by Gibby Haynes
In a nutshell, the water sheet is two technologies. One new, one old . . . married by a concept called rejection/attraction theory, or RAT.
The result? An insanely high-tech subatomic perforated hyper-polymorphic anti-surface. I shit you not. It feels like a rough-to-the-touch piece of fabric, which is pretty cool because not only is it self-cleaning, its multilayers (trillions of ’em) are constantly remanufacturing themselves—transferring properties to one another at a predictable number of layers above or below itself. By some technical standards it can be argued that it’s never really there. Hence the “anti” in the surface name/description. That crazy anti-surface is then covered in/integrated with an (unbelievably) intelligent liquid in which an innumerable number of molecular-sized machines are suspended.
Innumerable in the literal sense: impossible to quantify. Its magnitude can’t be determined at any particular one-trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, because it’s fluidly dynamic. Plus, it’s only theoretically known as to how many machines are actually possible; it’s an almost non-segmented curve. But, just for the heck of it, one time me and Carla computed a static machine number out to a googol—“if only to challenge,” as Carla put it, “the absurdity of an unimaginably large number.” The model still held water, so to speak.
Ordinarily, one wouldn’t know so much about the Carla Marks subatomic innumerable hyper-anti-world. But I’ve been interning at IBC for about five years, starting a week after my twelfth birthday. That probably had a lot to do with the way me and Carla met.
DESTINY MANIFEST
One day, as an eleven-year-old, I happened to be in the lobby of my father’s office. At the time he was one of the bigger investment bankers in North Texas mostly working in property and oil, not a ton of tech. He was known more as a pure financial wizard, but due to an article in Texas Monthly, I guess, he got a reputation as a guy who wasn’t afraid of taking chances, especially on new ideas, becoming sort of a bigwig . . . super busy and not around a lot. So, I was in his lobby, on the couch for about an hour one Friday afternoon, waiting for him to finish his “meetings” so we could go the lake house.
Then in walked Carla Marks. She had a techy-looking suitcase. She sat across from me and we just started talking. She briefly described the water sheet concept to me, but it didn’t really register at the time. After a while she realized her meeting with my father would not materialize, and that she, in essence, was getting stood up. But she didn’t even seem that upset.
Carla pulled out a thermos and a popsicle stick with some stiff weavy-looking stuff on the top of it. Then she said, “Don’t worry, it’s all organic,” and opened up the thermos. She explained it was hot lemonade and clipped a flat camera battery to the bottom of the stick. Then, with a gloved hand, she held the stick with woven material over the steamy liquid while exclaiming, “Watch this!” There was a sudden burst of steam from the thermos that was somehow contained solely within the material area. Kind of a super-dense, tiny whirling cloud for three or four seconds, then abruptly it stopped. After which Carla unclipped the battery and explained the system was designed to be 100 percent solar-powered, but she had used a battery for “demonstration” purposes. “Plus,” she added, “it looks so cool when it’s fast like that,” and handed me the stick, which now had a large popsicle frozen around the woven material stuff.
“What’s this?” I asked.
She responded, “It’s lemon sorbet. Well, really ascorbic acid and sugar, but it tastes great.”
I wondered if it was one of those health products my dad was using to improve his image. “Is ascorbic acid organic?”
“Sure . . . it’s organic chemistry.”
I cracked up, and so did she. That was when she introduced herself, when I first learned her name. We’ve been friends ever since. Carla was the first (and to this day only) adult to treat me like an equal. The popsicle was pretty good too.
LITTLE DRUMMER BOY
After I finished the “sorbet,” she packed up her stuff, having been shined on by my dad, and said, “Goodbye.” Maybe she thought we’d never see each other again. But I had captured the whole demonstration on my phone and showed it to my father at the lake that night—and the rest, with the help of a phone call and a few googly-eyed physics professors to validate the process, is history. It blew my father’s mind. He publicly beamed with genuine loving admiration, proclaiming that his “son knows genius when he sees it.” He was proud. It was awesome. It was cool too because, more than once, Carla has told me she was planning to see some other investor guy from Japan that following Monday. If I hadn’t called her at midnight on a Friday night to tell her my dad was completely floored, she could be living in Tokyo instead of Texas, and it might have been a “totally different ball game,” after which she always mysteriously laughs.
Being around IBC has been an education. Literally. I was their first and only intern . . . still am. I get to hang out, eat free lunch and learn cool shit. Carla soon became a combination of mother, sister and friend. Almost immediate family. I love immediate families, the really quick ones. She showed me how to weld, how to use her 3-D printers, how to hot-wire a BMW—she owned one and took it as a personal challenge to steal her own car . . . the important stuff.
ALL MOD CONS
She also taught me how to drive her BMW and somehow got me a Texas driver’s license when I was fifteen. She handed it to me on my birthday—which is her birthday too—and told me when she was fifteen, her parents became alarmed that she would talk to creatures other than humans, particularly cicadas (the insect). Her parents could attest to her ability to speak to them, but, as Carla puts it, there seemed to be a debate over whether the cicadas were talking back.
