His garden took on his mood and this summer the garden was struggling to produce anything of value. Unfortunately, the engineer’s shop was producing the same quality of work.
He’d sold a few patents years back and the royalties he got from those served him well. They didn’t bring the wife and kids back though, but they he paid his alimony he what he had left he invested in new machines and gadgets, and of course seeds and fertilizer.
Some summers would bring a bountiful harvests. His greenhouse would be bursting at the seams. The unfortunate part was that he would often be too busy to manage the gardens those summers. Wild animals would eat the fruit off the vine, neighbors would take a few knowing the man would never get around to eating all of it. When he would finally leave his work shop to take a few vegetables for a stew or salad there would always be plenty left for him.
The irony was now that he had the time and attention to put into the garden it wouldn’t grow a damn thing. He had killed two basil plants and none of his tomato vines had produced fruit despite it being mid August.
His luck in his work shop was no better. He had a project, he always had a project, but this summer it wasn’t going anywhere. He had taken on the noble task of building an authentic Turing computer in his garage. It used ticker tape to run basic addition commands. For the first half of the summer he had worked tirelessly on it knowing it wouldn’t go anywhere. He worked on it with the hope that he might learn something in the process.
By now he had picked up a few things but the most useful thing he had learned was how hard it was to find vacuum tubes in this day and age. He briefly looked into manufacturing his own and then found that it was marginally more challenging. He dropped that endeavor but not the project as a whole.
He watered his garden for the third time that day. He inspected the small yellow flowers on the tomato plants and wondered if they would wither off the vine or finally grow into something of substance.
When the ground was soaked far more than it needed to be he wrapped the hose up and walked back into his messy garage. He turned on the machine and ran a simple addition program he had written late last night. He looked at the output after all the wheels of the machine had turned. The output was garbage. Two plus two equaled five, seven minus ten was a round twenty and five divided by nine was some how eleven.
It had been a summer of chaos. The machines answers made as much sense as the rest of his life. Chaos from simple and known inputs. There was nothing that he could do to make sense of it. Sometimes the outputs weren’t even the same between runs.
He had meticulously looked over the machine day and night. He dismantled it a dozen times and even moved different vacuum tubes to different areas. He referred to countless manuals and patents that documented the original designs of these machines but had no luck. There was no winning with this project. It was as hopeless as his garden nothing this summer was going to go his way.
He finally sat down and sprayed the light of his desk lamp on the punch card maker and examined that. He verified that the outputs were all wired up correctly. They of course were. There was nothing being done that was wrong. The only plausible explanation, which was in no way indicative of his reality, was that everything he knew and used to get to the point he was at didn’t apply. Someone down the line had changed how electronics worked and he never got the memo. Or an equally reasonable reason was that he had bought a cursed vacuum tube and didn’t know it.
He walked into the house and picked up the phone. He was truly desperate, he dialed the number for his ex-wife’s house. The receiver rang three times and a young woman’s voice picked up. “Marlin residence this is Suzy.”
Hearing the new husband’s last name out of his daughter’s mouth stung but he continued. “Suzy, hey this is your dad. How’s it going?”
The click was as quick as ever. At least there was one thing that still worked as he suspected.
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