Weekly Expressions week #17 ~TJ

~*An Ace in the Mind*~

Little Ace woke from his dream with a start. He couldn't believe it, his first success! He controlled his thinking so that he'd think about boats one hour before bedtime, then think about legos for the next hour. But sure enough, he ended up dreaming about being a sailor in the north bay. He caused the sun to glow a beautiful orange while the water was crystal blue all around him. It must've been hours upon hours he dreamed, certainly longer than he was asleep. He couldn't wait to tell his parents about his new success. His mother smiled and told him he'd become a scientist and dream of solutions to all the world's problems. His father was not thrilled at all, and blutly told him he needed to grow up and get his mind out of his stupid 'dreams.'

Ace began to keep all his dreams to himself, short of the notebook he kept on his nightstand, where he'd record every detail about his dreams he could remember. He started recording his dreams at his aunt's suggestion when he was six. He was faithful to his habit through the year and by the time he was seven years old, he could remember almost every detail perfectly.

By the time he was eight, he started getting straight A's in class as he started remembering more and more material. He'd spend study halls writing in various notebooks all he could remember from the previous class and practicing it. But the exceptional grades caused him to be too favored above the other students by some teachers, while attracting suspicion in others.

In fifth grade, Ace was bullied too much to attend the school any more. Ace's mother tried for six months to enroll Ace in a different school without his father knowing. Ace gave up on the A's and went for B's in his new school, purposefully getting some questions wrong. 

On the last day of the sixth grade year, Ace's favorite teacher, Mr. Andrew Binks, found Ace's backpack in his history classroom. Mr. Binks noticed that Ace was always drawing in class, but he guessed the kid was just taking notes. But just to make sure, Andrew went through the contents of the backpack. Nothing could prepare him for the content- he found notebooks, one for each subject. After pulling them out and placing them on a desk, Binks noticed that Ace had skillfully drew art on the cover of each of his notebooks. History had an italicized style with vines and stars all over the cover of the book, math had 3-D shapes with precise angles drawn on the letters, and science had the periodic table of the elements hand-drawn down the the last detail.

The kid was a genius at art, but when the history teacher opened the books, he was speechless! In math, there was geometrical and algebraic formulas and theorems far beyond his grade. In science there were chemical formulas and compounds and entire page dedicated to Quantum Physics theorems. And finally, in history, he found timelines, dates, sketches of historical figures, and maps detailing possibly-used tactics of famous battles with geographical accuracy.

Andrew Binks ran out his classroom door with a sprint and found Ace in gym class. Andrew ordered the gym teacher to send Ace to his room immediately after class. Ace reported in the room and found his backpack had been run through and all his notebooks and textbooks (that he had written notes in against school rules) on Mr. Binks' desk.

The teacher held up his history textbook, "What is this, young mister Canton?"

Ace went pale, "I'm sorry, sir. I won't draw in the textbook any more."
"That's not what I meant. Where on earth did you learn all this material? I went to college for four years and taught for eight, and this material is more academically advanced than I've ever seen."

Ace sat down at a desk in front of the teachers desk and stared at the floor. "Please don't send me to Special Ed."

"I didn't say I was going to send you to Special..."
"You were thinking it, sir," Ace interrupted.

Andrew was taken aback for a moment. "Well why not? You're obviously far too smart for anything I can teach you."

"The other kids make fun of me. I was pulled from my last school."

A pencil made precise twirling rotations in Andrew's hand as he leaned forward. "Is that why you've been purposefully getting B's?"

Ace looked up at his teacher. "How did you know that?"
"You know when the Battle of Waterloo was, you know that Napoleon fought it, but you can't tell me when Napoleon lived and died out of a multiple choice question?"

Ace swore under his breath, he should have paid more attention to making sure is wrong answers made sense.

"Besides," his teacher continued, "you strategized three different approaches to that battle with conclusions, casualty counts, and play-by-play outcomes. How could you not know something as simple as a date? Especially when," he held up the history notebook, "you've written them all down in here?"

Ace simply shifted in his chair, not saying anything.

"I restate my question, is this why you're getting B's?"

"Yes," Ace barely whispered.

"Then I'll make you a deal, if you give me A's and let me borrow your history textbook and notebook during gym class after school to study your notes, then I will personally deliver your report card to your house so that no one knows what it is but me."

Ace secretly became excited to learn that a grown adult was intrigued by his intelligence. "Deal."

Due to the smallness of the school, every teacher taught that subject to all grades, and every other year the teachers rotated subjects. Mr. Binks and Ace grew very close until Ace was coming over to Binks' house every Saturday to teach him.

Andrew and Ace were best friends until 12th grade, when Andrew was diagnosed cancer and died six months later. Ace grew so deep within himself he barely spoke at all. He never attempted scholarships or college. He rented a basement from a elderly Russian woman after getting a job at his cousin Evan's computer repair shop.

~/*~*\~

"You know, AJ, you're going to have to do something with your life some day."

Ace unscrewed a hard drive from it's compartment. "That's what my father said, right before he said I'd never amount to anything."

Evan ran a damp cleaning cloth over a monitor screen. "You're a certifiable genius making $7.95 an hour from me."
"Are you offering me a raise?" Ace asked with a chuckle.

"I can't pay you any more, you know that."

"I know. But people can't know my gift." He started to screw a new hard drive where the old one sat.

"For the love of Mario brothers! Why not? You could be making annual 7-digit figures within your first year with your brains!"

"Once people realize my gift, they will attempt manipulate it."
"Yeah, it's the corporate world, buddy, they'll try to manipulate everything."

