Chapter 3 – The Early Years
Gilbert Zachariah Morrison was born under a full moon to Ben and Betty Morrison. He was their first and only child. It wasn’t because they didn’t want more children. Betty would have loved to have a houseful of kids under foot. Some women are just born with a mothering gene, and Betty was one of them, she had it in spades. Moments after his birth, when she held him carefully in her arms like a priceless ancient porcelain urn, Gilbert looked up at her and smiled. She knew then he was going to be a special child. There was an instant bond between them. She knew then he would be all she would ever need. Sitting on the edge of the bed beside his wife, Ben felt it too, and reached out to caress the top of Gilbert’s head. Gilbert focused on his father and graced him with a smile too. In the blink of an eye, all three of them knew they were meant to be together.
Gil, as his mother called him, had said his first words before the age of one, and was stringing words together into meaningful sentences before the age of two. By the age of three, Gil had drawn the first rudimentary designs to what was later to become the centerpiece of the doctoral dissertation leading to his first doctorate degree.
As you might expect, his childhood was anything but ordinary. He had no friends because kids his own age didn’t understand him and he had nothing in common with them. He had no interest in sports which he considered an unproductive waste of valuable time. Other things he put in that same category were riding a bike, skateboarding, just hanging out, fishing, skipping stones across the water, kite flying, and flying model airplanes.
Well, actually he could go either way on flying model airplanes. The kind you bought in kits and put together yourself were boring. He didn’t understand how anyone could be entertained by such basic simplistic designs. He found he could improve on both the design and the engines of the airplanes to make them more efficient. He was soon designing and building model airplanes for the whole neighborhood. That’s when he learned his first important lesson about human nature. Never, but never, show your designs to anyone unless you’re prepared for the endless interrogations that inevitably follow.
“How’d you do that?”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Can you teach me how you did that?”
“Will you make one for me too?”
Then he found he was wasting all his time building them for other people instead of spending his valuable time developing the endless stream of ideas he had running through his head.
Gil’s head was so full of new designs he didn’t have enough time in the day to build even a fraction of them. He had endless projects he started but had not yet finished in the small cramped space his father had carved out for him in the family garage. Each new project he worked on sparked other new and more interesting ideas which he just couldn’t wait to get started on.
That was when he acquired the nickname Gizmo. It actually came from the first couple of letters from his first and last names with his middle initial thrown in between. Kids in the neighborhood and at school used to tease him about Gizmo and his gadgets. At first he wasn’t sure he liked it, but he warmed up to it rather quickly and would just smile when called Gizmo. Of course his mother always called him Gil, and always would. Some things just didn’t change.
Most of Gizmo’s gadgets were just for family use and were never to be spoken about or shown to anyone else. One of his first gadgets, while he was still in grade school, was Gizmo’s redesign of the family coffee pot. He set it to read the specific telepathic impulses from his two parents. Theirs and only theirs. All they had to do was think about coffee when they got up in the morning and the coffee pot downstairs in the kitchen would swing into action by grinding the required amount of their favorite beans and brew the coffee for them just the way they liked it.
Soon after the coffee pot came the toothpaste. Since Gizmo hated to brush his teeth, but knew his mother insisted on it, he invented a toothpaste that could be used without a toothbrush. The toothpaste had micro miniaturized gadgets in it that were activated when they came into contact with water or saliva. By putting a small amount of toothpaste in your mouth and swishing it around, the gadgets would activate and clean the teeth and massage the gums and the inside of your mouth. They were small enough to get between the teeth and remove all the plague and food particles. They were also delicate enough and gentle enough to leave the enamel intact. The gadgets had a life expectancy of just over two minutes and then they would dissolve into a tasteless powder that could be either swallowed, or washed down the drain with no harm to the water supply. Gizmo was, after all, very green minded. He had very good reason to be, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Another one of Gizmo’s gadgets was a microchip he embedded in a harmless looking plastic devise his parents could carry with them at all times, or on their key chains. The chip was designed to lock and unlock the doors to their house. When they left the house and were more than two feet away from the door, the deadbolt on the door would engage. When returning home and they approached the door, the deadbolt would slide back when they got within two feet. The chip would also control the lights in the house, turning them on and off as needed, and the thermostat and air conditioning as well. Gizmo gave them a controller they could use to program the chips in any way that suited their needs.
