jeffreagan
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2017
I'm a free range drifter, a high school dropout who dropped out into reverse engineering things for the silicon industry, military microwave industry, laser industry, and most recently brain science. I've reverse engineered my own brain. For my next performance I intend to beat the common scourge inside of the mind. I'm perfecting a transcranial magnetic stimulator for online release as open architecture. My objective is to do it from scrap and a hundred bucks, with designs to be published soon. Stay tuned. What prompted this was I took a sabbatical in Alaska where I picked up a MBA with baccalaureates in marketing and management. I stripped a powerplant and learned related electronics by dissecting the controls, relaying, and protection. I naturally took in the downtrodden, who trashed me like clockwork. They seemed fine. Then each detonated, a term I use to describe a total catastrophic breach of trust. This made no sense, yet the trend dated back to my youth. Upon closer examination each deliberately botched a murder attempt, sparing me by cerebral miscalculation. Close friends did it too. In these cases peculiar failures arose based on missing knowledge of local customs and traditions. My predictable reactions spared me. In each case my attacker knew me a long time. They knew what I would do. A logical disconnect appeared when each attacked what might be a vulnerability with most folks. Each attempts to knock me off my rocker by targeting one of my secret strengths, then appearing bewildered having failed to bugger my life, limb, and liberty. Their own core values keep appearing exactly inverted. Each is now championing their own antithesis. But once-cherished core values must still exist inside each perfectly intact, as foreknowledge is required to perfect it's opposite. Outwardly their ham-fisted grim intent appears oddly clumsy. Tampering like bears they usually launch sneak attacks on me. I was left unscathed with such uncanny regularity I called myself God's cartoon character. But terrified eyes contrasted starkly with each evil-with-glee mug. Conflicted to say the least, there is clearly a method to the madness. Repeated enough I eventually got the impression concealed innocence lives on. Each automaton of doom secretly telegraphs proof to me their original intelligence is okay. Each knows our shared core values. By botching each shared source of pride, each rejects them self spectacularly. Public display of contempt toward their own former standards says they're not them self anymore, while also surreptitiously advising me to flee for my life. I shall return.
