Lindsay Fowler | 7
Like that, the inventor knew what he had to do, and he set to work right away. He took down his television and moved it to his workshop, where he disassembled the 150 inch panel. First, he worked on the television’s casing, heating it up with a hairdryer so that he could stretch and mold the plastic into a thin egg shape, big enough to comfortably hold a large dog. He then made a hinged hatch at the tip of the egg.
Once the shell had cooled, the inventor lowered himself through the hatch and fitted the egg’s interior with a pliant fiber screen, woven with wires and LEDs.
The inventor paused to marvel at the organic design of his remodeled television, but if he had only managed to alter the shape of the machine, he had failed.
It was time, then, for his true touch of genius.
The inventor climbed back into the egg with a jar of stem cells in his hand. The cells were his own, taken from his own placenta, which his mother had kept in the back of her freezer for decades. Only when he had moved his mother into his home did the inventor discover what his mother had hidden away, kept for reasons she had no longer been able to articulate. The idea of throwing a piece of himself away felt strange, and so the inventor had kept his placenta, just in case.
Crouched inside the egg, the inventor removed the lid from the jar. He dipped a paint brush into the solution and smoothed a glistening layer of cells over the screen.
Carefully, so as not to disrupt the cells, he levered himself out of the egg and closed the hatch. He plugged in the television so that the cells could grow in its flickering warmth, and he left his workshop.
The machine was beyond him now, and the inventor knew it. Should this experiment fail—should his idea not work—there was nothing the inventor could do to salvage it. All he could do was wait and visit the egg,