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02.Story by Cris, THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET (1/4)

THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET (1/4)

The West

Our ranch was located several miles north of Divide,lost in the Pioneer Mountains.

The closest thing to traffic was when the Union Pacific Freight trains rumbled through the valley, at 5:44 am, 11:53 am, and 5:15 pm.

Divide was literally located on the continental divide.

To the east, the water spilled into the Atlantic.

To the west, it spilled into the Pacific.

One day my brother Layton and I,decided to christen this natural border.☻

Giddap, you little donkey!

Yee-haah!

Giddiup, horse!

Yaaah! Yahoo!

Layton, look over here.

Hello Big Sur!

Hello New Orleans!

Hello Big Sur!

And hello New Orleans!

Hello “Nawleans”!

But Layton's favourite pastime was shooting at anything that moved.

Big loop.

Elbow up.

Ready?

Now!

Go! Yaah!

Stop!

Upon my brothers request,father built us a seesaw.

Slow down!

Ride'em, cowboy.

My father loved Layton more than anything in the world.

Yeah, that's a ood deal. I would have liked to be a daredevil, too.

But I knew I'd never be up to it.

One year earlier Orffyreus had five marbles

travelling in tubes, creating an imbalance.

This rocking motion, however, caused the energy to dissipate.

Robert Flux built a mill based on the concept of perpetual rotation.

However the inherent friction of the machine

caused a significant loss of energy.

The Italian philosopher Marco Zimara

imagined a machine that could

recycle the wind.

But the force required

to compress the bellows

was greater than the energy

produced by the windmill.

And so, it didn't work.

No scientific challenge

remains greater,

most prestigious,

more mythical,

than that of finding the key to

perpetual motion.

Thank you.

And yet some affirm that

this quest is doomed to failure.

Such a machine defies the laws

of the universe.

The very basis of thermodynamics

assumes that

all mechanism will

eventually come to a stop.

Yes, you.

Given the current state of

Science and Technology,

isn't the quest for perpetual

motion better suited for

idealists and poets than

real scientists?

What if imagination started

and science ended?

Those who pushed the boundaries

of science, were they not all poets?

I'm certain that as we speak here today,

that somewhere in this country,

a budding Leonardo Da Vinci

is gearing up for the challenge.

Thank you very much.

Oh God…

Hello.

Sir, I am the Leonardo from Montana.

You are? What you are going to do?

I accept the challenge.

You do?

One afternoon in August,

the phone rang,

while my sister Gracie and I

were on the porch, shucking sweet corn

into large metal buckets.

What?

the buckets were riddled with

bite marks dating back to last spring

when our dog Tapioca got depressed

and started eating metal.

Hello.

Wow.

Gracie, can you hold this a second.

This is what I predicted.

The Manticora Herculeana

is a subspecies of the Cicindeler.

Who was it, that called?

Same time, it has a hair on

the tip of the mandible.

Doesn't seem to have a white spot

on the elytra.

Mom?

The phone, who was it?

Oh, a call for TS.

- A call for him? !

- M-hm. Yes Gracie.

- Who was it?

- Hm?

I don't know. Ah…

She's still in the line.

She's waiting.

You should probably go.

If you finish before I get back,

count the number of good ears

and the number of bad ones.

Why not count the kernels,

while we're at it? !

I had 3 options

to get to the phone.

The corridor-kitchen way,

the quickest

but also the most boring.

The upstairs-downstairs route,

but the shift in altitude

made me nauseous.

I opted for the third and

riskiest,

particularly when father was

working around the house.

The sitting room smelled like

whiskey stained leather.

and moldy photographs.

If you just closed your eyes,

you could feel the dust

falling onto the prairie

after a cowboy posse galloped through.

Layton used to think the sitting room,

was the greatest thing since

grilled cheese.

- Hello.

- Hello. Yes, um…

I would like to speak to T.S. Spivet,

this is Miss Jibsen,

Under Secretary of the Smithsonian.

Hold on.

Father!

Phone!

My father is all yours, Miss. Jibsen.

Hello, Mr. Spivet.

Yes, my dad is listening.

Could you hand him the phone please.

No, my father is mute, Mrs. Jibsen.

He can hear you but can only

respond in sign language.

I'll translate everything for you.

You are the T.S. Spivet

that has just invent the magnetic wheel?

One second. Father is saying…

Yes, I only sent you the blueprints,

because I didn't have the time to do it.

The quest for perpetual movement!

I mean, it's the Holy Grail

of inventors…

Tell me Mr.Spivet,

I take it you live in Montana?

