Simon's complete and utter love affair with reading was apparent by just one look at his room. Shelves over-flowing with a never ending supply of fantasy from the most common of mainstream middle grade fiction to things like the Silmarillion which was so far above his reading level that it had been almost a year and he still wasn't half-way through. And that was if you were only looking at his room. God have mercy on your soul if you were talking to Simon and he managed to steer the topic of conversation.
You'd be no doubt subjected to an hours long rant about fantasy novels and his favorite authors and the tropes that he couldn't stand. And that was if he didn't break off half-way through to talk about his own work in progress which he'd dubbed the most incredible work of fiction to never be completed. Simon swore up and down that he was almost finished with it but even he knew he'd be writing it forever. Everytime he felt almost satisfied with it he'd read a new series and have tons of new ideas he'd want to incorporate.
Despite his clear love of the escapism fantasy provided however Simon was very picky about his reading habits. Simon knew he found comfort in narrative structure and tropes, in chosen ones and magical destiny's. Those things brought a safety to a story and venturing away from those things made him uncomfortable. To Simon reading something outside of the safety of his comfortable fantasy tropes was akin to leaving a kiddy pool and being thrown into the middle of the ocean.
So when his father gifted him a sci-fi novel Simon had eyed it suspiciously. He'd wanted to mention that he didn't read stuff like this and that he wasn't interested in investing himself in a new genre but he knew better than to be ungrateful and besides his father was trying and hadn't been back for long so Simon had accepted the gift without hesitation. And Simon had been prepared for that to be the end of it. He figured he'd put it on the back of his bookshelf and never touch it.
But when you make plans, even little ones, they almost never seem to work out so that was not what happened. Instead, on a day that was otherwise uneventful Grace had been over at his house as she was many times before and he'd asked her to grab something from near his bookshelf and that had been a catalyst. Grace had seen the book and grabbed it looking over its cover and name and addressed him.
"Simon, I didn't know you read this series." she said gesturing to the book. Simon looked up from his current drawing and eyed the book Grace held recognizing it as the one book on the shelf that he'd actually never read.
"I don't, my dad gave it to me but I'm not into sci-fi." he responded before turning back to his artwork. Grace thumbed through the pages while laughing to herself.
"How can you know that you don't like sci-fi if you refuse to read it?" she questioned. Simon couldn't think of a response so he didn't give one. Grace returned the book to where she'd gotten it from. "Well for the record I like that series." she muttered before grabbing the markers that Simon had requested and dropping them on his desk before going back to making edits of dance clips on her phone. That detail she'd given about her liking the series probably shouldn't have made Simon read the book.
He should have been desercening enough on his own to branch out to new genres even if he didn't have the Grace seal of approval looming over him. But Simon wasn't the type of person who walked up to strangers his age to talk to them and he wasn't the type of person who explored outside of what was easy and comfortable because he didn't see the use in trying to change things that worked. Simon liked structure, but maybe he trusted Grace more than he liked structure so despite his initial hesitation about it he read the book.
Simon thought it was pretty good which made sense because in the almost three years that he'd known her Grace was never one to waste her time on something that wasn't at least good enough for her standards. Simon considered their friendship to be the exception to that rule. It of course wasn't enough to spark a complete and total renovation of his interests like reading the Chronicles of Narnia had been but it was good. What had sparked a total renovation of his interest however had been the technology described. Futuristic technology captured his interest.
It hadn't been the weapons to take hold of his heart however, it had been the most practical things. He liked the idea of robots that acted to fix mundane issues, of reinvented food management and distribution systems that ended world hunger, of housing that was both efficient and cost effective. While most would be focusing on the story of these space bound epics Simon could only wonder how things like water refining worked in the future. He started reading more sci-fi but rather than read the stories he'd quickly scan through them.
When he found a tidbit of practical information regarding the way the world worked and how the society functioned on a technological basis he'd take a yellow highlighter and highlight the phrase. It drove his mother up the wall but Simon felt he had to. What if one day someone with a great mind for things like this was trying to change the world and needed inspiration. Simon could present this person with the ideas and maybe they'd change the world for the better. Simon told all of this to Grace over the phone during one of their balcony talks.
"If you're so hyped about all that future stuff and changing the world why don't you do it?" Grace asked him. Simon took a pause after that question.
"...what?" he asked, unsure if he'd heard her correctly.
"You want all that stuff to get implemented so that the world can be changed right?" she asked.
"Yeah, I've run the numbers and stuff like the food distribution system they have in the Glaxaygate series would end world hunger." he explained.
"Then why don't you figure out how to make that distribution system in real life and end world hunger for us." she asked. The tone in her voice was mostly joking but a part of it was serious and that scared Simon more than anything.
"Do you know the level of engineering expertise I'd have to have to make something anywhere near that complicated. I mean outside of the obvious implementation issues, I have no idea how to build something out of metal or use energy to power things. I'm not that smart Grace." he responded. He could hear Grace sigh exasperatedly over the phone.
"You've got to stop selling yourself short. You're smart enough to do whatever you want. If you want to build something that makes the world a better place then do that. The only thing stopping you from doing something that changes everything is yourself." she asserted. Simon corrected what he saw as a blatant falsehood.
"The only thing stopping me is not having the knowledge, the tools or the skills to complete a project anything like that." he said.
