xp_logs | Mark and Forge, Saturday afternoon (Reply)

At the New York Consumer Electronics Expo, Forge runs into Mark and is surprised at the club DJ's talent for electronics.

The New York Consumer Electronics Expo was, for the most part, nothing more than a marketing extravaganza for the next year's video game systems, three-year-old GPS technology being spun as new and innovative automobile gadgets, and a haven for hucksters more suited to three-am infomercials.

If you knew what to look for, though, you could sometimes catch a glimpse of the truly innovative, the diamond in the rough. Forge, by his very nature, knew what to look for. He'd debated applying for a vendor's permit to display some of the inventions he'd designed over the last year, but decided against drawing that much attention right now. Better to wait until he had a firmer grasp on intellectual property law and patent procedures before putting his creations out for the less-scrupulous to try and steal for god knows what uses.

He paused by one of the booths without a sign, simply a flat-screen monitor and a sign saying "Back in 15 minutes". The data scrolling across the monitor alongside a wireframe diagram would have been easily mistaken for a simple computer diagnostic, but not to Forge's trained eye.

"Amazing," he commented to the empty booth as he squinted at the monitor, "radio-responsive polymers. If they can get beyond the structural issue, that'd be an incredible leap forward for prosthetics..."

"No, see, the problem isn't that I'm asking the impossible," came an irate voice a few tables down, "It's that you're completely fucking retarded. It's designed wrong. See this? Wrong. If I'm going to be payin' extra for a silver coil - and 'paying extra' is an understatement - then it shouldn't fuckin' melt." The tirade ended with with something slamming on the table and the impatient tapping of a foot. "Well? You gonna refund me or not?"

The voice wasn't familiar so much as the attitude. The average consumer would have just bitched about their product not working, but that was the familiar sound of the engineer's lament about shoddy materials. Interest captured, Forge glanced over and suddenly placed voice with face. "Mark?" he called, wandering over to the table in question. "Wow, didn't expect to see you here, especially not with... what seems to be the issue here?"

"Oh, heya." Mark's temperament took a 180-degree turn as Forge approached, and the guy manning the booth seemed relieved. He wasn't going to be happy much longer. "Okay, you help us out here, Master Engineer. See this?" Mark picked up the object he'd not-so-gently placed on the table. It was a very small loudspeaker. "These folks here are sellin' silver coils, which is great because I needed something that wasn't going to melt, and copper wasn't going to cut it. And yet, it still did. So, care to posit why that might have happened?"

Ignoring the vendor's objections, Forge picked up the speaker and pried off the back cover. Withdrawing the aforementioned coil, he held it between two metal fingertips. "That's because this is anodized silver with a zinc core. It's cheaper and just as good for regular applications, but if you're passing a high-amperage current through it repeatedly like, oh, in a speaker or amplifier, you're going to get conductivity breakdown. You find these in the Korean knockoff market more than anything else. Tell me you didn't pay full price, Mark."

"I never pay wholesale prices." Mark turned back to the vendor and crossed his arms across his chest, trying to look as menacing as a pissed off hipster can. "So, before I go the nice people sponsoring this fair, maybe you should give me back my money. Sound good?" It was almost a shame Remy wasn't here to scare the living crap out of this guy, Mark reflected as he pocketed his refund and stalked away satisfied. "Ugh, this happens every year. There's always someone who's totally trying to fuck me over. I must be out of it if I didn't see through it this time."

Curious, Forge paced alongside Mark. "Well, you don't find high-capacity silver contacts in your off-the-shelf iPod headphones, that's pretty rare stuff. A bit more involved than your everyday mixing board too, which begs the question... what are you doing at this end of the hall? I figured you for more of the..." He nodded over to the entertainment exposition where a crowd of raucous twentysomethings were hooting and hollering about the newest over-rendered flashy video game shown on the huge plasma screens.

"I don't really like video games. Unless Minesweeper counts." The refund was burning a hole in Mark's pocket and just begged to be spent, so of course the next stop was a much more reputable (and unfortunately more expensive) vendor displaying various components for sound systems. "I was just tryin' ta improve on a little project I started a few months ago."

"Oh?" Forge was curious. Mark wasn't looking at the display models, but at the specific components. Offhandedly, Forge wondered if this was how people saw him when he was getting into his zone, with the infinite world of mechanical creation laid out before him. "Anything interesting?"

Mark delicately picked up a small lead clamp and inspected it closely, trying to determine if it was the right size for what he needed or not. "A toy, partly," he said with a dejected sigh, and replaced the clamp. "Just a mini music player I rigged up to play a trick on my co-workers. Here." He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew the little rectangular machine that had exposed Snow Valley to Fall Out Boy, and later saved his ass in Africa when his iPod battery died.

Forge picked it up, eyebrows immediately going to his hairline. "Interesting. I'm assuming it's... wait, set up to activate remotely via RF signal or at preprogrammed... oh, this is brilliant. I mean, not past the cutting edge, but it's not like you have a professionally-stocked machine shop to work with and... and you even worked the anti-interference circuit in with the antenna. Oh, that's... this is good work, Mark. Where'd you study at? This is top-notch."

Mark smirked. "Thank you," he said pleasantly. "I think it took me a couple lunch breaks to actually build it. Which is fine, because I was on a diet anyway and cutting back helped." Tooting his own horn, sure, but there was that perverse pleasure of surprising someone by totally ignoring their expectations.

Forge peered closely at the device without cracking it open - that would just be rude and besides, it wasn't as if he needed to. It was a machine, it was already telling him everything he wanted to know. "I'm serious, this is a really superb design. You've got natural talent. I mean, there are ways it could be improved - narrowing down your RF bandwidth, that's what's going to eat up battery life on this faster than anything else, but ... oh, and here we are, there's why you were burning up those contacts so fast, your heat dispersal's going nowhere." He looked up, still impressed, and handed Mark the small device. "But that's like criticizing a poet for his handwriting -I'm... I have to say, I am a bit taken aback. Never pictured you as the electronics geek type. It's kind of hard to figure, beneath all the 'whoop-whoop chika-chika' club kid guise. You're a closet nerd."

Mark winked. "Oh, Forge, I have never been in the closet for anything. You just don't work with me and see what I do when I get bored. And I can't claim all the credit. Doug did help, especially when it came to actually putting music on this. All that programming stuff is beyond me. I can design a website or give your DOS Pong, but that's about it."

Laughing, Forge put his hands out like a zombie. "One of us... one of us..." he chanted before smiling and nodding his head towards the next row of vendors. "When I get bored, on the other hand, God himself shits his britches worrying about what I'll do next. Thankfully, I have outlets. C'mon, you ever worked with cadmium lasers? I've got this miniaturization project that's light-years beyond what the folks at CERN are doing..."