Coppertop ranch.

Longitude: 112° 44' 19".

Latitude: 45° 44' 27".

These are the coordinates

to my bedroom.

Wow!

Clearly you have an eye for detail.

Which is a requisite for

any great inventor.

Father is asking:

so you are the head of the Smithsonian?

Well, technically,

I'm the Under Secretary, but,

many people would say I run the place.

Wow!

Yeah.

Look, Mr.Spivet, your invention

has won our prestigious Baird Award.

The Spencer Baird Award?

Indeed.

Our 150th anniversary gala

is in a week's time

and it would be perfect

oppurtunity for you to,

you know, make your

acceptance speech.

Of course, we would

provide you with a

sign language interpreter.

But… I'll be in class.

I go back to school on Monday.

Oh, you must teach at the

University of Montana.

A quick phone call to your

President, Jack Campbell,

and it'll be taken care of.

I mean,…

we are talking about

the Baird Award, after all.

Prairie of Truth

Mountain of Lies

Hello… Hello?

I was just thinking.

I can't come out to receive

the Baird award.

I have too much work to finish.

Thanks anyway.

Have a good day.

What are you doing?

What do you think I'm doing?

You're going to mess up my dataset.

You were in there for, like,

15 hours. Who was that?

A journalist, from… New York.

Wants me to go there

for an interview about my work.

Inside Gracie's cortex

Just laugh in his face,

it's the only way to deal with this.

Clearly he is making it up.

And what if it were true?

You mean this total spaz

leaving Montana before us?

Would it be so bad to be

a celebrity sister?

This total dork, invited to New York? !

For an interview? !

You're full of crap!

I told her I can't come,

'cause classes start again on Monday,

but she was insistent.

What did I do to God

for Him to hate me?

It's like, “Here, Gracie, I found

you a family full of nutjobs,”

“And you are gonna live in

Nowheresville, Montana”

“and your brother, who is a

total spaz”

“is going to New York!”

I told you I'm not going,

I've got school!

News flash: crazy New Yorkers love

spazzers. It's kind of a new trend!

Too late.

Any chance she got

she'd wallow in the role of the

misunderstood actress.

She landed the lead in a retro

anti-establishment theater piece.

But that night,

I was busy working on a challenge

set by Discover magazine

“How to drop an egg from the top”

“of the Empire State Building

without breaking it.”

In order to finish my project

and get out of seeing Gracie's play,

I had to enlist Tapioca to the rescue.

One night, in her Bette Davis phase,

Gracie launched into a heated diatribe

about father's museum sitting room.

Is it even conceivable that that

cowboy museum or rather, mausoleum

could be turned into a

normal living room

where normal people could relax

and have normal conversations?

My father, Tecumseh Elijah Spivet,

was born 100 years too late.

He had the soul, stature,

and mindset of a cowboy.

For him talking was a necessary

chore, like shoeing a horse.

Cellphone reception was nowhere

to be found at Coppertop Ranch

and father refused to install

a telephone in Gracie's room.

And you heard her voice, right?

Her body…

Yeah, its no wonder in the history of Miss

America pagent Miss Montana's never won.

It's, like, the worst selection ever!

Every night in his sitting room

father took off his boots

and muttered some cryptic statement

after raising a glass of

whiskey up to his lips

precisely every 45 seconds.

You can't get horseshit

from a cricket.

Crickets and insects,

were my mother's specialty.

Dr. Claire had spent most

of her adult life

studying tiny creatures

with a magnifying glass,

and then classifying them

into species

and subspecies.

What if it doesn't exist?

What?

I mean, for a year now,

you stopped everything

to prove that Tigermonk

Cicindelas exist…

Stopped everything?

What do you mean, in a

maternal sense or a scientific one?

What is it that you want me

to start doing again…

that I stopped doing, hm?

I dunno.

Your research on the

Parasitic Scolyte Catepillar maybe?

Your findings could've saved

all the pine trees in Montana.

Every other scientific

attempt had failed.

Failed?

Form the ecologists

point of view, maybe.

But from the caterpillar's

point of view,

looks like a win-win situation.

Anyway I've never liked pine trees.

They're drippy and they're sticky.

Some things are just meant to die.

How my parents ever fell for

each other is a mystery.

They were like day and night.

The human head lice,

Pediculus Humanus Capitis

belong to the Anoplura family.

A-N-O-P-L-U-R-A.

TS, When you're drawing the legs,

make sure you observe not just

how many there are,

but the exact distance between them.

Yep. The exact distance between'em.

Beware of mediocrity,

it is the fungus of the mind.