“So I was sent to a counselor, as they called it.”
I knew it was a shrink. “Wow, Carla,” I remember asking, “what did you do?”
“I told him I could speak to cicadas. He pretended he believed me and talked for twenty minutes. Then he walked me out to my mother’s car. I opened the car door, turned around and just as Dr. Borthwick said, ‘Goodbye, Carla,’ a cicada came from out of the sky and landed on my lapel. Dr. Borthwick was incredulous. Looking down at my new friend, I said hello, got in the car and drove away. My mother didn’t notice the bug in her car, but later told me I must’ve had a fruitful conversation with the good doctor, as he’d relayed to her that he’d never met a more normal little girl in his entire life. In observation of my renewed sanity, I decided right then: never to talk to bugs in front of my parents again.”
I thought it was a cool story—and the last line rhymed and everything—but the water sheet in Carla’s simplest of explanations is part swamp cooler and part cicada wings . . . on highly efficient steroids. I kind of get the swamp-water-cooler part. But not very many people know that cicada wings are hyper-aquaphobic. That means they repel water really well. Additionally, the wing structure is such that it kills bacteria, is self-cleaning and provides cooling for the cicada proper. All that while discharging electrical energy as a by-product.
Who’d’ve thunk it?
Maybe a girl who talks to bugs.
GRAY GREEN BLUE
I’ll never forget the day my father came home from work early and announced to the family, while opening a bottle of champagne, that Carla Marks had indeed subverted the zeroth law of thermodynamics, and temperature, in fact, had more than one dimension.
The next day I rode my bike down to IBC and asked Carla if I could have a job. Most of the company’s tech was based on a paper Carla published in grad school. It was largely ignored at the time, but now had created so much demand so quickly that my father maintained a second office at IBC where he spent the majority of his time. He became a lot busier, but due to my internship, we actually got to see each other more often. New things were happening every day there, and it became apparent that my dad was going to be CEO of a crazy-important international con
cern.
The cost to manufacture the water sheet was only fifty-three dollars per unit, and surprisingly, the R&D, or fixed costs, are super low since most of IBC technology was developed out of Carla’s college-era research. The margin is so huge, my dad used to say, “Oscar, you’d better not become a spoiled rich kid,” and threatened to “love me to death” if I did.
Soon, governments began knocking on Carla’s door. The water sheet and IBC’s related technologies prompted ominous questions about the current international political structure. The solar power aspect to Carla’s invention, seemingly a sideshow, was poised to affect the type, cost and availability of basic world energy needs in a significant way. People were getting nervous about a potential “farewell to fossil”–type event.
Needless to say, security got tighter at Carla’s and IBC. I was kind of the mascot there. Or maybe the “cute kid” who was always hanging around asking questions.
Then, thirty-three days after I turned thirteen, my father died in a car wreck on the Chickasaw Turnpike in southern Oklahoma.
LAKE EMERSON AND PALMER
G. Oscar Lester II had hosted a technical presentation of IBC tech at a government/military facility somewhere in the Arbuckle Mountains. When driving home, he apparently lost control of his car, which rolled down an embankment and burst into flames. He died instantly, they say, and my life changed forever.
My sister, who I guess will always hold her mishap with Blip against me (what with getting her hand bitten off and all), was due to leave for art school and moved to NYC about a month after my dad’s funeral. Ever since, I really only see her on major holidays. With a few phone calls a year and visiting her in the city one spring break, our childhood together was basically over. Even though it really ended the day her hand came off, it was definitely final when the rest of her body actually moved away.
Almost a year after my dad’s death, my mother officially started dating her dead cousin’s husband. I got the distinct feeling, however, the relationship had been unofficial for some time prior. The guy had appeared kind of overly clingy at the funeral. Anyway, they seemed sort of happy together. He was kind of nice, plus he owned two car dealerships and a ton of land with oil and gas wells on it. She was the grieving widow with a convertible Bentley and took private jet flights to an island off the coast of Florida (they called it Sand Castle—not Sand Castle Island, just Sand Castle) where she began to spend most of her time.
KRAKATOA: EAST OF JAVA
I hung in there for a while but finally quit baseball last spring, casting aside one the few remaining vestiges of my childhood. Which pretty much disappeared right after my father’s funeral. However, that situation did give me the opportunity to pursue my promoter thing, which, despite it all, has turned out to be kind of a groovy deal.
My school experience has been fairly normal, it seems. I try to go as little as possible. I’ve never done any homework with the exception of writing papers, yet still I’m going to graduate a year early in the top 10 percent of my class. My sister chose the private-school route, but I went public. It was closer and had better baseball. Ever since my fifteenth birthday, I got out of class at noon and went to IBC under the ruse of some “work release”–type arrangement.
School proper is crazy simple, but I learned a lot at IBC.
Carla, who went to public school as well, says that public schoolteachers are basically helpless because not only are they underpaid, they’re forced to dumb it down to make it look good on paper so the school district will get its funding from the state or from whatever corporation happens to be in favor with the current administration.
