The landscape of the grounds was actually much prettier than I would have thought. Nido had a vast amount of grounds around his house, and it was all surrounded at some distance by lovely deciduous forests of great trees. It was clear to me that Nido had bought this house because of its extreme remote and hidden location. It seemed like the perfect place to simply get away from the world at large, and I could definitely understand why Nido would desire a place like this. Here he could work on his projects with the greatest of noise, or paint his house blue with pink polka dots, and no one but maybe the mailman would be any the wiser. The grounds, it seemed, Nido treated much the same way as the rest of his house, like a great workshop to be used and beautified if possible. Had I walked around and explored the grounds more in depth from the beginning, I would have thought of Nido as a part time farmer, with what seemed to be fairly extensive fields of different kinds of crops, and orchards of different kinds of fruits next to them. There was a tool shed further away toward the back of the fields. The grounds looked well trimmed and taken care of, which was still slightly surprising to me, but now I was more curious about what Nido had created to do this, rather than who might have been here to perform the function for him.
I decided to go and walk out into the fields and see what might be there, and doing so, I found a very subtle, and hardly noticeable track much like the one I’d seen in the greenhouse. Out in the field where several carts and robotic arms hard at work reaping the harvest which was in full bloom. They were reaping many kinds of vegetables and grains that hadn’t been growing inside. Nido’s biggest crop out here was wheat by far. There were perhaps two or three acres of wheat growing, and several carts bringing them into the house to deal with. There was also a lot of corn that by this point was nearly as high as an elephant’s eye, and it looked like it was growing clear up to the sky. Walking further, I found some rows of what looked to be potatoes, carrots, green beans and regular vegetables like that, that I assume were the bulk of Nido’s subsistence, and then I came out to what I can only call Nido’s cash crops, it seemed that he was growing more of the tobacco I’d seen earlier, but this looked a little less experimental than what I had found in the greenhouse. There was also some cotton growing, but in different colors than just the normal white kind. It appeared Nido didn’t have the time or the patience to dye his own wool, so he must have crossbred indigo and various other dyes with the cotton itself. It was actually quite amusing to look out into the cotton fields, for it looked like I was standing in a children’s book with the different colors of different kinds that were popping out at me.
Near the cash crop section grew some spices, such as garlic and vanilla, and things like that. I couldn’t quite understand how these could grow here, but figured out Nido’s tastes fairly quickly based on the spices he chose to grow over others. His spice garden wasn’t terribly large, so I figured he either didn’t mind blander food, or he simply bought a lot of his spices in the grocery store. They smelled quite nice though, and I wondered what it would be like to have Nido prepare a meal for someone from his own homegrown food. After looking at all of this food and remembering Nido’s kitchen, I came to the conclusion that Nido must have been a vegetarian, there were no animal products, except inside there was some milk and cheese. Obviously there had to be cheese, it was part of his meaning of life, after all. I wondered what reason Nido would have chosen to be a vegetarian, but couldn’t come to any conclusions, maybe the tome of his life would contain the answer to that, but for the moment I attended to the fields. Kelly, who had stayed back at the door surveying the land called to me that this was something she should have but didn’t expect to find here. I agreed with her, and asked what she found of particular interest so far. She said the thing that really caught her eye was what looked to be a wall grown out of thick bamboo. I hadn’t taken great notice of this myself, but after looking into it a little more, agreed that it did look interesting, not only because there was bamboo growing there, but it looked to be concealing something and I aimed to figure out what.
So, I walked over to the bamboo area and joined Kelly who was already marching there. When we arrived to the brush, we swept it aside as well as we could and it opened to reveal something covered in a tarp, so stepping in to remove the tarp, appeared to be some sort of vehicle but that looked vaguely like a motorcycle. There were, however, no wheels or anything that really gave it any sort of obvious vehicle appearance other than an apparatus for steering, and some gauges on the front side of it. There was also a seat behind these, so obviously this thing was supposed to move in some way or other, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. Walking around it I noticed there seemed to be some sort of propulsion system with miniature jets on either end of it. These jets looked blackened, but not very. So it had obviously only seen a little use, but in what way precisely, I wasn’t entirely sure. Then it came to my mind that we were actually at this point standing on some sort of large stiff rubber platform, and there were a series of switches on the side of the house, and here. I went to go see what the switches do, and so flipped one, from the platform on which we were standing was a sudden loud hum. It actually startled me enough that I jumped at first, because not only was the noise startling, but the ground actually began to shake. Kelly, who was standing a little further from me, began to laugh hysterically when she saw my reaction, and I laughed too, since it hadn’t left her motionless either.