Some of the many other gadgets Gizmo designed were an automatic lock / unlock of the car doors, an automatic start and stop of the engine, automatic breaking when the car sensed danger, and an automatic override to the cars controls in an emergency situation. Some of these enhancements were a little disconcerting to Ben and Betty at first. They weren’t used to a car that could think and act fast enough to get them out of harm’s way.
Ben and Betty were at first apprehensive about Gizmo’s gadgets. He was after all, and for all intents and purposes, still a kid, even though he no longer looked like one. Gizmo had gone through a growth spurt and by the age of 15, he was six feet tall, so he no longer looked his age. He had big ears on his oblong head, with a shock of uncontrollable reddish blond hair on top. When he smiled, which he liked to do, and often did, he showed a big mouthful of very white perfectly shaped teeth. Gizmo’s growth had been so rapid, it was hard to keep him in clothes that fit him. He could often be seen with shirt sleeves two inches above his wrists and pant legs several inches above his ankles. It gave him the appearance of a homeless person, which Gizmo didn’t seem to notice, but it got him teased a lot at school. He preferred the long sleeve shirts even if they were too short. He never rolled up the sleeves and always kept the top button buttoned around his neck. To complete his normal daily outfit he always carried a pocket protector in his shirt pocket. He had learned that lesson too many times with leaky pens ruining his shirts. With all his gadgets, one would have thought he could invent a pen that didn’t leak, but Gizmo actually liked the pocket protectors because it gave structure to the pockets and gave him the ability to carry other things as well without making the pocket look bulging. When referring to Gizmo, the words nerd and geek generally came to mind, but Gizmo embraced the terms because he knew he was special. He knew he had qualities others only wished they had.
The list of Gizmo’s gadgets were endless, and there were as many more in various stages of production in his garage workshop. He had found it necessary to enclose the workshop and put a padlock on the door. Not so much to keep his parents out, because he had after all given them a key, but to keep the curious eyes of unwanted strangers out of his business. None of his inventions were patented and he didn’t want them falling into the hands of strangers who could put them to ill-conceived purposes.
There was never enough time in the day to work on his inventions, and then of course there was school. His parents required that, but Gizmo considered it another colossal waste of time. In most cases he knew more than his teachers. They saw early on he was a gifted child, and after a battery of tests moved him along to the ne
xt grade level. By the age of ten he had finished high school with the highest grade point average in the history of the school. By the age of fifteen he had completed his first doctorate degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and by the age of seventeen he had completed his second doctorate degree from Stanford.
The dissertation for his first doctorate degree was on the leap frog effect. The design he started when he was three. Over the years, he had perfected it until it was completely safe and reliable. Of course in his dissertation he left out some key elements he knew his professors would neither catch nor miss. He knew this was cutting edge technology and his professors would not only have questions, but they would not be able to keep it to themselves. He didn’t want his invention to get into the wrong hands and find some government type knocking on his door, which he knew would only be a matter of time. So in effect, what he had to do was dummy it up enough to get the degree and nothing more.
The project he presented with the dissertation was a very simplified space-time gadget designed to move a golf ball three inches from one spot to the next. It had his professors spellbound as he demonstrated it over and over again to their delight. It was all carefully spelled out in the dissertation complete with wrong algorithms so no one would be able to duplicate it. He knew he would have to leave it behind with them, but he had the forethought to build into the leap frog gadget a self-destruct mechanism that would reduce it to dust if it was tampered with. He could just see the government getting their hands on that, or getting their hands on him for that matter. He knew he had to move fast after that or he would have some explaining to do, but by the time of the dissertation, he was ready.
Gizmo knew they would come looking for him, and he was right, but by that time he was long gone.
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