Absolutely breathtaking....
Cato was always a curious seeker. He took joy in the simplest of discoveries, ever since he was a child. Having a difficult life as a youth, he often sought refuge in books. He dropped out of school when he was in the 10th grade, but he never stopped studying. Frankly, he probably learned more on his own than he ever could have in school.
Cato was an amateur inventor, always trying to come up with a new innovation that would revolutionize the world. He had successfully prototyped a number of interesting gadgets, but he never had the initiative required take them to the next level, and as a result, he spent his daylight hours toiling away at a local restaurant.
Cato was easily impressed at times, as he took a genuine delight in academics. This time, however, it was different. He looked at his creation with wide eyes. Anticipation burned in his stomach, with the intuitive knowledge that maybe this would be the thing that would finally make people talk about him - The thing that he could contribute to the world, and that would secure his place in history books for years to come.
The internet, it seems, has a vast amount of information, and if you know where to look, you can rival any ivy league college graduate. Cato spent years studying the open course materials from MIT relating to engineering, electronics, and programming. His friends had always known him as a bit of a nerd.
Though few in numbers, Cato had a very tight circle of friends who respected his intelligence, but also teased his social awkwardness. When he wasn't studying or experimenting, he was spending his time with three other people. Chad was a bit of a jock, but also a friendly soul. He'd taught Cato self defense and eventually got him to play sports with the rest of them. Cato was as terrible as sports as he was good with eletronics. Neal was an in school, working on his MBA. He always had a great idea about how to make a ton of money, and would often try to motivate the others to get involved. Occasionally, he would try to market one of Cato's inventions, but Cato never let him, always saying that it wasn't finished yet. Santo was a strong christian. He and the others would frequently argue about matters of politics and faith. He never tried to push his beliefs on the others, but he was sometimes noticably uncomfortable when the group would talk about things that weren't in line with his worldview.
Over time, the group grew accustomed to Cato's unusual behavior. If he felt a spark of inspiration, for instance, he would get up and leave, no matter what they were doing. They could be in the middle of playing basketball or in the middle of a video game, and he would walk away, entirely unexpectedly, leaving the 3 to fend for themselves. This moment was one of those.
Cato looked at the device in front of him. His latest topic of study involved chaos theory and
fractal geometry. He was fascinated by the idea of Koch's Curve - a simple fractal. By following the simple principals of fractal geometry, one can create a line that starts only an inch away from it's end, and yet is infintely long. The secret of Koch's Curve is that it iterates inward on itself infinitely many times. While each iteration gets smaller, it also adds a small bit of length. The result is that the iterations never run out of room to express themselves, but continue to add infinitesimally small amounts of length to the overall structure, until those small additions add up to reach infinity.What if this concept could somehow apply to energy? Cato looked at the mass of clumsily assembled wires and components in front of him. To a layperson, it would have looked like nothing. It was just a board with seemingly random electronic parts on it in a jumbled mass, with a battery slot on one end and a light socket in the other. It had a few rows of LEDs that served to gauge the total amount of electricity in the device. He'd worked on this for 16 hours straight, barely taking breaks to feed himself.
Absolutely fascinating.
The result was a success. With a quick charge from a battery, followed by complete removal of the battery, the contraption would hold the electricity, circulating it through the wires and components. The electricity would then increase. He had discovered a way to treat electricity as though it were Koch's Curve. He could take a small amount of electricity and turn it into a larger amount of electricity. It was like alchemy, and yet Cato fully understood how and why it worked.
He toyed with it, attaching it to light bulbs, and watching them get brighter and brighter before they burnt out. Eventually, the device started to emit a familiar odor, as it overloaded with electricity and the components melted. His device was ruined, but he was only disappointed for a moment. The real discovery wasn't the device itself. The real enigma ran much deeper than that.
