"At Midnight, All the Doctors Scream"

"The Dreaming Machine"

The Oral History of Impractical Devices, 1

Read part 2

Samantha Waters

The machine took up half the room, and seemed to throb with energy—a whirl of motion and sound held together by wires, gears, shivering tubes, and pistons. The sound of it was unreal, like an automobile factory inside a submarine, but still I could just barely hear its creator shouting over the din: “This machine will end world suffering.” He was 10 years old.

It was the fifth grade science fair where I first met Percy Andrews. The auditorium was just stuffed full of this machine, I wasn’t even sure how they got it in the door, there was hardly any room for the rest of the presentations. It just sat there, hulking, and seemed to shiver with rage that anything else was even included.

Q. And what exactly was it? What did it do?

It was a, uh, perpetual energy machine if I remember right. The idea—well, Percy’s idea—was that this machine would generate more energy than it would consume, that the results would increase exponentially. A little bit of electricity was needed to get the thing moving but after that, it fed, or was supposed to, off the power it generated itself, forever.

It wound up blowing a hole in the power grid instead. The whole town was blacked out for nearly two days while they tried to fix the damage. One of the gears blew off and almost decapitated a teacher. You should have seen her face; she wasn’t even mad or scared, just kind of confused and awestruck.

Q. So who wound up winning that science fair, in the end?

Oh, I won. My hydroponic tomatoes won the science fair. My mom was quite pleased but Percy had already left, his parents weren’t even there I guess, and he just fled the embarrassment of failing. There was a canal behind the school with a small bridge over it, behind the transformers and past the hedges and the fence, entirely hidden but only a few feet from the school grounds—it was a place where kids used to fight or kiss after class without worrying about getting in trouble. I found Percy sitting there in the darkness of the blackout, his body small and trembling like some kind of baby animal. His legs hung over the railing of the bridge. I couldn’t tell if he was weeping or not, it was too dark—but I still remember watching him and thinking about his tears, how they might be falling into the canal and mixing with the water. How I could grow tomatoes from them, he was so beautiful.

It was the last thing he ever built. Until recently.