Part 2 : Sachita What's-Her-Face
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Some of mankind's greatest discoveries and inventions have been accidents. Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin by accident. He had returned from a long holiday and noticed mould growing on one of the Petri dishes he had left out for cleaning. Upon closer examination, he further noticed it had killed off the bacteria originally cultured on the dish. The first antibiotic was thus discovered adding years to human life expectancy. I was invented by mistake too. I am a piece of software installed on a tiny a chip implanted in the fore brain of my creator. The chip uses patented technology to detect, capture and process electrical signals in the brains of others and pass them on to the brain of my creator. That's how he read minds. It took Suvit and him, and later just him, about two and a half years to come up with this invention that was never meant to be.

What's more, my creator's birth, like mine, was an accident. He liked to joke that he was the result of poor quality control at Nepal Contraceptive Retail Services Company, Lainchaur. His birth was the result of someone's else mistake. His life too was the result of other people's mistakes. He had a tomcat of a father and a slut of a mother. Which came first - his dad's visits to the whorehouse or his mom's flings with Kathmandu's high society - was like asking the chicken and egg question. Regardless of the order of precedence, each behavior fed the other. His grandparents whisked him away to boarding school in Nainital to shelter him from the heavy artillery in the battlefield his once peaceful home had become. Chairs, tables, cups, mugs, glasses, telephones were hurled inside the house like Scud missiles pounding Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. His tears were the closest thing he had to the Patriot interceptor missiles that were supposed to destroy the Scuds in mid-air. Like the Patriot missiles, his interceptor's hit-miss ratio was fifty-fifty. He parents would sometimes cease their fire but other times completely ignore the tsunami of tears he shed and carry on their endless, senseless war.

I was meant to be part of a process to detect the electric field in a human body and compress electrons into packets of data that could be transmitted around the world. I was to be the software that would operate the underlying hardware which consisted of electro-magnetic sensors, gauges and processing centers. I was the glue to hold together the different components of their earth-shattering invention

One day things changed. My creator and Suvit parted ways. Suvit's sister fell in love with my creator. He initially resisted her advances because she was his best friend's sister. His relationship with Suvit was more important to him than her love for him. Then one cold wintry afternoon, and she curses herself to this day for it, she kissed him. He kissed her back. Before they knew it, they were in my creator's bedroom giving vent to to the fires that burnt within. His defences crumbled to the ground like a house of cards. A man often thinks with his penis. When he does not, he can only put up so much resistance to persistence from the other side. As Murphy's law would have it, during their third sexual encounter, Suvit caught them red-handed, stormed out of the room, trashed the laboratory they had built in a rented place in Baneshwor, and never spoke to my creator again. My creator stopped speaking to Suvit's sister soon after.

With an enemy for a best friend and a family more ravaged than war-torn Bosnia, my creator sought solace in the hills of Kumaon and Garwhal. Nepal epitomized everything that was wrong about life. The war, the strikes, the pollution, the traffic he loathed them all. When the Maoists weren't fighting the Army, his mother was ambushing his father over one thing or another and his father, a staunch believer in the Powell doctrine, was retaliating with overwhelming fire power reducing his mom to a vessel of tears. When there wasn't a Nepal banda outside, there was a strike in his mother's kitchen. "Don't those whores feed you? You shameless bastard, you dog, you fu*k every bitch you can sniff and then come home and expecting hot food? My foot! "

Have you ever heard your mother swear? I haven't since I never had one and don't know how it feels to have a mother let alone one who swears. My creator never swears. He doesn't drink or smoke either. He speaks with a soft voice and has a smile that can light up a cave

My creator met Jogi Parmanand by accident. Disillusioned with the world, he decided to take time off from his life and travel. It was his childhood dream to explore the Valley of Flowers, tucked away in the high altitudes of the Garhwal Himalayas. Legend has it that there is a lake close to the Valley and late in the summer, the wind blows the beautiful yellow, red, purple, pink and orange petals from the valley and covers the lake to form a magnificent natural cornucopia. Those who have seen it have said it is unlike anything anywhere else in the world. According to the same legend, those who take a dip in the petal-covered icy waters of the lake have their sorrows washed away and attain perpetual bliss.

He had stopped in Haridwar on the way to the Valley of Flowers. A flower seller outside the Mansa Devi temple, upon finding out where he was from, motioned him to a cottage where a "Nepali baba" lived. He said the baba was a nice man and was interested in meeting people from Nepal. He was supposed to posses curative powers to rid people of diseases like cancer and diabetes. None of which my creator believed but driven by sheer curiosity he decided to pay a visit to see what a Nepali sadhu would be like.


The hop of the bumble bee
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When Suvit walked out, the lab resembled the scene in my creators house after a big fight. It was six months before my creator returned to the lab again. Fresh from his trip to India and rejuvenated by Jogi Parmanand's example of the bumble bee, he set out to revive and complete the abandoned project. He had lost his best friend to lust and he was going to finish his friend's work as a tribute to their friendship. When optical travel became a reality, he would share the credit with Suvit. They would be the new Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their company would overtake Google as the most sought after technology company in the world. Suvit would surely forgive him when he saw how earnestly my creator sought his forgiveness. He would also hire the best marriage counsellors and psychotherapists to fix his parent's dysfunctional marriage. He would not hesitate to pay off the Colombian drug cartels to knock off anyone who so much as dared lay a glimpse on his beautiful mom and his dashing dad. He would take his grandparents on a helicopter pilgrimage to Mt Kailash . As for the expulsion from MIT, when you are that famous, they would probably be willing to brush that incident under the carpet as an act of youthful indiscretion.

My creator finally managed to put together a prototype of the first component of the optical travel system : the electron compressor. It could, in theory, dismantle elements into their sub-atomic components, pack the electrons into data packets, transmit them using TCI/IP, the standard protocol used on the internet and re-assemble packets on the other end. While testing the prototype, he faced an uphill challenge in detecting electrical activity in the human body. The intensity of the electromagnetic field varied by body part and he realized he needed different compression mechanisms for each part of the body. Since the brain seemed to have the most readily detectable electric field, he decided to focus his efforts on the brain.

The microwave was an accidental discovery when Percy LeBaron Spencer noticed the radar waves he was experimenting with melted the chocolate bar in his pocket. In contrast, Dr Frankenstein's monster, albeit fictional, was not so accidental.

"Luck favors the prepared mind" my inventor was not going to let anything go wrong.

To be continued