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onion-culture · 2 months ago

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Yes. Please. I, personally, need to see how much more detail can be put into the disheveled downfall of that Quizboy. It's good for the soul

BOY GENIUS | Prologue | Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5 | on AO3

↓ Chapter 1 below the fold ↓

↳ BACK TO FAILURES OF SCIENCE INDEX

I've been drawing my theoretical concept for a Conjectural Technologies: ORIGINS spin-off for months, so I finally committed to putting words to it. Your eyes will be better off reading on A03 but I'll post chapters here if it gets it to people who'd want to read this sort of thing.

Fifteen years pass (more or less). Norman has Stormed. The Man from Hope gets inaugurated. Downtown LA smolders while the Balkans are sparking. And then this shit...

Chapter 1: I'm A Loser, Baby

“Fffzzztttt… just your average kids but--- chhhhh…. their parents say there’s a problem! Help! They’re teenagers now and wow, they’re out of control!”

Plink! A bottle cap ricocheted off to the upper left. Jenny remained unfazed, being as she was pre-recorded a thousand miles away in Chicago.

“Fffzzztt… to a MAKEOVER or it’s off to BOOTCAMP! Today, on the Jenny Jones Show….fzzzztt….”

A second bottle cap grazed Jenny Jones’s shoulder as she turned to a stage full of stewing parents sitting next to children in corpse paint, 12” platforms and spiked mohawks straight out of central casting for “miscellaneous dystopian thugs” in a Chuck Norris film.

Another bottle cap arced high and dinged off the bent-wire-hanger aerial, the static finally consuming the image entirely.

“Got it. Pretty fucking good for having no goddamn depth perception,” Billy slurred to an empty trailer, cracking open the last of the Zima four-pack. He rubbed the eyelid over his missing eye, no idea where his eyepatch went but didn’t care.

“’Zima’ means winter in Polish, Slovene, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, and Czech? There’s some fucking trivia for you,” he mumbled while choking down his 4th bottle of the day, trying not to think about how tasted like drinking scotch tape soaked in air freshener. Or like flat Sprite mixed with aluminum foil and rubbing alcohol. Zima was clear (all the best products were these days) and it was cheap. The TV commercial for Zima showed irreverent hip young people laughing with some loser in a dumb hat who couldn’t pronounce his esses right so maybe the product spoke to him. Most importantly, the product made him drunk. He laid back in his nest of empties and snack food and trash on the couch.

The door squeaked and rattled as Pete White struggled to open it with his foot, his arms full of packages. He staggered a few feet and he released his armload onto the kitchenette counter into a postal landslide. He turned back to notice Billy on the couch where he had left him— unshowered, unshaved, in the same dirty clothes, scowling with a smoldering cigarette hanging off his lip.

“Encounter: level 12 Alcoholic Divorced Dad Dwarf of Middle Earth. Plus-one against child support.”

“Ugh. Shut up,” Billy muttered as flicked ash into a branded Conjectural Technologies coffee mug. One of 500 White had ordered to “get their name out there,” and then left in a pile in the storage closet.

“Aw, Jeeze,” Pete grumbled, fanning the smokey air with last month’s issue Sassy from the mail pile, “You know it’ll be impossible to get the smell out of the curtains. Do you have to smoke in here? Huh?”

“Do you have to put magnetic poetry all over my hand when I’m sleeping?” Billy angrily raised his magnet-crusted mechanical hand, shedding “majestic” “symphony” and “purple” as he moved it.

White smirked, internally delighted, “I couldn’t find a pen so I was leaving you a note reminding you to get a haircut. I feel like I’m living with a scale model of Snake Pliskin.”

“WhatEVER,” Billy snarled. He didn’t disagree his long greasy hair made him look like an Irish Setter drowning in Crisco but what did it matter? Nothing mattered.

White frowned. “You’re really harshing the dynamics of our double act, pally, with this self-pity thing. I can’t play dryly acerbic without a naive optimist to play off of, y’know.”

“I’m just…” Billy killed the last of the bottle and pitched it weakly into the pile, his anger drained, “You know if I went to MIT like I planned to I would have graduated this summer.”

He flicked “languid” and “cacophony” off his wrist, “Maybe I’d even have a doctorate, too. I dunno.”

White busied himself with the mail. Billy wasn’t throwing out accusations yet but his train of thought could turn ugly for him depending how the ZIMA hit him.

“I was the greatest mind in a generation. What am I doing with my life?” Billy muttered, staring at the burning end of his cigarette. Melancholy, “I shelve books part-time at a public library! An ape could do my job,”

“An ape would probably do it better! Because they have longer arms. Oh, and they could climb the shelves!” White chimed in, “But they’d probably, like, crap everywhere so that’s a minus.”

“Nights I wash fucking dishes at a ‘50s-themed diner in a mall.” A sudden rage, “A WILDLY INACCURATE ‘50s-themed diner!” He jumped to his feet.