“State, local and federal,” Carla says, “the worst of all worlds,” referring to free-market capitalism and the dreaded S word . . . socialism. “Why not the best?” she muses. Carla has an appreciation for both.
Naturally, then, in the name of capitalism and in a really social environment, I began throwing parties in the guesthouse at the bottom of my parents’ driveway.
THE BEST LIFE ON EARTH
It was a cool spot, with hidden parking and an old horse barn converted to a huge apartment. From the very beginning I looked at the party thing as primarily a business adventure.
The fact that you meet crazy new friends and have sort of a blast is really just a welcome side effect. It’s how I re-met the clown. Which is awesome. Nonetheless it is a business . . . I guess.
The first one’s always free, kid.
So for party numero uno there was no cover, free beer, a cheapo sound system with playlists I downloaded from some generic IDM Google Cloud. It lasted till 5 a.m., 250 people came and there were a ton of older kids, which took me by surprise. There was also a broken window and a toilet issue. In other words a huge success, legendary actually (as far as school lore goes), and as planned it proved to be an excellent advert for future such endeavors. The second party I got a real DJ, hired some low-key security and charged for everything. Even used the kitchen for late-night catering.
One party I decided to put weed in the chocolate chip cookies, graduating to mushroom punch then eventually MDMA. No one knew where it came from because I used an unnamed friend in a clown suit to distribute the “party favors.” For a nominal fee, of course. Actually, market price. It seemed like a super-groovy thing. I was making money, people were having fun and most important, no pressure from the authorities . . . no pressure, that is, until the second annual Halloween bash, when cops showed up at 3 a.m. and wanted to talk to the clown. The clown had long changed into his street clothes, and nobody got arrested, but the party got shut down early and I was now on their radar.
TRISTATE TERROR
So I woke up the next afternoon, made myself a crema-laden espresso and decided to go legit . . . sort of. Carla was really the motivating force toward legality . . . sort of. She knows/knew about the party aspect of the parties but was unaware, as far as I knew/know, about my side business with the clown. She’d actually attended a few of the events, somehow knew of the police involvement the previous evening, and called me (really scolded me). Then she offered her company to sponsor the first legal gig.
THE PLYMOUTH WIN-YOU-OVER BEAT GOES ON
IBC put up the cash for the preproduction; we got an advertising budget, rented a PA, lighting gear, some portable toilets, trailers, etc. We got a couple more guys that looked like security, and bam—we used the ten acres behind the IBC research facility. The party went from twelve noon to sunrise in the middle of July (which was the name we used for the party). Fifteen hundred people showed up at fifty a head.
Carla’s water sheets provided water for the crowd and air-conditioning for the tent.
Everybody was cool (literally, again). We all had fun and we walked away with around thirty grand plus profits on the sale of party favors. We did another Why Party a few months later called Halloween Overnight.
We sold two thousand tickets in advance, but another thousand people showed up. Our parking lot was filled and people began parking across the FM in a sort of uptight neighborhood. We paid for cleanup the next day, but apparently the neighborhood had been traumatized by the behavior of some of our partygoers. There had been a naked couple caught “sleeping” on the ninth green of a nearby golf course and a few other amusing/amazing situations.
The local authorities, however, were not amused, and amazingly, we could never use that location again. We made a ton of money and developed a decent team to pull it off. However, me and the clown were both graduating from high school and going off to college soon. I guess. So, despite our “success,” we decided to throw in the towel. Throw in the towel, that is, after one final big party. A last hurrah, as it were: a big stage with a big light show and a legitimate world-class DJ or two. In a hassle-free, stunning outdoor party environment.
Typical senior-in-high-school-type shit. Only up a few notches.
THE BRIDGE OVER THE ROOT CANAL
We have prepared for around four or five thousand, but who knows how many will walk up expecting to buy tickets at the site. Honeycomb Falls is on private land about fifteen miles south of IBC headquarters. It’s an amazing spot with a maze of Spanish moss and waterfalls that have turned the limestone into a giant spring-fed Swiss cheese ceiling of water and sunlight. Pretty cool, and much of the park will be lit with a new IBC “mystery system,” which Carla tells me is tiny smart video cameras/a monitor system that can be deployed en masse, to the billions, via a film of aerosol “smart gel.”
It’s the same concept as the water sheet but in a different suspension. I say “mystery system” because very few people have seen it in action or even heard about it. As far as the public is concerned, Carla Marks’s only invention is the water sheet. Which makes tonight’s light show extra cool.
GARY THE BEAVER AND HIS FRIENDLY DAM
Both Carla and my dad’s replacement, Jack Ogilvie, will be at the show tonight.
Jack came to IBC several months before my father’s death. He’d been a friend of my dad’s from the navy and only recently embarked on a civilian career. I still hang out in the lab most every day, but technically my position is Jack Ogilvie’s assistant. Nowadays I hardly ever see him. I eat lunch with Carla at IBC. She wants to know everything I’m up to and gives me tips on stuff I don’t really think about, like college, careers, girlfriends, etc. . . . Maybe I need it. With my sister in NY and my mom hardly ever there, everybody’s gone from my parents’ house.