"Then don't do that, learn how to do something smaller and use what you learn to make something game-changing in the future." she responded. Simon wanted to argue but thinking about it he decided against it. No one won arguments with Grace and he was not an exception in that case. Besides, what she said did make sense. Maybe he couldn't build a globe spanning food distribution network but maybe he could make something smaller. Maybe he could start by reading up on power sources.
So Simon decided to do just that. He went to the library and brought home countless books on power sources, and on technical engineering and robotics. All of it was above his reading level but that had never stopped him before. Simon had been inspired in only the way that young idealistic children can be and to Simon the idea that he could change the world was a foregone conclusion because Grace had said so and she was always right. He could do it because he wanted to make the world better and he'd been told by movies that wanting it was enough.
And yes he recognized that just wanting something to happen didn't really make it happen but that was why he had books. And after reading tons of them his want to make an advanced food distribution system had morphed completely into a want to design other things but his goal of improving the world never wavered. He wanted to make something that changed the world because people who did that were remembered and Simon wanted to be remembered as someone who did something good.
Simon wanted to start building things the second he'd gotten it into his head that maybe he'd like to build a robot but he'd been told by his parents that he wasn't allowed to go to the nearby scrapyard and search for things to salvage for a potential project. Normally that would have been the end of it as Simon tended to be very respectful of his parents rules but in his mind they were preventing him from possibly changing the world and so it was okay to disobey them just this one time for science.
"I'm going to walk Archduke Franz Ferdinand!" he yelled towards the kitchen as he stood near the door about to head out with the dog close behind wagging it's tail excitedly.
"Alright!" his mother called back and Simon took it as his cue to leave. What he'd said wasn't a lie technically, he was going to walk Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was just also going to walk over to the scrapyard and scavenge for scraps of metal and wiring so that he could build a robot. The dog happily walked ahead and Simon took notice of his neighborhood with it's tiny houses and quiet streets. It all looked oddly foreign. Simon could probably make a map of Grace's neighborhood by memory but that was because her's was so dynamic and interesting.
Simon didn't consider himself an artist, he was a writer first, an engineer second, and artist third; but he had what his mother called artistic sensibilities. He could recognize things that were worthy of being captured as art and he could recognize what things were boring and normal. Grace would have disagreed with his thinking had she been with him for this walk, Grace had once told him there was art in everything. Simon hated to disagree with Grace but he was sure she was wrong.
The idea that someone could look at something like Grace's dancing, which was the closest thing to abject artistic perfection Simon could think of, and a garbage can while believing that both had artistic merit was ludacris to him. Some things just didn't hold the same artistic value as other things and it wasn't a value judgement, in his opinion it was just fact. When he'd told her that she'd responded that he missed the point and Simon had been too stubborn to ask what that even meant.
He made his way to the dump and tied Archduke Franz Ferdidnand to a sturdy pole while he looked around. He may have been an overambitious kid but he wasn't looking to actually get hurt for the sake of a project so mostly Simon just poked around the scrapyard searching for anything that might be usable and shoving it in his book bag. Springs, motors, buttons, and batteries were all taken from broken electronics using a screwdriver he may or may not have borrowed without permission.
After he'd gathered what he considered to be enough for the project he was working on he zipped his backpack and untied Archduke Franz Ferdidnad before returning to his house. He hoped he hadn't been gone for too long and wasn't about to walk into an ambush. He prepared himself to answer a barrage of questions and to defend his backpack like his life depended on it but when he entered he was only greeted with the smell of dinner cooking. His dad walked over to him casually.
"Put your shoes and backpack away and go get cleaned up for dinner, your mom made meatloaf." he said with more excitement than Simon thought meatloaf required. Simon let out a sigh of relief and began walking upstairs to put away his things before his dad added something. "Oh, and if you're going to borrow my tools for secret adventures, try to at least leave the garage in a state similar to how it was." he said. Simon was thrown off kilter by the offhand comment.
"You knew?" he asked. His father nodded in response. Simon dug the screwdriver out of his bag and handed it back. "Please don't tell mom." he begged. His father laughed at this.
"Your mother knows too, we watched you walk over there and waited in case you were in trouble. By the way, look up more when you're walking, it is uncomfortably easy to follow you without you noticing." he said. Simon nodded and went upstairs to stow his parts and to wash his hands. He made a mental note to check for people following him more often before he joined his family for dinner. After the meal was complete Simon really wanted to start working on what he'd found but he'd promised his dad that he'd learn some French that day and so he did.
He tried not to get frustrated with the nonsensical use of vowels and such in the French language and instead actually did manage to get some progress made in the learning of the language. After he was satisfied Simon rushed upstairs in order to make an official tally of exactly what he'd gathered on his excursion and what he could do with it. His biggest find by far had been the small motor he'd discovered and Simon had no doubt it could be put to excellent use if it still worked.
He didn't know what you were supposed to do with the materials that you found in a scrapyard, he figured he'd have to get another book before he would know but at the very least he could start working on concepts for what he'd make. He had plenty of ideas and books for inspiration on that front and while a small motorized robot built of scraps wasn't by any means world changing it was the start to learning a skill which he could maybe use to change the world if he was lucky.
He remembered what Grace had said to him about the only thing stopping him from changing the world being himself and mentioning that he sold himself short. He wasn't exactly sure that he sold himself short, just that Grace had more faith in him than he did. But maybe he could use a more positive mindset. Archduke Franz Ferdidand barked at a squirrel he saw outside of his bedroom window and Simon decided he'd had enough introspective thought for one night. As he got ready to go to sleep Simon dreamed of a world where he made a difference.