Everything would have gone well for Jack and Richard, as much as one could expect under the circumstances, if it weren’t for the parents’ and the teachers’ curiosity. Come summer, everybody was on pins and needles to learn the results of the science fair, where, they had no doubt, the boys’ project was certain to grab the interest of the evaluating committee.

After unsuccessful attempts to get the pertinent information from Jack, Mrs. Jenkins decided to take the matter into her own hands and reach out to the various science fairs, in the hope of surprising the two by sharing with everybody their outstanding results. When her phone inquiries turned out nothing, she thought that the school principal might have a better grasp of the ins and outs of these competitions, and she asked him for assistance. The principal researched all the science fairs in the area himself, but none of them happened to feature any bio-engines at the time, so, a little puzzled by the conflicting information, he called Jack’s mother, to find out the name of his cousin.

Jack’s mother wasn’t able to shed any light on his query, due to the fact that Jack didn’t have any cousins that she knew of, and this was the first time she’d ever seen her son show interest in a science fair, since the boy seemed to be drawn to artistic endeavors, rather than technical ones.

The principal then called Carol, who knew even less about the details of the project. She had shown great interest in its development right from the very beginning, but her interest was more from the standpoint of maternal pride, as a great piece of news to be shared with friends and neighbors.

By the time the boys got back from school, both of their houses were on full alert. Carol sent Richard to his room until his father returned from work, unwilling to deal with whatever it was that made Richard get in trouble at school.

The boy went to his room, almost relieved to have a couple of hours to himself, to cook up an explanation before he had to face the music. He used his time wisely, revising his story, and worrying that he would not be able to coordinate it with Jack if the need arose. When his father finally got home, the tiredness of a long day was amplified by the fact that he now had to discipline his son. Dinner was a lot quieter than usual, with both father and son searching for a way to avoid the mandatory conversation.

“Your mother tells me that the school principal called,” his father finally started, wishing he were anywhere else instead. “He mentioned there was no science fair in the whole district,” he said, softly, and continued after a long pause. “What on earth are you two up to, Richard?” he asked, uncomfortable, swallowing his words.

“I’m going to strangle Jack,” Richard thought. “It’s just as simple as that.” He couldn’t come up with any reasonable explanation for the web of truth enhancements, so he looked around, in search of inspiration.

“I hear Jack’s mother never heard of that cousin of his, on account of the fact that he doesn’t exist,” Tom continued, unable to stifle his sarcasm. Richard’s gaze was still sweeping the room and his mind grabbed hold of the first image his eyes came upon, which was the tankless water heater.

“We wanted it to be a surprise, we didn’t know whether it would work, so we didn’t want to let anybody know before we tested it,” Richard replied in an embarrassed mumble, looking at his plate.

“Didn’t know if what would work?” his father’s questioning continued.

“The bio-engine. We wanted to make a chlorophyll enabled solar heater,” he blurted the first words that came to his mind. His father gave him a long, probing look.

It was quite obvious that he didn’t believe a single word Richard had said, but he wanted to demonstrate to his son that lies never lead a person to a good place, and he was willing to allow the deception to continue to the inevitable point where the fibs imploded onto themselves.

“Ok,” he said. “Now we all know about it, so you no longer need to hide your work. Why don’t you bring your prototype here and show us how it works?” he suggested.

“That one was a first draft,” Richard improvised on the spot, with a sudden appreciation for Jack’s talent to make up stuff on cue and somewhat relieved that some of his friend’s useful skill seemed to have rubbed off on him. “It’s not working-working,” he continued. “We were in the process of refining the concept,” he said, and his father interrupted him with an impatient hand gesture.

“We know, we all saw the little jellyfish. That was an almost finished gadget, was it not?”

“Which broke, unfortunately,” Richard didn’t skip a beat, “Jack and I dropped it on accident just as we were about to test it for the first time.”

“That’s regrettable,” his father kept him on the hook, “after all that hard work you guys put into it! What was it, five, six weeks?”

“Two months,” Richard corrected him.

“I hope you get a new working prototype soon, we’re all very curious about how it works.” Richard nodded with his mouth full, grateful that the meal of the day, venison stew, required extra time for chewing.

“Sure, dad,” he finally said when they reached dessert.

“It shouldn’t take you very long now, that you already have it all figured out,” his dad put some pressure on the expected timing of the delivery. “Two weeks? Three, tops?” Richard nodded, so he wouldn’t have to answer.

“One thing I don’t understand, though,” Carol stumped him, just when he thought he had safely delayed the reckoning for his elusive activities for at least another week. “Why did you have to make up a cousin for Jack?” she looked at her son, as if searching for his former innocence.

The thought of strangling his friend occurred to Richard again, and at the same time he wished the latter was there, because he surely would have come up with something half-believable. For lack of an answer, he shrugged his shoulders and dove into the seven layer cake with surprising enthusiasm.

“Just don’t keep us all on tenterhooks,” his father insisted, to make clear to Richard that the event will not die down without an adequate explanation. “I, for one, want to hear all the technical details.”

Later, at the library, Jack and Richard buried themselves in a mountain of technical documentation that nobody could understand, in order to carve for themselves a half hour of uninterrupted dialog and assess the magnitude of their kerfuffle.

“Are you crazy?” Jack snapped. “Why on earth would you tell your father we were making a chlorophyll enabled…” he forgot the rest of the designation.

“Solar heater,” Richard completed it. “I didn’t know what to say, ok? I panicked! This is the first thing that came to mind!” he whimpered.

