Chapter 2

Tim got off the school bus and ran home.

“Mom!” he yelled as he ran into the house. “Mom! My science fair project won first prize!”

“Your super top secret project went well?” said Mom.

“Yeah!” he said. “Look!” He removed his baseball cap revealing a mass of wires attached to his scalp.

“What did you do to your hair?!” shrieked Mom.

“It’ll grow back, Mom!” he said. “And it’s just sticky tape like they use to take EKGs and EEGs. It comes off easy. I left them attached to show you ‘cuz it takes a few hours to calibrate after you hook them up. Watch this, Mom!”

“You’re never gonna get a girl to go to the prom with you with your hair all chopped off like that!”

“I asked Cassie. She was always friendly to me and I thought she, maybe, liked me. She told me to go out for football and become the team captain and she’ll consider it.”

“There’s other girls,” said Mom.

“I asked a few girls. They all said basically the same thing. Fred and Andy and Boris all got the same answers from the girls they asked. So unless you’re a jock, you’re literally invisible to girls. But all the guys on the football team have about ten girlfriends each. Unless you’re a jock, it sucks to be a guy when it comes to girls.”

“Things sure have changed since my day,” said Mom. “An intelligent, attractive young man like you would have been in high demand in my day.”

He shrugged and plugged the mass of wires into the USB port of his laptop and launched his app. A moment later, a blurry, pixelated view of the kitchen appeared on the screen wiggling and wobbling oddly.

Mom looked at Tim, then at the screen, then at Tim, then at the screen.

“Okay,” she said. “You have a tiny camera somewhere on your head.”

“No, Mom!” he said. “This is what I’m seeing with my eyes! What I see with my eyes is what’s showing on the screen! Some Japanese scientists published a paper last year of an experiment they did. Their results were higher resolution and better stabilized than mine, but they had a lot more money to throw at it. Did you know that the human eye doesn’t look straight ahead –– it’s constantly wiggling around. That’s how it senses perspective and builds a complex image in the brain. If your eyes just looked straight ahead, all you’d be able to see clearly is a tiny spot of what you’re looking directly at.”

“Timothy! Shut that off right now!” she shrieked. “You’re gonna burn out your brain or something!”

Tim shut it off and removed the wires from his head.

“It’s totally safe, Mom,” he said. “It’s just detecting my brain waves. It’s not sending any signals back into my brain or doing anything intrusive.”

“Well, go get washed up for dinner,” she said. “Your father will be home from work soon.”

“Did I get any mail today?”

“You got a letter from some university,” she said and he dashed off to the table by the front door before she even finished her sentence.

“Yes!” he yelled.

“Don’t yell in the house!” she yelled back.

Tim returned to the kitchen. “I got accepted to the pre-med program at University of Metropolis! And they have an awesome cybernetics engineering program, too!”

“Congratulations!” said Mom. “Now go get ready for dinner.”