The Novagem Read online

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  Jon Thorpe

  Copyright 2010 Jon Thorpe

  One

  There is an antique store. I have sat, on many occasions, in the small café directly across the street from the antique store and sipped from a white mug of black coffee or sometimes a small cup of espresso. I sit and watch the antique store window. The store attracts few customers. Once in a while a middle-aged housewife, dressed a little too formally, enters the store, lingers for a few minutes, and then leaves, oftentimes empty-handed, sometimes with a small item wrapped in brown paper and fastened with twine.

  There is a girl in the store.

  She sits behind the counter.

  She is still young.

  She fascinates me.

  Two

  I have been in the antique store maybe four times. It takes a great amount of courage for me to enter the store because when I see the girl I become tongue-tied and lose my train of thought. I have tried to enter the store with a plan, a plan that will lead her to accept an invitation to come across the street and sit with me in the café and share a coffee and maybe one of the fresh-baked pastries.

  During what was perhaps my third visit to the antique store the girl looked up from her thick paperback book and asked me if I needed any assistance. I think I stared a little too long into her eyes because she looked away and then turned her attention back to her reading.

  “Please let me know if you need any help,” she said flatly without looking up.

  I waited a long moment before moving.

  I wandered into the back of the store where the smell of stale perfume seemed to linger.

  I picked up a tattered book on the 1915 San Francisco Pan-Pacific Exposition. I turned it over in my hands. The back of the book was blank. I opened the book randomly to a photograph of the Tower of Jewels. I read that the tower was nearly 40 stories high and covered with hundreds of thousands of novagems which reflected the sunlight and glittered spectacularly in the night when illuminated by the exposition’s 50 searchlights. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in San Francisco after sunset to see the miracle of artificial illumination.

  I gazed for a long moment into the photograph. The world therein seemed distant and yet so close, romantic yet terrifying, filled with possibilities and yet apocalyptic. I closed the book and thought for a long moment before I opened the book’s front cover and read, inscribed in elegant cursive: “Artificial light not only reveals the beauty of decoration and architecture but enthralls all mankind with its own unlimited powers.”

  I returned the book to its place.

  The words rolled over in my mind.

  And then I understood.

  I was cleansed.

  I had a sense of purpose.

  I finally knew what I would say to her.

  I returned to the front of the store.

  I stood in front of the girl until she could not help but look up.

  “You’re disturbing me,” she said flatly.

  “Artificial light not only reveals the beauty of decoration and architecture but enthralls all mankind with its own unlimited powers.”

  “Would you please leave?”

  “I will find you a novagem”

  “I’m going to call the police.”

  “The sun is not a star.”

  “What?”

  “I said the sun is not a star. There are no such things as stars. The concept of stars is nothing more than a lie to hide reality from us.”

  “The sun is indeed a star and I am now calling the police.”

  She picked up the phone and began dialing.

  “I am not leaving,” I stated. “I am not leaving until you believe me.”

  She spoke into the receiver and hung up the phone.

  “The police are on their way.”

  “I will wait for them.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “The sun is not a star because a star has limited powers and what sort of God would create such a thing that could bested by our own mortal creations?”

  The girl stood and walked out of the store and stood outside in front of the window, protected from the sunlight by the store’s awning.

  I waited until the police arrived to arrest me.

  On the way out the store I mentioned to the girl once again that I would find a novagem and when I had it in my possession l would bring it to her and then she would understand, then she would love me.

  Three

  “And you are correct, you are a productive member of society.”

  I nodded.

  “I am more productive since I have discovered the truth,” I replied. “All I need to do now, all I hope to do, is demonstrate this larger truth to the rest of the world.”

  “And how will we do that?”

  “With funding.”

  “And you hope to procure funding from me?”

  “Of course.”

  Lazlo Taylor Malfeasance, the great Silicon Valley venture capitalist, author of the self-published classic Simulation Theory Now!, dropped my crude, hand-written on yellow legal paper proposal onto the table. He had circled my occupation, entrepreneur, in black Sharpie marker. I had discovered Malfeasance after hundreds of hours of internet research and hundred of additional hours networking with individuals who were already wired into what I was happy to discover was my not so original theory on the sun being an artificial source of light. There were many disagreements as to what type of artificial light the sun generated, some wondered if it was florescent, some argued for incandescent, while a growing, but vocal minority were claiming that the sun had to be halogen. But even though we had our disagreements, we all were in accord that the sun certainly could not be the magnificent fusion reactor that we were brainwashed into believing by our elementary school science teachers.

  Many of us Artifices, as we called our community, extended the artificial analysis to the entire universe and argued that all of us were synthetic and that the whole notion of organic molecules was a myth set into motion to hide a truth that many would believe too horrifying. However, I could not extend my personal belief too far in this direction and instead persisted in arguing that only the sun and the stars were artificial and that all else was certainly organic enough, for not even God could be that cruel.

  “And you still persist in your belief in God?” Malfeasance asked and I nodded.

  “I do.”

  “I like you. You’ve got spirit.”

  “Thank you.”

  This meeting with Malfeasance came about because I had entered into lengthy discussions on internet chat boards with one R.H. Muffintop, and after hundreds of thousands of words were exchanged on the true nature of the sun, Muffintop revealed himself to be the Lazlo Taylor Malfeasance, visionary, futurist, and primary architect of Omega One, the precursor to the World Wide Web. Malfeasance invited me to his office in San Francisco, located in the very tip of the Transamerica Pyramid, and it was here that we discussed my proposed expedition to visit the sun to prove its artificial nature.

  “So you will fund my voyage?” I asked.

  Malfeasance leaned back in his chair and placed his hands on his ample gut. He let out a loud burp as we had just finished our lunch of Big Macs and super-sized Coca-Colas.

  “And what if I were to tell you,” Malfeasance said slowly, “and what if I were to tell you that such a voyage has been planned for quite some time?”

  “I would tell you that would make me happy.”

  Malfeasance leaned forward. His eyes sparkled.

  “The craft is almost ready,” he said in a voice filled with wonder.

  “There is a craft?”

  “Artifice 1.”

  “What a glorious name! And what will this craft do?”

&nb
sp; “It will fly us to the sun so that we may conclusively demonstrate its artificial nature. It is designed to fulfill your specific mission.”

  “And where is the craft located?”

  “It’s an open secret. I can’t tell you but if you’re clever even, you’ll know.”

  “And when will this craft depart?”

  “When we locate the fuel source.”

  “And that fuel source is?”

  And here Malfeasance leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper: “Novagems.”

  Four

  I returned home with a new mission. Malfeasance had made it quite clear. His researchers had put in hundreds of hours of work compiling the thick file I held in my hand. The Tower of Jewels had been dismantled in 1916 by the Petrarch Demolition Corporation. The novagems were purchased by Alkaline Glassworks & Fine Porcelain which, in turn, had the novagems crushed and melted down so that they could become parts of souvenir plates commemorating the Pan-Pacific Exposition.

  “But we need a complete novagem,” Malfeasance stated clearly. “Once a novagem is crushed, it loses its ability to generate energy.”

  I read through the file in my apartment. Only four known novagems survived what we in the Artifice community call the Great Novagem Holocaust. A 1917 article on Giuseppe Petrarch, published in the San Francisco Telegraph, contained a blurry photograph which clearly shows Giuseppe receiving the keys to the city from the heir to Emperor Norton. Next to Giuseppe stands his seven year-old son Antonio Petrarch. Antonio wears a necklace. Dangling from the necklace is what is most certainly a novagem.

  Additional research demonstrated that this very novagem was handed down through the Petrarch family. A 1957 family photograph shows Antonio’s