“We Built This City on Rock & Roll — released 1985 by Starship — does not belong on the house music! ‘Chicken fingers’— invented 1976 in Savannah, GA — do not exist in 1955! I tell the general manager all the time, but does he care? Where’s the stifling suburban malaise? Where’s the simmering feeling of nuclear dread? This so-called ‘theme’ your institution perpetrates is willful disinformation!”

White relaxed; this rant could go on for hours and he wasn’t the target.

Billy concluded, “Being an adult SUCKS.”

“Takes most people more than a year into it to figure that out. Still a genius. Congratulations, Billy,” White said.

Billy sighed, exhausted again. He crawled back to the couch.

“I finally cleared out the PO Box.,” White said, indicating the packages on the kitchen counter.

“Mine. Mine. Mine,” White claimed a stack of music mags and mailers from bedroom record labels out of the mail pile. He tapped a box from a scientific supply warehouse, “That’s probably the catalyst solution we ordered for the mind control experiment.” He found a couple padded envelopes in the pile and shook them, “VHS tapes. From your internet super highway nerd friends. Go soak in nostalgia. Get the stink off you.”

Billy perked up slightly. White raised his arm to toss them over but Billy shrieked, “No! Don’t! You’ll damage them.”

White rolled his eyes, and walked the packages to the couch, “They made it through the mail from —” he checked the labels “— Murfreesboro just fine. They’re not going to break eight feet from me to you.” He stacked the envelopes on the top of Billy’s head and joined him on the couch.

White sorted the remaining mail into piles. More supplies for Conjectural Technologies projects. Bills. Catalogues. Another letter from Billy’s mother — oof, save that for later. He wanted to keep Billy’s mood up for as long as possible. He pocketed it.

“Whoa,” gasped White.

“What?” muttered Billy, tearing open the first envelope.

“We got an invitation from the World Super Science Forum,” White said, puzzled. A glossy brochure as nearly big as a Trapper Keeper slid out of the envelope, sparkling with metallic ink. It looked like a wedding invitation for a giant who also happened to be an art director.

“As if,” Billy scoffed without even looking up from his coveted “105: The Ticking Monkey. Long Edit. KTLA Cartoon Cavalcade. NOTE: Missing Closing Credits'' VHS tape. All the heavy negotiation on the alt.fan.rustyventure USENET group to set up this trade had finally paid off.

“It’s gotta be the sign,” White gestured to the ceiling, above which $700 ($1344 today) of neon he commissioned to flash their company name to a rarely-traveled back road in the middle of the desert, tripling their electricity bill. “Neon demands respect.”

Billy was a million miles away, squinting at the tape’s edges for potential cracks in transit and mentally tabulating how many more episodes eluded his decades-long quest for a complete collection of the series.

“Word must be getting out about our…,” White beamed in salesman mode before stumbling on the landing, “Uh, work?”

Conjectural Technologies didn’t do shit and both of them knew it. But here was an invitation to the premier professional Super Science conference in the US.

“It’s in Seattle this year. That’s like the coolest city in the world right now.”

“Frasier lives there,” Billy said flatly. He was still woozy. Zima-drunk.

“It’s basically the new Vatican,” White agreed, “Ground zero for both the tech and expensive coffee industry and the home of ‘the Seattle sound.’”

“They throw fish. In the market,” Billy said, suddenly very sleepy. Why did he drink so much Zima? Oh, he remembered it was because he hated himself and his garbage-failure life.

White read through the brochure like a kid tearing into a Sears Christmas Wishbook, “Technology demos. Lectures. Hey, we’d get to go to an awards dinner at the top of the Space Needle. This looks so cool.”

“We should go,” Billy said, drifting into semi-consciousness.

“Yeah!” White turned to the final page of the invitation. Early registration - $550* a person. Does not include airfare. “Oh.”

He showed Billy the price without speaking. They both sat silently. Living paycheck to paycheck, that was astronomically outside their budget.

“THIS is why Super Science is dying out,” Pete said angrily, slapping the brochure, “It’s like, you gotta be a legacy or already have a compound or a ton of government contracts to even pay for this shit. It’s MORIBUND! The same old scientists. Same old IDEAS. What about the scrappy independents on the fringes! THAT’s where the next big thing is coming from.”

“A lot of passion from a ‘scientist’ who does jack shit,” Billy snickered, half-asleep.

Pete looked at the brochure again, “It’s too bad we didn’t get invited earlier. It says here ‘Boy Genius’ admission is half-price.”

“Makes sense,” Billy muttered, “Trying to stem the tide of potential future science geniuses defecting to Silicon Valley. No kid even thinks about going into Super Science anymore.”

“AND their parent/guardian/sidekick/lab assistant can plus-one for free — I’m at least two of those!”