Ace just remained silent, a task he had plenty of practice at. The bell they had duct-taped to the door rang, signaling a new customer.

"You want to take that one, AJ?" Evan asked.

Ace didn't look up from his work. "I don't do new people, you know that."

Evan set his cleaning cloth down and started to walk twords the door that led to the front room. "You know, all you have to do is ask 'can I help you?'"

AJ didn't pay attention to the sounds of the new customer until Evan poked his head through the curtain that separated the backroom from the front room. "Hey, can you come look at this real quick?"

Ace stopped his project and came to the front room where a 2002 Dell computer sat on the sales desk.

"Do we carry anything for a Windows XP Pro? We'll need to swap out her 8-gig hard drive for something a bit more substantial."

Ace looked at the computer after glancing at the extremely attractive brunette customer. "I know a place where we could get one. It'll take a couple days to get here, and then another day to get things installed correctly."
"With all due respect, I need this fixed no later then the day after tomorrow. My boss will kill me if I don't have my computer up and running," the customer pleaded.

Evan scratched his head. "Well, if you can get the software and get the new hard drive installed by Thursday, then I can deliver it to her after we close."

"Deal." 

Evan and Ace finished their projects later than usual and closed half an hour late. Ace realized he was going to miss his sub and would have to catch the next one that didn't leave for another 20 minutes, so he took his time walking down 3rd street to the subway station. He rounded 3rd street to turn onto fourth when he stepped behind a certain attractive female- the same one in Evan's shop a few hours ago! AJ didn't say anything, but simply kept in step so not to alarm her. He had been accused of being a mugger with his dark clothing and dark eyes, creating a rather scary impression to those not expecting it.
They both boarded the subway and took seats across from each other, she pulled out a Science Today magazine while Ace simply played Tetris on his small flip-phone.
"Oh!" She suddenly exclaimed.
Ace always read Science Today and Matter of the Mind over breakfast in almost no time flat. "Page 5?"
The girl looked up suddenly with a questioning glance, she didn't recognize him at all. "Pardon me?"
AJ raised his eyes from his phone to meet hers. "Are you looking at the telekinetic droid bots on page 5?"
She looked back down at the magazine. "Oh, yes. Quite fascinating, how they can transfer signals from the brain like that!"
With the perk of his eyebrows, he mumbled to himself, "oh, you have no idea..."
"What's that?" She asked.
"Nothing." He put his phone away. "So I see you like robotics?"
The girl granted him a second questioning glance. "How did you know?"
"I get Science Today every morning. You seem to have paused on page 5 for a substantial amount of time."
The girl blushed for a moment. "Well, I have a fascination for engineering and science."
The sub slowed to a halt with an annoying screech. The lady collected her purse and magazine and stood. "Well, this is my stop. See you later."
"You will."
She stopped at the door of the sub. "What's that?"
Ace turned to look at her. "I got a different shift at my job, I'll be taking this sub about this time every day now."
The girl smiled politely. "That's great! My name is Destiny."
Ace stood and nodded briefly. "I'm Ace. But my friend calls me 'AJ.'" He forgot to add a plural to 'friend' even though he really did only have one friend. But maybe he talked fast enough she wouldn't catch that.
"Well then, I'll see you tomorrow then." Destiny nodded back and hurried out the door before they closed.
"I certainly hope so."

Ace arrived in his basement later than usual. Being an extreme introvert, he often shared his thoughts only with himself, but he had to say them out loud before they got ahead of themselves. He prepared a bowl of dry cereal on the table in his kitchen and grabbed a can of Sprite from the fridge to sip on, then began to pace back and forth... thinking.
"The Cx3 will work if I can wire auxiliary lines to a central drive to translate the signals from the microdes. Each transistor will collect specific points of data then send them to their individually programmed microprocessors. Which, I might add, I do NOT want to do again!" He passed by his cereal bowl and scooped a handful to nibble on as he paced back and forth some more. "But that's a cheapie way of doing it. If this was professional work, I'd have to build primary drives for each different micro lines. But if the drive was 24 gigabytes or more, I could program different file translators and program sensors to detect the individual signals. But I'll need a dedicated RAM unit for that. Altogether, if I went to Evan's at noon tomorrow, I could have the Cx3 ready tomorrow morning..."
Ace's train of thought was abruptly halted with a knock on the door. Evan walked in without a response. "Dude, check out what I found at Programmer's Plan for 50 bucks!" He held up a Windows XP Pro software package. "We can finish the day after tomorrow."
"Great. Destiny will be ecstatic." Ace replied. He grabbed another handful of cereal.
Evan was speechless for a moment, "uh, who's Destiny?"
"The girl in the shop today. I met her on the subway."
Evan dropped the box of software on the floor without flinching. "You talked to someone?! What happened? Tell me everything!"
Ace held his hands up as if to surrender. "Evan, nothing happened. We just talked about a science magazine." His cousin was the ecstatic one now.
"Dude! Do you know what this means?!"
AJ looked at the floor almost solemnly. "It means I have someone to test on."
Evan's jaw dropped like a brick off a bridge. "What?! No! No... No... No. Heck no! No."
"She can do it."
"She just met you today, you dimwhit!" Evan grabbed Ace's shoulders and began to shake him.
"I know someone when I see them, Evan. She'll be ready in a few weeks."
Evan squeezed the blood flow out of Ace's shoulders. "Ace Johnathon-James Canton!!! I forbid you to enter that girl's mind."
"Two weeks. Then she'll never be the same."