NeoDex:Sixth Birthday/The Tale of the NeoDex
We all take the NeoDex and its systems for granted, but what is the NeoDex and how did it, six years ago today, come to be founded? Macbeth has been trawling through the archives and interviewing the people who know the people who know the people who know.
The Neodexian Times is proud to present the portrait of a man and a myth:
It is early 2005, and deep in darkest Australia, Kym is suddenly struck with an idea. It is such an inspiration that Kym is rendered monetarily immobile, and nearly drops the orphan he is in the middle of rescuing from a burning building.
The seed of that idea grows as the day goes on. He answers his door to the mailman with a smile, a witticism, and his latest translation of an ancient Babylonian funeral rite, while the seed swells and sprouts in his mind. Between phone calls from the Prime Minister about Sino-Australian trade relations, Kym begins to sketch out the design for a remarkable machine.
People who knew him during this time reported that he became obsessed over his project - only venturing out of his penthouse to recapture escaped mental asylum patients, retrieve cats from trees, and place a wallaby who had taught himself to spray paint graffiti under citizen's arrest.
He had to bulk order notebooks because he was filling them up too quickly. He bought a blackboard, filled both sides of it with sprawling equations, then in fury demolished them to scrawl chalk figures anew. Formulas that would not balance, obliterated and replaced with algorithms that did not coalese. Eraser in hand they joined their brothers-in-dust.
His friends and family feared for his well-being. Always writing and always deleting, always formulating and always discarding. The local mailman found himself delivering parcel after parcel to the penthouse, and instead of being greeted by a beaming Kym, was met time and time again by his robotic butler, Jeeves. Kym, Jeeves confided, was too busy working to come to the door.
The parcels were textbooks on all sorts of advanced subjects: genetic engineering; quantum mechanics; a treatise on hydrogen power; a logbook of transitional metal vaporisation points; scat singing; the list goes on. Pausing only long enough to rewrite a dissertation on wave-particle duality, send it to the publisher, and collect the Nobel Prize in physics for his work, Kym poured over the volumes, looking for clues as he refined his designs.
Then, one night, it happened. While preparing himself a quick bite to eat in the form of a Michelin star three course meal, the phone rang. It was NASA: they were ringing to say the supercomputer had finally finished the simulation - it was a success.
Kym breathed a sign of relief, put the telephone down, and got back to tenderising the lobster, absent-mindedly scribbling a cello concerto on the back of a receipt. Tomorrow, the real work began: tomorrow, he had to find a sponsor.
The construction of his extraordinary device would require enormous resources and financial backing: Kym knew he must find a corporate sponsor to foot the bill.
The project nearly ended there, and Kym's days of slaving over multithreaded processes and differential equations would have been for naught. Kym's idea was too ground breaking, too complicated, for any CEO to understand. His contraption confounded, his mathematics mystified, his algorithms addled.
There was no way he could dumb down his work enough to explain it to somebody else - not in his allotted three score years and ten, anyway, and he hadn't found the time to finish his cyborg body yet. What he needed was a mega-rich company executive who would give him the funding without a word of complaint, a businessman who never asked for things to be explained. A businessman who would not, indeed could not, say "no".
Enter The Pink Poogle Toy, chairman of Pink Inc.
It took over ten thousand man hours of work to assemble, enough optic fibre to cover Wales in plate glass, and enough aluminium to build a frying pan big enough to fry all the eggs laid by chickens in China in a day at once. With the resources of the mighty conglomerate of Pink Inc. at his disposal, Kym was able to construct his master work, the NeoDex Engine.
The rest, as they say, is history. Kym went back to wrestling crocodiles and restoring Renoirs; scientists are still pouring through the acres of notes Kym made on his magnum opus and have so far discovered they contain three new types of maths; and at the Engine, a ragtag band of friends and allies from around the world found each other and began their work.