“That gizmo better look a lot like Brenda, ‘cause we don’t have the time to design a new device from scratch. Can you adapt the jellyfish to look like it heats water?” Jack inquired.

“Well, technically speaking, it has to be able to heat water, I don’t think dad will give me a pass for a device that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, not after two whole months of tinkering and two previous prototypes,” his friend replied.

“You mean to tell me that you are going to have to attach a real Brenda to the hot water pipe in your kitchen?” Jack asked, incensed by the mere contemplation of this possibility.

“Relax, Jack! This doesn’t have anything to do with the plant. It’s not going to grow, meld, incorporate, or do anything weird. We need to design an instantaneous water heater that looks like Brenda, that’s all. It shouldn’t be too hard!” Richard replied, confident of his engineering prowess.

“I wish I were there with you during that conversation, you come up with the most ridiculous fibs, dude!” Jack highlighted his own creative skills while shaking his head with disappointment at the same time.

“Oh, yeah?” Richard challenged him. “And what exactly would you have said?”

“I would have approached the subject from an emotional angle, first of all,” Jack started expertly and then remembered. ”What did you tell him about my cousin?”

“Nothing!” Richard confessed. “I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.”

“Oh, man! This is a disaster!” Jack frowned. “Just give me a few minutes to compose myself, I’ll try to figure out a way to get this chestnut out of the fire, but you’re stretching my limits, man!”

They spent some time in silence, with only the shuffling of pages and thumping of books between them.

“You know?” Richard couldn’t help himself. “Maybe this is not the best place in the world to retreat to in order to come up with a scenario, not with that jolly librarian on our case constantly.”

“As compared to what?” Jack replied. “Your house? The malt shop? School? At least this place is quiet enough for us to be able to think!” he frowned, irked by the interruption.

Richard spent the next couple of weeks trying to reconfigure Brenda to function as a water heater, a task that, as it is often the case, proved to be significantly more difficult in practice than its theory originally assumed. At the end of this time period, however, an updated version of Brenda was born, a little smaller than the first one, but just as strange looking.

“I still can’t look at those tentacles, Snake!” Jack gave the mechanical jellyfish a dirty look. “No offense to Brenda!” he corrected himself.

“Priorities, Jack!” Richard scolded him. “If I don’t come up with a Brenda heater by the end of this week there will be hell to pay!”

“How is it coming?” Jack asked, eyeing the device with intense curiosity.

“Never you mind!” Richard retorted. “Did you come up with an explanation about your non-existent cousin?”

“Of course I did!” Jack replied, vexed that his friend could even suspect otherwise. “It was because of the science fair regulations, which required the teams to consist of at least three people, and we didn’t have a third, so we made one up.”

“But the science fair is no longer in the picture, remember?” Richard pointed out.

“Pay attention, Richard! Doesn’t matter what is or isn’t right now, it made sense inside the original premise, the one we have to explain! This thing is harder to keep track of than a soap opera. What was next? Aah, yes, the surprise,” he remembered. “Why did we want to keep it a surprise?” he asked Richard, who again was caught unawares.

“You never think these things through,” Jack chastised him, shaking his head again. “We wanted to keep it a surprise because everybody is bothered by the plant and since our device is kind of based on plant biology, we worried that it might make people uncomfortable,” he explained, as if describing the proper set-up of a scene from a movie.

Jack approached the synthetic jellyfish again.

“I’m not sure I’d trust this thing with the hot water pipe, what if it sinks its hooks in it and refuses to let go?” he said.

“It’s just programmed to grab hold of anything that looks like a tube. See?” he demonstrated, slightly touching the quivering tentacles with one of his fingers. Brenda grabbed onto it eagerly, to Jack’s dismay.

“Wow, dude, don’t do this to me, I don’t want to see this thing chew your finger off!” he flinched.

“She’s a sweetheart,” Richard defended his synthetic pet, “totally harmless.”

“How does she let go of it?” Jack asked, and watched as his friend tapped Brenda on the head, prompting the mechanical jellyfish to release his finger.

“I don’t know about the utility of this object, but it sure is entertaining,” Jack giggled. “Are you sure it needs to be a water heater? We could turn it into a toy,” he suggested, but his friend ignored him and immersed himself in his work.

In the meantime, back at the factory, some of the workers slowly started populating the plant’s bio-dome with light furniture and tropical plants, which attracted birds and small wildlife to create a little garden for winter weary people.

The dome was large enough now to be noticeable from the Belvedere point, and, if one were to adhere to Richard’s smoke hissing dragon metaphor, one would have noticed that the dragon had grown a little chubby.

From the height and distance of the observation deck this organic addition to the factory assets looked like a strange Noah’s Ark, upside down and gleaming in the sunshine, filled with life to protect, indifferent to opinions and human priorities, the ultimate triumph of nature, benevolent and gleeful in its will to survive.

In the few moments he afforded himself for relaxation, with the deadline of his project looming, Richard sometimes liked to walk to the look out point, watch the city that bustled with life in the valley below and wonder how things might have turned out differently if he didn’t, in a manner of speaking, help bring this new life into the world, however strange and unsettling it was.

At times like these he stopped thinking of this large living conglomerate in terms of good or bad. One doesn’t question whether the squirrels or the lions, or the grass of the plain, are good or bad, they just are, and so is the sun in the sky and the snow on the mountains. When you open your eyes to life and see them for the first time, you don’t judge whether they belong or whether you belong. The wholeness of being is a shared experience and it is laid down before you, to provide the fabric and the context of your life.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit francisrosenfeld.substack.com