John Maguire

Bleary eyed was the best description. That, and falling down drunk. John Maguire was lost. Not location lost. Soul lost. He was dirty, smelly, drunk and just an all around general non-contributor to society. The cops on the beat knew John well. He never caused them any trouble, which was exactly how they liked it. But they kept their collective eye on him, just in case. John was sort of like Sung’s Corner Store. Mr. Sung had stepped off the boat from Korea in the midst of the Korean War. He’d found his corner and opened his store. The store, give or take several Sung generations, had been there ever since. Seemed like John Maguire was in the same category. He’d been the drunk in the alley for as long as anybody could remember (except for maybe old man Sung.) The cops left John alone. John left them alone. He was disgusting, but generally harmless.

People looked (a more accurate description might be “averted their eyes”) at John as an unavoidable blight on the landscape; sort of like the empty lot in the middle of the street that served as the neighborhood dump. There, let’s not talk about it, best forgotten.

You walked around John. You tried to avoid his glance because if he noticed you at all his hand would come out. You didn’t want to and you hadn’t but you always felt guilty about not supporting him. After you passed you always had that conflicted, dirty feeling. He was disgusting and made you feel bad. (Some did support John. When you saw that, it made you feel even worse.)

And here’s the sad part. John knew stuff. Not just some stuff. John knew stuff no other human being knew or even suspected. John was an anomaly. Actually, John was the first member of a new species on the taxonomy chart. A new order on the evolutionary scale. One that we might call Homo-utopian. John was the next rung up on that evolutionary ladder. And that was why he drank.

John’s IQ would have been measured at around 225. Fantastically high by most current standards but just average in the new species. When he was 10 he discovered Einstein. By 12 John had pretty much dismissed all of Einstein’s theories. Not on an opinion basis. No, John had disproved Einstein’s theories based on 2 new mathematical disciplines that he developed. (One of them while he was bored in Health class.) Combined with his new cosmological model, John pretty much blew Einstein out of the water. (He flunked Health class. He couldn’t be bothered.) About that time (pun intended) he had an idea about a time machine and started designing it a month before his 13th birthday. By the time John got to be 13 1/2 (notice how kids are “13 1/2” or “going on 5”? Ever hear an adult say, “I’m 37 going on 38”?) his parents had enough of the squiggles and diagrams and reams of wasted paper John had been accumulating during the past four years, including two options for the time machine. John was at school, again ignoring some teacher, when his mom went into his bedroom one day and tossed out every piece of paper she could find. So much for debunking Einstein. (And meeting him.)

John decided to go on to other issues. He decided to try to figure out his mother and so gravitated towards psychology. It took him about 3 weeks to conclude that the psychological arts were mostly smoke and mirrors. His final conclusion about psychology was that psychologists believed that for every action there was an excuse. He also decided (correctly) not to try to figure out mom or, ultimately, any other female of the homosapien species. (I told you he was smart!)

He next tried theoretical chemistry. He quickly discovered several cures for diabetes. How could people not see the answers? He moved on and quickly found out not only how to cure cancer but how to inoculate against it. (He also theorized an additional 37 elements on the periodic chart but that’s another story.) His diabetes and cancer discoveries caused him to do a quick study of patents. Man, were those expensive! So he asked his dad for a loan in order to patent and license his discoveries. (Think of the billions that would have made him.) His dad turned him down and told him to stop spending so much time in the library and cut out wasting all that paper. Did he think money grew on trees? Well, ‘No’. . . but then again. Besides, the librarians had caught him scribbling in some of the library books (he’d been making corrections.) His dad was getting tired of looking at him. “Go outside and play some ball, kid. Why can’t you just be normal?”

He went outside and deciphered dog talk. His own larynx chords would not allow him to duplicate some dog sounds so he went into the garage and made a translator/barker out of an old car battery, a shoebox, a can of nuts and bolts, a bike tire (the inner tube part,) and a fishing pole. He got whacked for that one. The fishing pole was a favorite. Before he got whacked he had categorized most dog conversations into “Happy, Happy, Happy”, “Food”, “Chase the (fill in the blank)” and “Bark!” He also realized that the only real dog-to-dog communicating that went on was nose-to-butt. That didn’t appeal to him but he did enjoy getting all the neighborhood dogs barking about “Happy! Happy! Happy!” Too kewl. And it pissed off the adults.