There seemed to be a light that came on to this craft now, when I had turned on the switch, like it was waiting to do something, and so, cautiously, I went up to sit on the thing, and flipped a similar switch at which point my stomach turned. I was now elevated maybe a centimeter above where I had been and it had caught me again off guard. My nerves were rather jittery, but I wanted to see what on Earth Nido had made. I started to turn some of the throttles that were on the control panel of the vehicle and suddenly it raised slightly a little more, and it wobbled a little bit as I shifted my balance but remained fairly stable. I moved a different throttle and suddenly I was flying forward at a slow but still scary rate. I went forward perhaps two meters on the platform and suddenly when I reached the end found my front end grounded with my back end still hovering. The dropping of the front of the hover craft soon cleared up any notion I had about this being a simple hovercraft, it somehow needed the pad to stay afloat, otherwise it wouldn’t go very far. I wondered if Nido had made any device on this hovercraft for just such eventualities. Unwilling and unable to find it, I simply turned the thing off, and beckoned Kelly to help me push it back onto the pad. As I cleared the hovercraft, I thought it strange that Nido would have such a small space for it to fly on, when it was obviously meant to go farther than it did. So, I tried to clear out the rest of the bamboo, some of which was growing over the platform itself on the sides and this is when I found what appeared to be a small track of metal, leading out another few meters.
The track wasn’t very long, and made a small loop of a few meters, although it looked like much of it was concealed so people wouldn’t realize they were walking over it. I decided to try this little hovercraft again and started it up, floating slightly as I turned the switch on again. Taking the same actions as before, it started to go, a little at first. I rode the track around and started to go a little faster trying to take note of where I could and couldn’t go, since the hover bike was dependent on the track in order to fly properly. At times it would dip a little, but I would try to right it by moving back to the proper area immediately. I returned to the main pad where I had discovered it, and a little more bold and confident now I rose up off of the ground as high as I could go. This raised me perhaps as high as three meters in the air, but as it approached the zenith of its hovering ability, it began to waver and could go no further. Slowly I lowered the bike down again until it was finally back to where I’d started. Kelly traded places with me and soon she was zipping along and looked to be enjoying herself quite a lot. She went around the course and almost fell off a couple of times, but overall looked like it she was quite in command. When she came back, she was delighted to tell me everything she thought about it and said she would love to try it out again, but she asked me if I knew how it worked. I replied that I didn’t but that I was very curious myself to know.
I looked around and turned the switch on the side of the house on and off a few times to try to find a clue. Suddenly I noticed when I would do this there seemed to be a pulsating wave like a strong breeze coming and going among many things on the outside. I finally realized that the things that were moving so strongly were mostly made out of metal, so I decided to do a little test and see if there was something about the metal things that made this happen. I looked around to try to find a light metal object and asked Kelly if she had anything. She told me she had a watch in her purse and I asked if I could borrow it. By this point the switch was off, and nothing was moving any longer. I turned the switch and held the watch over the platform, but nothing happened, which was a little frustrating, finally I asked her if she had anything else in her purse, to which she replied she had gotten a small button from a store she went to earlier that week, the store was having some kind of promotion and she had received it as a promotional item, but had forgotten about it until just now. I checked it, and instead of having the normal safety pin style back to it, it had two small magnets to keep it in place, presumably to avoid putting holes in one’s clothing. Taking the small button from Kelly, I turned on the switch again, and held the button over the platform. As soon as I did this, I felt like my hand was going to lift me up. Even from this small source there was a crazy amount of force acting on these small magnets. The force was so great, that I accidentally dropped one, only to watch it shoot a good three meters up in the air.
Kelly shrieked in surprise at what she had just witnessed, and scrounged to find the thing. In the meanwhile, I turned off the switch and decided to go and further investigate this by jumping back onto the bike and investigating a little more. I sat on the bike and pressed the switch again, nothing happened, except that all of the lights came on. I tried to press the throttle forward and it moved slightly and gave the distinctly unpleasant odor of rubber burning from behind me. I then remembered that the propulsion system was powered by the small engines behind it, and looked to see the recently cooked rubber mat that I had just fried. While it was still hot, I found a stock and tried to clear away a little of the rubber mat. The mat was very thick, perhaps three or four centimeters, and the last part of the mat I tried to clear was actually rather hard on my hands. I continued to dig and once at the bottom of the mat, revealed a metal floor. Curious still, I asked Kelly to get on the bike and ride it again, I wanted to study the underside of it in action, since I hadn’t been taking special notice of it before. She did as I asked, and when the bike raised enough for me to see the underside of it, there was only an arch and on either side were two rubber circles, one in the front and the other in back. Kelly lowered the bike again, and I thought I finally figured out what made this vehicle move and told Kelly about it.