We must constantly fight

against it

or it'll creep into everything we do.

Darn!

The louse got away.

Here. Made a lasso to catch him.

Wooh!

Thanks, Dad.

A fool, by definition

is one who turns what is beyond

his mental grasp,

into one big joke.

And then a few days later,

at the end of the hallway,

their hands brushed against

each other,

as if they were secretly

exchanging a few seeds.

What?

And then there was Layton,

my dizygotic twin.

That's when two sperm cells

fertilize two seperate eggs.

To each his own embryo.

To each his own lucky star.

Layton got the height

and I got the neurons.

- Mom…

- Yeah?

Have you ever gotten AIDS?

What? !

Angela Ashworth says AIDS are bad

and I probably have them.

Well, next time,

you just tell Angela Ashworth,

just because she feels insecure

about being a little girl,

in a society that puts an

inordinate amount of pressure

on a woman to live up to

some physical standard,

it doesn't mean that she

has to take out her

misplaced self loathing

on a nice little boy like you.

You may be an inherent part

of the problem,

but it certainly doesn't mean

you have AIDS.

I'm not sure I can remember all that.

Well then, just tell her, she's fat.

OK.

But Layton died last year

during an accident with a gun

in the old barn.

I don't know what went wrong.

I was there too,

measuring gun shots.

No one ever talked about it.

No one.

Chris, not bad.

Except, we're going to have to

go over this a little bit.

Daisy… B+.

Solid work.

Excellent illustrations

of the lake formation process.

TS.. C+.

Report shows undeniable qualities,

but as usual, is way off-subject.

What does the formation of lakes

in Montana have, anything, to do

with the east-west migratory

path of Canadian Geese?

Sir, I'm not sure if you read

the introduction, but I…

You think you're the smarter

than everyone else, don't you?

As for the diagram,

its very pretty,

but scientifically erroneous.

Really, Sir?

Bacause I sent it to the

Discover Magazine…

and they liked it,

and they published it.

Do not play games with me, TS.

You're out of your league.

And what about the magnetic wheel?

THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET (1/4) EL JOVEN Y PRODIGIOSO T.S. SPIVET (1/4) LE JEUNE ET PRODIGIEUX T.S. SPIVET (1/4) IL GIOVANE E PRODIGIOSO T.S. SPIVET (1/4) 若き天才T.S.スピヴェット (1/4) DE JONGE EN WONDERBAARLIJKE T.S. SPIVET (1/4) МОЛОДИЙ І НЕПЕРЕВЕРШЕНИЙ Т.С. СПІВЕТ (1/4)

The West

Our ranch was located several miles north of Divide,lost in the Pioneer Mountains.

The closest thing to traffic was when the Union Pacific Freight trains rumbled through the valley, at 5:44 am, 11:53 am, and 5:15 pm.

Divide was literally located on the continental divide.

To the east, the water spilled into the Atlantic.

To the west, it spilled into the Pacific.

One day my brother Layton and I,decided to christen this natural border.☻

Giddap, you little donkey!

Yee-haah!

Giddiup, horse!

Yaaah! Yahoo!

Layton, look over here.

Hello Big Sur!

Hello New Orleans!

Hello Big Sur!

And hello New Orleans!

Hello “Nawleans”!

But Layton's favourite pastime was shooting at anything that moved.

Big loop.

Elbow up.

Ready?

Now!

Go! Yaah!

Stop!

Upon my brothers request,father built us a seesaw.

Slow down!

Ride'em, cowboy.

My father loved Layton more than anything in the world.

Yeah, that's a ood deal. I would have liked to be a daredevil, too.

But I knew I'd never be up to it.

One year earlier Orffyreus had five marbles

travelling in tubes, creating an imbalance.

This rocking motion, however, caused the energy to dissipate.

Robert Flux built a mill based on the concept of perpetual rotation.

However the inherent friction of the machine

caused a significant loss of energy.

The Italian philosopher Marco Zimara

imagined a machine that could

recycle the wind.

But the force required

to compress the bellows

was greater than the energy

produced by the windmill.

And so, it didn't work.

No scientific challenge

remains greater,

most prestigious,

more mythical,

than that of finding the key to

perpetual motion.

Thank you.

And yet some affirm that

this quest is doomed to failure.

Such a machine defies the laws

of the universe.

The very basis of thermodynamics

assumes that

all mechanism will

eventually come to a stop.

Yes, you.

Given the current state of

Science and Technology,

isn't the quest for perpetual

motion better suited for

idealists and poets than

real scientists?

