grazing her bubblegum lips. She rapped in her trade-marked (literally) helium voice to the accompaniment of what sounded like kettledrums and dueling band saws:
“Bad at good, so good at bad,
those girls could be the best we’ve had.
Perfect for the plan we’ve hatched,
to make sure everything is snatched.”
After brushing back dazzling strands of translucent hair away from her face, Yojuanna scratched her diamond-studded ear—an ear that seemed longer and pointier than it had been only moments before. With a shrill giggle like the backfire of a clown car full of laughing gas, the digital diva kicked her feet into the air and resumed her manic hopping.
“C’mon!” Marlo said, beaming, feeling as if she were doing the backstroke in an Olympic-sized bowl of Lucky Charms. For the moment, she was a prisoner in a pretty awesome cage.
Perhaps the only difference between incarceration and vacation is perspective
, Marlo thought as she skipped down the mall, certain that she was soon to become the preferred “pet” of a ginormous jack rabbot with a highly electric personality.
14 · ENERGY CRiSiS
“I THOPE THITH workth,” Milton said to himself as he held the poultry thermometer underneath his tongue.
After his parents had gone to sleep, Milton had snuck into the garage to conduct his late-night experiments with subtle energy.
Lester Lobe had given him a printout listing the “secret” experiments of Sir Edward Tylor and his Subtle Energies Commission.
Sir Edward’s experiments with complex patterns of electric shock had led him to believe that there was indeed an after-realm, as he put it, a “spirit world crowded with countless detached essences removed from their respective material bodies. These insubstantial images, vapors, films, and shadows are, I believe, the very cause of life and thought, independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of their corporeal owner.”
Easy for him to say
, thought Milton as he bit down on the thermometer and straightened the jumper cables leading from his mouth to the industrial-strength bug zapper (the Insecticide 3000) suspended from the basketball hoop outside. Sir Edward made the “after-realm” seem like a noble place full of freedom and possibility, unlike the vexing bureaucratic freak show Milton had encountered.
Lester Lobe had written some notes—cribbed from various electricians’ manuals, alongside Sir Edward Tylor’s observations—that detailed how to make an etheric energy “trap.” Of course, due to practical considerations such as “where would an eleven-year-old possibly get a two-thousand-volt transformer,” Milton had to make some compromises, the biggest being that under no circumstances was he going to drill a hole to the center of his brain in order to hot-wire his pineal gland.
Sir Edward had used extensive animal testing to achieve his aims. There was even an unconfirmed account that he was able to reanimate a dead man using the life force of a convict facing execution. And while Milton may have accidentally killed his archenemy, he wasn’t going to cause harm to others simply to be “whole,” energy-wise.
Lucky, his faithful ferret, undulated into the garage, sniffed Milton’s sneakers, and looked up at his master with an expression that said, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Milton scratched Lucky in that prime spot at the top of his neck, and the ferret billowed away out into the night. He had performed some rough calculations and deduced that, if a human conducted an average electrical current of three hundred kiloamperes, then—based on body weight—he would need either several large dogs, a dozen cats, or a hundred mice to get enough captured etheric energy to fuse his physical and sentient bodies together.
Milton could never bring himself to sacrifice an animal. He did, however, have no great love for insects. And, on a late summer night in Kansas, he was pretty sure he could harvest the death energy of
“Bad at good, so good at bad,
those girls could be the best we’ve had.
Perfect for the plan we’ve hatched,
to make sure everything is snatched.”
After brushing back dazzling strands of translucent hair away from her face, Yojuanna scratched her diamond-studded ear—an ear that seemed longer and pointier than it had been only moments before. With a shrill giggle like the backfire of a clown car full of laughing gas, the digital diva kicked her feet into the air and resumed her manic hopping.
“C’mon!” Marlo said, beaming, feeling as if she were doing the backstroke in an Olympic-sized bowl of Lucky Charms. For the moment, she was a prisoner in a pretty awesome cage.
Perhaps the only difference between incarceration and vacation is perspective
, Marlo thought as she skipped down the mall, certain that she was soon to become the preferred “pet” of a ginormous jack rabbot with a highly electric personality.
14 · ENERGY CRiSiS
“I THOPE THITH workth,” Milton said to himself as he held the poultry thermometer underneath his tongue.
After his parents had gone to sleep, Milton had snuck into the garage to conduct his late-night experiments with subtle energy.
Lester Lobe had given him a printout listing the “secret” experiments of Sir Edward Tylor and his Subtle Energies Commission.
Sir Edward’s experiments with complex patterns of electric shock had led him to believe that there was indeed an after-realm, as he put it, a “spirit world crowded with countless detached essences removed from their respective material bodies. These insubstantial images, vapors, films, and shadows are, I believe, the very cause of life and thought, independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of their corporeal owner.”
Easy for him to say
, thought Milton as he bit down on the thermometer and straightened the jumper cables leading from his mouth to the industrial-strength bug zapper (the Insecticide 3000) suspended from the basketball hoop outside. Sir Edward made the “after-realm” seem like a noble place full of freedom and possibility, unlike the vexing bureaucratic freak show Milton had encountered.
Lester Lobe had written some notes—cribbed from various electricians’ manuals, alongside Sir Edward Tylor’s observations—that detailed how to make an etheric energy “trap.” Of course, due to practical considerations such as “where would an eleven-year-old possibly get a two-thousand-volt transformer,” Milton had to make some compromises, the biggest being that under no circumstances was he going to drill a hole to the center of his brain in order to hot-wire his pineal gland.
Sir Edward had used extensive animal testing to achieve his aims. There was even an unconfirmed account that he was able to reanimate a dead man using the life force of a convict facing execution. And while Milton may have accidentally killed his archenemy, he wasn’t going to cause harm to others simply to be “whole,” energy-wise.
Lucky, his faithful ferret, undulated into the garage, sniffed Milton’s sneakers, and looked up at his master with an expression that said, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Milton scratched Lucky in that prime spot at the top of his neck, and the ferret billowed away out into the night. He had performed some rough calculations and deduced that, if a human conducted an average electrical current of three hundred kiloamperes, then—based on body weight—he would need either several large dogs, a dozen cats, or a hundred mice to get enough captured etheric energy to fuse his physical and sentient bodies together.
Milton could never bring himself to sacrifice an animal. He did, however, have no great love for insects. And, on a late summer night in Kansas, he was pretty sure he could harvest the death energy of
Similar Books
![MINE! [New World Book 8]](https://fs.ageofbook.com/503196/thumbs/152x264/mine-new-world-book-8.jpg)