I explained that the floor was a giant magnet, with a single polarity going toward its surface. I further explained that this didn’t affect the bike too much when the bike itself was turned off, because it was too heavy and non magnetic to really do much, but when one would flip the switches of both, the thing had two magnets acting with repulsion toward each other creating an immense amount of lift. Either magnet when turned on would be extremely powerful by itself, but when combined, it was enough to really make a show. How Nido pulled this sort of anti gravity magnetism and tame it into the form of a hover bike was quite extraordinary to me, but I was happy to witness his great work in action. I figured it would be an interesting idea to try to lay out a metal course like this all over a city and see what it would do as far as less pollution and so on like that, but figured it would be an impracticable idea, simply because people would constantly crash unless there were some sort of confining parameters to keep them from doing so. Plus, I wasn’t really sure how much electricity it would take to power either the hover bike, or the floor beneath it. I wondered if Nido used this often, or simply made it to see if he could, tried it out a few times and then grew bored with it and moved on to his next project. I wasn’t really sure either way, but guessed the latter was the more likely choice. It seemed to be Nido’s method to get really interested in a project intensely for a short time and then once he finished with it, to move on to another one.
We covered the bike with the tarp again and made sure everything was off and safe the way we had found it, and soon found ourselves heading back toward the fields. Kelly ventured out to the tool shed, and I went to the orchards to see what Nido was growing in his trees. The orchards were very well taken care of, and in the center of all of the trees were stationary robotic arms with long ranges tending to the fruit. Some of the trees were barren and looked like they had already yielded their crops earlier in the year. Others were at their peak season, particularly the apple and pear trees. As I walked around the trees, I noticed that these were a very healthy and delicious looking lot of fruit. The colors of the apples in particular looked rather nice and it seemed that Nido was growing a few different varieties of them. What was more noteworthy than that he was growing three different varieties, however, was that he was actually growing different kinds of apples on the same tree. I don’t know how he did it, but the apples were growing in different colors and sizes. Some were green, some were red, some were yellow, and others still were orange. I wondered if they just looked different but were all the same apple really, so took a few down, each of a different kind and bit into each of them, noticing a real difference in taste as well as everything else. I called to Kelly than when she had time to come and try these. She seemed to be busy in the shed however, so I went to her, and asked her to try them all. When I arrived at the shed, I was fairly amazed, but would inspect it more later (and thus write about it later too), but for the time being, Kelly, said it was interesting that Nido would have all different kinds of apples growing in one orchard. This is when I threw out the curveball that it was not only in the same orchard, but also in the same tree. She simply looked at me with her mouth gaping in astonishment.
I gave the apples to Kelly to eat if she wanted, and returned to the orchard, to see the tracks and carts and arms of the fields and the greenhouse were busy here too. The arms as I had said were much longer, and looked like they actually had a device to extend and retract themselves. They seemed to grow and shrink in what looked like a mechanical feat, and it was always interesting to watch these machines going about their business of constantly attending to their fruits. They would simply move back and forth at random times and feel one plant or other trying to determine how to either help it, or to harvest and store them for later. Some of the things I wondered was how they would know a certain fruit was in any particular one spot. With the grains and vegetables, they didn’t have as far to look, and would be guaranteed finding something by grabbing anywhere, but here, not only were the apples harder to find, but they could either damage themselves or the tree by bumping into it by accident. The next thing I wondered was how long it simply must have taken Nido to perfect this whole system, with the sensors and all. How many of the concepts did he research and how much of it was pure trial and error. As talented as Nido seemed, I would guess he mostly relied on the research of others, and tried his hand at robotics again more as an academic interest, and simply put it to work for him once he had gotten into it.
I searched around some more and looked at some more of the fruits he had grown and discovered something that wouldn’t have normally struck me as being so odd, but here, it rather did. Nido had orange and even lemon trees growing. Now normally I wouldn’t consider anything so odd about this, but I did after a little consideration. Here we were in a climate that is far too cold for citrus trees to grow, and somehow Nido had found a way to not only grow these trees here, but grow them in totally exposed conditions out in the moderately cold climate. What was more was that they were growing in the early autumn, which although warm, was certainly not as warm as they probably required to really flourish in other parts of the world. Nido had somehow discovered a way to grow this fruit with less heat that it normally needed. I figured Nido must somehow have manipulated the DNA of all of these plants to suit his own purposes, and with the modifications of this kind, he was able to better keep a diet of things that only he grew for the most part, with probably a few store bought things here and there. I wondered how satisfying and gratifying it must be to grow all of one’s own food, to be totally self sufficient in the one area of life where a person really ought to be. It had sometimes been a fantasy of mine to be a farmer, simply to know this feeling of self-reliance and ability. I took one of the oranges down, which looked like it was about ready to come down anyway, and cut it open to see if the taste was sacrificed for the later growing season and colder climate. When I tasted it, I noticed that not only did it taste delicious, like the quintessential way an orange ought to taste, but it was also totally seedless, and the skin was extremely easy to peel off. Normally, I would struggle with an orange’s rind for a few minutes, and never really have the rest of the skin off the way I wanted, but here, it came off like I was peeling an older hardboiled egg. I was smiling quite widely after this little discovery, to find perfect oranges for free, for as long as I could probably want.
