The Weekend Project

PROMPT: Blue prints for a cheap faster than light space craft are simultaneously emailed to every address and posted to every website along with a message from a human who claims to have seen the edge of the universe.

“It looks like everybody got it.”

Ajay finished taking a pull of his beer and set it down hard on the table. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “How would you even prove that?”

“Well, so far nobody has come forward who didn’t get it.” I looked out at the nighttime city; from up here it was calm and quiet, the occasional car-horn giving the only clue that the neighborhood was making its weekly Friday-night costume change from Business Casual to Club Formal.

Ajay took another pull at his beer; I could tell he was having hard time letting go of the “everybody got it” assertion. You can’t say things around Ajay without being willing to either back up your statement with suitable proof or else listen to him give a lecture on the importance of checking your sources.

“Anyway,” I said, taking the opportunity to move carefully past the conversational land mine, “An incredibly large number of email addresses seem to have gotten it, and it’s been seemingly posted to every website that you can submit...”

“Yeah, okay,” said Ajay, “So it’s as popular as that...”

“Come on, Ajay, at least look at the thing.” Although these days he is a cranky and easily irritated manager of software engineers, in an earlier life Ajay had earned a doctorate in a field of physics obscure enough that he would invariably lose his temper before he finished explaining it to a lay-person.

“Fine, send it to me.” 

“Someone already did, I’m guessing.”

He gave me stink-eye as I stood up and went back inside to get my stuff and head for the elevator. It was Friday night and time to do something other than work.

My phone rang at some time past three AM. I was in someone else’s bed; I didn’t know their name and had only vague memories of having gotten here, even though I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours.

I grabbed my pants off the floor and dragged them and the phone downstairs, away from the bedrooms; this was one of those houses where like six people have bedrooms upstairs and then there’s a downstairs with a living room and kitchen and library and whatnot that never get used except when the housekeeper shows up once a week to dust.

“Yeah,” I said. While I was trying to fish the phone out of my pants pocket, I’d accidentally made the ‘answer’ gesture across its face; rather than continue fumbling, I just held my pants pocket to the side of my head.

“Dude,” said Ajay, “It might work, how fast can you get back here? I have a list of things that...”

“Don’t you have kids?”

“They’re fine,” he said, “My mother in law is in town.”

I wish I had known that before providing him with a potential weekend project that could keep him as far away from his house as possible.

“I’m standing naked in some sort of tech-office sorority house in the Marina,” I said. Last night’s taxi ride was mostly a blur, but there was something about...

The fog horn from the bridge sounded; I turned, then turned again. So yeah, somewhere north of Russian Hill, maybe...

“Seriously, dude, I need fifteen cc of Drano, ten smoke detectors, and a bag of cat litter.”

I looked up at the ceiling; there was a smoke detector almost right over my head. Probably, I thought, easier to just go to a Walgreen’s. 

“It’s almost four in the morning,” I said. 

“Yes,” he said, “And we’ve wasted a bunch of time already. Listen,” he said, “By Monday, the world will be divided into people who built this thing, people who failed to build this thing, and people who didn’t try. I want to be one of the ones who built it.”

I looked up the stairs; my shirt and jacket and backpack were up there somewhere. I realized that I had been rubbing my pants on my head while I was talking.

“Fine,” I said, “Give me an hour or so. While you’re waiting, would you come up with a list of coffee that’s open at this hour and email it to me?”

“There’s coffee here.”

“I’m not there.” I hung up my pants and set about sneaking upstairs. As I rounded up my things, eyeing the sleeping figure on the bed, I mentally reviewed the contents of the email I’d read earlier in the day.

Faster than light spacecraft. Buildable with parts from the hardware store. I grinned. Like something out of the back of a comic book: Send away for plans now, build your own hovercraft x-ray robot!

No possible way would it work, but Ajay was right: Monday, the world would be divided between those who spent the weekend making this whatever-it-was, and people who were still nursing their Friday-night hangovers.

The Uber pulled up just as I closed the front door; I slid into the back seat. “Walgreen’s,” I said, “And can you, you know, keep the meter running while I go in?”