That was fun for about a week then became boring, especially after the fishing pole got liberated. But the garage proved fascinating. John spent one afternoon developing a fuel source for the family car based on water and pill bugs. (There were a lot of pill bugs in the garage.) The car needed some alterations to make the new fuel work so Saturday morning John started in on the alterations. By the time his dad got to him he had a good portion of stuff that one would normally find attached to the engine lying out on the driveway. He received a real thrashing that time and spent several weeks in his room. (It was summer vacation.)

As you can imagine, John failed at everything. He corrected his teachers, really screwed up the grading curve, knew all the answers, didn’t have time to talk to other 12 or 13 yr olds, and made adults uncomfortable. And had no time for girls. (See later.) You would have thought that somebody would have noticed and they did, but John’s dad was threatened by a smart son so he did everything he could to discourage the boy.

By the time he got out of high school, John was emotionally ruined. Having pretty much the same raging hormones as his classmates didn’t help. Especially hormones with an IQ around 225. (Imagine what those guys could come up with!!!) (Well, then again, maybe you can’t.) The girls were so afraid of his intelligence they didn’t even make fun of him. So no girlfriends. (See earlier) Not even the fat and ugly ones. Talk about a sorry case. (And he could have made them skinny with peaches and cream complexions using just a can of peas and some WD-40.)

John started to drink. He actually started during his Junior year. Like most kids, he wanted to experiment. Like most kids, he had a beer or two. But unlike most kids, he started finishing off the whole six-pack all by himself. By the end of his Senior year he could put away a fifth of Red Rock Wine without much visible affect. He got kicked out of the house two days after he graduated. “Get a job, kid!”

Three days later he hit the big city, found his alley and had been there ever since. Homo-utopian, IQ around 225, filthy clothes, filthy body, mind in a fog. Answers to some of man’s most pressing questions held behind drooping lids, quivering lips and mud caked knees. For 25 years John had free reign to claim every piece of trash in that alley. What a career.

Enter Petey Swenser and crew. Petey was a no-good, no-account, low caste, local hood. His big claim to fame was boosting cars and grabbing purses. He was on the prowl that night and so far the pickings had been slim. He and his three accomplices were getting frustrated after two hours of not finding a single petty crime to commit or defenseless old lady to beat up. Then they turned down John’s alley.

When they exited John’s alley they left the man in flames. John’s cries woke up the locals and the emergency services were called. But he was too badly burned to survive. He died on a gurney in a dingy hospital hallway at the city’s welfare hospital. One of the orderlies who cleaned up afterwards mentioned that things probably turned out for the best. After all, John only had misery and pain mapped out for the rest of his life. “Wasn’t worth nuthin’ anyway! Just another bum.”

Roughly 3,650 years later the next attempt at evolutionary upgrading would occur. All the right factors and all the right choices and all the right flukes would occur and little Jessica Moraine would enter the world. Her IQ would be around 260. More like it. Unlike John, though, Jessica would be very shy and introverted. No one would ever suspect her incredible intelligence without spending a good amount of time getting to know her. Her father was totally taken in by his daughter and she received mountains of love at home. Her mother knew she was special but she also knew that specialty could change Jessica’s life. Mom kept quiet. (Living on the colony on Titan didn’t hurt. The locals were mostly adherents to the Progressive-Reactionary cartelish philosophy.) Jessica also made good choices. She married a man who would become an extremely wealth textiles tycoon. (Not only did silkworms thrive on Titan, Jessica’s husband loved his wife enough to listen to her suggestions and her suggestions usually led to a much-improved bottom line. Which may have accounted for why he loved her so much. Hmmm …) Jessica would bear 7 sons and 2 daughters for her tycoon. (Her hormones worked good, too!) Of those, 3 sons and 1 daughter would also be Homo-utopian. And so Homo sapiens’ domination of the earth - and several other planets and moons - would, finally, begin to wane.

But between John and Jessica humanity would experience billions of tears and immeasurable pain and suffering. Disease, poverty, the ultimate total consumption of fossil fuels, over crowding, wars, widespread crop failures and cannibalism, total racial genocide, and even, in some areas of the southern hemisphere, the total and complete breakdown of society. Man had many black days to travel through before Jessica would appear.

John couldn’t have known. But then again, John wouldn’t have cared.