There were other kinds of trees too, but these were the more noteworthy of them. Following my walk around the orchard, I went back to the fields where I found the shed again with Kelly inside it. What I found when I arrived there were some gardening tools of various sorts and more schematics and things to tamper with the cross breeding processes of the various vegetables and fruits out on the grounds. He had pots and even a few plants growing there, but nothing too fancy. What I really was interesting though was Nido had some of the robotics parts there under repair, and I got to examine one more thoroughly than I had before by just looking at it from the exterior. It seemed he had built them in a very mechanically simple seeming way, and he actually had his plans laid out for how to repair them. They were built on very simple mechanical principles, except for the feeling probes, which seemed to have some sort of computerized chips attached to them. It was actually really cool to see all of this together and laid out very simply. It made me wonder how Nido got into robotics in the first place. Surely, it would never be a simple prospect. Naturally, I figured that the more Nido did, the more apt he got at figuring out how to make things together, altogether, and with his work ethic, it would only be a matter of fine tuning some of his other skills to work on things like this. I wondered how Nido’s mind worked to accomplish such great feats, surely he was at least a little abnormal in that regard, but not in a bad way mind. Nido’s craft and skill were things of great speculation for a long time after all of this for me, only by reading his giant tome did I find any sort of answer in this regard.
Looking more at this mechanical curiosity, I examine how the arm extended and it was built on a sort of belt system that simply raised it with the aide of a motor. The fingers were controlled by tendon like features, much more like our own fingers. I felt the need to test these things out, so manually pulled them and watched them open and close with great delight. The fingers had some sort of intricate system to give them slightly more dexterity, and it was actually strange to press buttons and watch them work in a very double-jointed sort of way. I wondered how long it took Nido to think of these things for his fields and greenhouse, but then figured I could probably find the answer to that in his journals, if I ever had the inclination and time to read them. Looking beneath the workbench in the shed where the arm and all of its parts were, I found a plethora of tools of different kinds. Some of them looked specially made, others were common. One thing I found of a bit of interest was a measuring tool. The tool had stranger units on it, and of course they were all multiples or divisible by eight, but I didn’t understand why they looked different than other units. The probe of the hands were quite interesting to look at, but I couldn’t make out much from them, save to say they were built of a sort of dark glass, and had several holes in them in a brush sort of fashion. The bases with the wheels and so on were actually quite intricate too, they weren’t regular wheels, but built at a sort of concave angle, so as to better stay on the tracks, I suppose. I wondered how this thing was powered, but then figured Nido must have built a power source which would come from the tracks themselves.
I asked Kelly what she was interested in, and said she had found some tea plants that Nido had on the table, and they looked interesting because they were extra potent, and were naturally sweet. I asked her to elaborate and she went on to say that there were natural sugars so that if you ever made tea it would likely have the perfect tastes (at least for Nido’s palate) and it would have a good consistency. If you steeped the leaves for longer, they would simply give a sweeter and more tea like taste, and not give the bitter taste one was used to. I asked her how she knew this, and Nido left notes of those basic descriptions, Kelly had been going over them all. I knew these plants would be of special interest to Kelly because she loved tea as much as anyone I’d ever known. I asked her if she knew about the caffeine content, and she told me it was somewhat strong, but maybe half the strength of normal coffee, but this was based off of Nido’s sketchy notes. Kelly was excited because she got to use Nido’s language notes to understand this, and it was actually a very easy language to use and to learn once you got past the differences to English. I asked her if she was ready to go inside and she told me almost, but to busy myself for a little while. I decided to walk around the periphery of the house for a while and explore what was there. Walking around, I found a garage that led out into the driveway, and a door on the side of it. I opened the door, and called to Kelly to come. When she didn’t come, I went back to the shed to find her still immersed in what she was doing and told her I had found the garage. She told me to go on and look at it alone for now, and she would come by after she had finished reading everything.
