LISA
A wet towel on the bathroom floor.
Honestly? I’m right at the end of my tether. I don’t know why but he’s been drawing circles in the sand. When I went out to hang his wet towel up he’s screaming at me ‘Don’t disturb my circles!’ It’s going to be the last thing he says.
And if one more person tells me I have to make allowances because he’s a highly intelligent man. No. Can a highly intelligent man pull his own bathplug out? Yes. Our Archimedes can’t. What the fuck’s he doing up there? He’s certainly not washing himself.
I mean it. Last thing he says.
JOHN
Creating Evidence
He found the photo cleaning out the house after his last surviving sister died. Five sour-faced kids, two glowering parents, and the family dog stared back at him from crinkled black and white. He took the photo to the senior center’s computer room and asked the young woman working there to scan it. Following his directions, she first erased the parents and then, one by one, his siblings. She was able to press a few buttons and slide her finger to create a smile on the boy’s face and move the dog to lean against his leg. Perfect, he thought.
RICHARD
Perpetual Motion
Grandpa was a little mad, but he did have interesting ideas.
Take his perpetual motion machine, for example – a sealed system, of a number of tanks, and a complex arrangement of Archimedes’ screw pumps, electro-magnetic impellers, dynamos and capacitors.
It worked by way of a gravity fed stream of water from a header tank, driving a dynamo, which generated a charge, stored in the capacitors, to power the impellers, driving the screws to pump the water back to the top.
It was crazy, but it worked.
Well, for three years.
Outlasting grandpa.
So, I guess, for him, it was perpetual.
LIZZIE
“Archimedes!”
Archimedes received an envelope in the mail for years. He opened that envelope to find it empty. But he kept all those envelopes, neatly organized by dates, in a shoe-box under the bed.
One day, a man arrived in town asking for him.
“Your instructions.”
He rushed to his room. He unfolded all the envelopes open and there it was. A map.
He followed the map and at the location, he found a box.
“Oh, my God! I’m filthy rich.”
Ah, his uncle, his only surviving relative, the trickster.
Good thing he hadn’t thrown any of the envelopes away!
TURA
Archimedes
———
It was me that gave Archie the idea. He’d discovered how to calculate the volume of a sphere, or a cone, or pretty much anything. Hiero heard about him, and challenged him to find the volume of his crown. He gave Archie a month… or else.
Archie forgets about ordinary stuff like bathing when he’s thinking. At last I tell him “You reek, Archie!”, and I drag him along to the public baths. I see him staring at the water and thinking, then suddenly he leaps out and runs off yelling “You reek! You reek!” and the rest is history.
SERENDIPIDY
I’m always on a mission to find new and interesting methods of shuffling people off their mortal coil, but it can be hard to innovate, when you’ve tried it all before.
There’s not really much choice outside the usual strangling, stabbing and shooting, and all those unusual and fun ways you see in the movies, can be a pain to set up, and are rarely successful.
I always fancied the toaster in the bath method, but the fuses always blow before you can do any damage.
Then I had my Archimedes moment – why not simply bypass the fuse-board?
Eureka!
NORVAL JOE
Billbert blinked his eyes and shook his head. “There’s no difference between magic and a superpower?”
“That’s right.”
Billbert scoffed. “I think there’s a big difference. With magic you cast spells, and wave your hands, and other mumbo jumbo. With a superpower, you just have it.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes. “That’s not what Archimedes said.”
Billbert frowned. “Archimedes? The ancient Greek mathematician?”
She sniffed. “Of course not. My uncle Archimedes. My uncle Archie was a real deep thinker, a philosopher mage. He said that true magic doesn’t need to be learned or performed. It should be natural to the witch.”
PLANET X
The Archimedes was a Class Seven Star Freighter.
Just a big hollow box with a jump engine attached to it.
The Shipping Consortium ran a circuit around The Gamma Rim.
Raw ore from one world, robots from another.
Grain, water, gold, diamonds, fusion bombs.
As long as they got paid and nobody pointed a gun at them.
So when a stray shipment of Rigel fusion bombs went off in Sirius-4’s orbit, the Consortium stopped coming.
Express smugglers happily took up the slack, bringing food.
And planning out where to plant the next round of fusion bombs to annoy the Consortium.