall, had he
not? He put down his science textbook and slowly walked into the living
room.
There in his living room, sitting
against the wall, was a bookshelf. On the book shelf were
encyclopedias. Maxwell had already read through most of them. They
were very old encyclopedias, but he didn't mind. There were lots of cool
scientific concepts explained within the pages of these books. He
actually spent many hours with his face buried deep inside them.
'A-AN',
no, ... book two, 'AN-AZ', no, not that one either, ... book three, yes, that's
the one!, 'BA-BL.' He flipped
through the pages and began scribbling down some notes. His eyelids began
twitching even more furiously and pronounced than ever before. 'This is a
good thing though,' he thought. For the first time since it had begun,
Maxwell was actually glad his eyelids were blinking.
He hadn't noticed until that very
morning how there seemed to be a strange regularity that existed inside these
twitches. One eye would blink a few times, then the other, then a pause,
then back to the first, then the second, and then another pause, and so on it
went for a couple of moments, only to start back over again.
It was a repeating pattern!
Your eyes are 'expressing', ... they're trying to say something! Of course! Maxwell’s eyelids were trying
to express something through the mathematical language BINARY!' It was a crazy notion, but it was worth a
look. Maxwell recalled the writing of his all time favorite author, Carl
Sagan, about how an advanced alien civilization had sent humanity schematics
for a machine, and had done so using binary. It was mathematics, after
all, that was the language of the very universe itself. It was language
of science.
And so Maxwell went, scribbling away
on his notebook. The left eye represented “0” and the right eye,
“1.” Using different combinations of
zero and one, he was able to spell out alphabetically what his eyelids were
expressing.
What he was left with was something even more confusing. Once he had translated the blinks, Gnothiseauton was written across his
paper. This made no sense whatsoever.
Discouraged, he crumbled the paper and threw it into the garbage, but
then the blinking suddenly stopped. 'Maybe there really is something to this message?' He
pulled the crumpled paper out of the garbage, unwadded it, and read it again,
out loud, "Gnothiseauton." He got on the computer and typed it into the
search engine.
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