What if imagination started

and science ended?

Those who pushed the boundaries

of science, were they not all poets?

I'm certain that as we speak here today,

that somewhere in this country,

a budding Leonardo Da Vinci

is gearing up for the challenge.

Thank you very much.

Oh God…

Hello.

Sir, I am the Leonardo from Montana.

You are? What you are going to do?

I accept the challenge.

You do?

One afternoon in August,

the phone rang,

while my sister Gracie and I

were on the porch, shucking sweet corn

into large metal buckets.

What?

the buckets were riddled with

bite marks dating back to last spring

when our dog Tapioca got depressed

and started eating metal.

Hello.

Wow.

Gracie, can you hold this a second.

This is what I predicted.

The Manticora Herculeana

is a subspecies of the Cicindeler.

Who was it, that called?

Same time, it has a hair on

the tip of the mandible.

Doesn't seem to have a white spot

on the elytra.

Mom?

The phone, who was it?

Oh, a call for TS.

- A call for him? !

- M-hm. Yes Gracie.

- Who was it?

- Hm?

I don't know. Ah…

She's still in the line.

She's waiting.

You should probably go.

If you finish before I get back,

count the number of good ears

and the number of bad ones.

Why not count the kernels,

while we're at it? !

I had 3 options

to get to the phone.

The corridor-kitchen way,

the quickest

but also the most boring.

The upstairs-downstairs route,

but the shift in altitude

made me nauseous.

I opted for the third and

riskiest,

particularly when father was

working around the house.

The sitting room smelled like

whiskey stained leather.

and moldy photographs.

If you just closed your eyes,

you could feel the dust

falling onto the prairie

after a cowboy posse galloped through.

Layton used to think the sitting room,

was the greatest thing since

grilled cheese.

- Hello.

- Hello. Yes, um…

I would like to speak to T.S. Spivet,

this is Miss Jibsen,

Under Secretary of the Smithsonian.

Hold on.

Father!

Phone!

My father is all yours, Miss. Jibsen.

Hello, Mr. Spivet.

Yes, my dad is listening.

Could you hand him the phone please.

No, my father is mute, Mrs. Jibsen.

He can hear you but can only

respond in sign language.

I'll translate everything for you.

You are the T.S. Spivet

that has just invent the magnetic wheel?

One second. Father is saying…

Yes, I only sent you the blueprints,

because I didn't have the time to do it.

The quest for perpetual movement!

I mean, it's the Holy Grail

of inventors…

Tell me Mr.Spivet,

I take it you live in Montana?

Coppertop ranch.

Longitude: 112° 44' 19".

Latitude: 45° 44' 27".

These are the coordinates

to my bedroom.

Wow!

Clearly you have an eye for detail.

Which is a requisite for

any great inventor.

Father is asking:

so you are the head of the Smithsonian?

Well, technically,

I'm the Under Secretary, but,

many people would say I run the place.

Wow!

Yeah.

Look, Mr.Spivet, your invention

has won our prestigious Baird Award.

The Spencer Baird Award?

Indeed.

Our 150th anniversary gala

is in a week's time

and it would be perfect

oppurtunity for you to,

you know, make your

acceptance speech.

Of course, we would

provide you with a

sign language interpreter.

But… I'll be in class.

I go back to school on Monday.

Oh, you must teach at the

University of Montana.

A quick phone call to your

President, Jack Campbell,

and it'll be taken care of.

I mean,…

we are talking about

the Baird Award, after all.

Prairie of Truth

Mountain of Lies

Hello… Hello?

I was just thinking.

I can't come out to receive

the Baird award.

I have too much work to finish.

Thanks anyway.

Have a good day.

What are you doing?

What do you think I'm doing?

You're going to mess up my dataset.

You were in there for, like,

15 hours. Who was that?

A journalist, from… New York.

Wants me to go there

for an interview about my work.

Inside Gracie's cortex

Just laugh in his face,

it's the only way to deal with this.

Clearly he is making it up.

And what if it were true?

You mean this total spaz

leaving Montana before us?

Would it be so bad to be

a celebrity sister?

This total dork, invited to New York? !

For an interview? !

You're full of crap!

I told her I can't come,

'cause classes start again on Monday,

but she was insistent.

What did I do to God

for Him to hate me?

It's like, “Here, Gracie, I found

you a family full of nutjobs,”

“And you are gonna live in

Nowheresville, Montana”

“and your brother, who is a

total spaz”

“is going to New York!”

I told you I'm not going,

I've got school!

News flash: crazy New Yorkers love

spazzers. It's kind of a new trend!

Too late.

Any chance she got

she'd wallow in the role of the

misunderstood actress.

She landed the lead in a retro

anti-establishment theater piece.

But that night,

I was busy working on a challenge

set by Discover magazine

“How to drop an egg from the top”

“of the Empire State Building

without breaking it.”

In order to finish my project

and get out of seeing Gracie's play,

I had to enlist Tapioca to the rescue.

One night, in her Bette Davis phase,

Gracie launched into a heated diatribe

about father's museum sitting room.

Is it even conceivable that that

cowboy museum or rather, mausoleum

could be turned into a

normal living room

where normal people could relax

and have normal conversations?

My father, Tecumseh Elijah Spivet,

was born 100 years too late.

He had the soul, stature,

and mindset of a cowboy.

For him talking was a necessary

chore, like shoeing a horse.

Cellphone reception was nowhere

to be found at Coppertop Ranch

and father refused to install

a telephone in Gracie's room.

And you heard her voice, right?

Her body…

Yeah, its no wonder in the history of Miss

America pagent Miss Montana's never won.

It's, like, the worst selection ever!

Every night in his sitting room

father took off his boots

and muttered some cryptic statement

after raising a glass of

whiskey up to his lips

precisely every 45 seconds.

You can't get horseshit

from a cricket.

Crickets and insects,

were my mother's specialty.

Dr. Claire had spent most

of her adult life

studying tiny creatures

with a magnifying glass,

and then classifying them

into species

and subspecies.

What if it doesn't exist?

What?

I mean, for a year now,

you stopped everything

to prove that Tigermonk

Cicindelas exist…

Stopped everything?

What do you mean, in a

maternal sense or a scientific one?

What is it that you want me

to start doing again…

that I stopped doing, hm?

I dunno.

Your research on the

Parasitic Scolyte Catepillar maybe?

Your findings could've saved

all the pine trees in Montana.

Every other scientific

attempt had failed.

Failed?

Form the ecologists

point of view, maybe.

But from the caterpillar's

point of view,

looks like a win-win situation.

Anyway I've never liked pine trees.

They're drippy and they're sticky.

Some things are just meant to die.

How my parents ever fell for

each other is a mystery.

They were like day and night.

The human head lice,

Pediculus Humanus Capitis

belong to the Anoplura family.

A-N-O-P-L-U-R-A.

TS, When you're drawing the legs,

make sure you observe not just

how many there are,

but the exact distance between them.

Yep. The exact distance between'em.

Beware of mediocrity,

it is the fungus of the mind.

We must constantly fight

against it

or it'll creep into everything we do.

Darn!

The louse got away.

Here. Made a lasso to catch him.

Wooh!

Thanks, Dad.

A fool, by definition

is one who turns what is beyond

his mental grasp,

into one big joke.

And then a few days later,

at the end of the hallway,

their hands brushed against

each other,

as if they were secretly

exchanging a few seeds.

What?

And then there was Layton,

my dizygotic twin.

That's when two sperm cells

fertilize two seperate eggs.

To each his own embryo.

To each his own lucky star.

Layton got the height

and I got the neurons.

- Mom…

- Yeah?

Have you ever gotten AIDS?

What? !

Angela Ashworth says AIDS are bad

and I probably have them.

Well, next time,

you just tell Angela Ashworth,

just because she feels insecure

about being a little girl,

in a society that puts an

inordinate amount of pressure

on a woman to live up to

some physical standard,

it doesn't mean that she

has to take out her

misplaced self loathing

on a nice little boy like you.

You may be an inherent part

of the problem,

but it certainly doesn't mean

you have AIDS.

I'm not sure I can remember all that.

Well then, just tell her, she's fat.

OK.

But Layton died last year

during an accident with a gun

in the old barn.

I don't know what went wrong.

I was there too,

measuring gun shots.

No one ever talked about it.

No one.

Chris, not bad.

Except, we're going to have to

go over this a little bit.

Daisy… B+.

Solid work.

Excellent illustrations

of the lake formation process.

TS.. C+.

Report shows undeniable qualities,

but as usual, is way off-subject.

What does the formation of lakes

in Montana have, anything, to do

with the east-west migratory

path of Canadian Geese?

Sir, I'm not sure if you read

the introduction, but I…

You think you're the smarter

than everyone else, don't you?

As for the diagram,

its very pretty,

but scientifically erroneous.

Really, Sir?

Bacause I sent it to the

Discover Magazine…

and they liked it,

and they published it.

Do not play games with me, TS.

You're out of your league.

And what about the magnetic wheel?