Trendsetter

Byron Ellerbee wasn’t special. He grew up in crummy little factory towns in Canada and the United States and he never really excelled at much of anything at all. He lettered in wrestling only because the kid above him in the 105-pound class couldn’t cut weight.

When he was a kid he would play with his brothers in the factory their father managed. He collected bright plastic plugs that kept the ends of pipes safe before being fed to the threading machines. The smell of cutting oil was a permanent memory.

He’d had a lot of jobs. Byron had been a paperboy, a furniture refinisher, a reporter, a beekeeper, a technical writer, a tech entrepreneur, a metal sculptor, a real estate developer, a maker of biofuels, a writer of books, and a distiller. Poor fellow did all

that work without the benefit of a single job interview.

At fifty-eight he was simply rich and bored.

His parents were dead, along with his favorite older brother. He’d lost a son to a heroin overdose and he’d been through a couple of marriages. He was merely trudging along through the usual vapors of drugs and alcohol, watching his belly grow fatter and his nose grow redder as his remaining children had babies, changed careers, and pushed on with their lives.

Byron encountered Humanium one night when he was shopping online. It was a new substance out of Sweden; made from melted down firearms. Humanium. Not a new element in the periodic table, but a new alloy to be used in metal products. No checkout cart. No photos. He left a message via the contact form, promising not to be a robot.

Humanium touched the retired artist in him. Byron’s art collection had some local traffic. His metal working shop was dusty, but still functional. Occasionally he fired it up to repair farm tools, or other broken things. Occasionally he would fabricate a sign, or create a figure, or a piece of furniture as needed.

But Humanium. If he could lay his hands on some, he could make a splash. It would help bring attention to the new metal, and it would give him something to do. Byron was jazzed.

He sent spiders across the web looking for Humanium. He found a company in Toronto making beautiful spinning tops with the new substance, and he immediately ordered one to give to Meadow, his four-year-old grand child.

When the top arrived, Byron was stunned when he could not make it spin. After digging the unread instructions out of the recycling bin, he read, “You will not be able to make this top spin without practice.”

Translation: YouTube. Byron immersed himself in practice and was irritated by the short intervals of his initial spins. He acquired the custom, concave, highly polished glass base to accompany his many attempts. As his spinning times increased, his fascination with angular momentum and dissipative forces became an obsession. Byron spun and spun, and decided Humanium tops would be his gift to his world for Christmas.

All of his brothers, nephews, shareholders, and children got one. He gave one to his massage therapist, one to his acupuncturist, and one to his chiropractor. Byron’s initial order caused the company’s supply chain to hiccup—but in Sweden they were able to acquire enough illegal armaments to complete another manufacturing run.

The factory replied to Byron, and told him that Humanium was only sold as a powder, and that he could not acquire solid product to work with. One of Byron’s contractors had a powder-coating oven, but he also sold illegal firearms, so Byron felt he could not push on with his desire to make something from Humanium. He could have worked on popularizing the tops, except there was no need.

A bar owner in Raleigh received one of his gifts, and was smitten. He distributed tops to every barstool in his restaurant group. That ignited interest in food and beverage through the middle of North Carolina, which then caught fire in the southeast, and then across the land. Byron had accidentally unleashed a “Pet Rock.” Everybody had to have one.

In a world of Internet memes, Byron was glad to witness a good old fashioned craze that involved three dimensional objects. Sometimes when a colleague would suggest they have a teleconference to discuss something important, Byron would counter with “Let’s get together. Let’s discuss this in 3D.”

To keep up with demand, Sweden needed more firearms. And more firearms. While Humanium was originally defined as a substance derived from “illegal weapons,” the inventors shifted to melting down any armaments they could get their hands on.

The owner of the top factory in Toronto was on global news for having created the next “Beanie Babies.”

Byron had only a vague sense of Newton’s 2nd law (which really is for motion in a line), but derivations could be used to explain spinning objects. He was providing torque, and waiting for the moment of inertia along with tens of millions of others—many of which were spinning their Humanium tops at the same time.

Social media lit up with the notion of “nutation.” Atmospheric scientists had troubling breakdowns in their modeling of the polar vortex. That’s the mass of low pressure cold air that spins counterclockwise at the earth’s poles. Every now and then, in winter, it dumps a blast of cold arctic air onto the jet stream, which delivers horrific snow-storms and freezing temperatures to the United States.

When the polar vortex developed an inexplicable wobble, some said it could be attributed to the vast numbers of countervailing Humanium spinning tops. Ski resort operators in Upper Michigan considered lobbying Congress to stop the importation of Canadian tops.

When Humanium tops became the rage in China, demand for firearms to feed Humanium furnaces was so strong that people in the United States began exchanging their guns for cash. Old guns were worth more as money in the bank than they were as sentimental objects. At one point even the prices for new guns could not compete. Traders were buying up tents full of weapons, at fairground gun shows in order to sell them into the global Humanium markets.

Byron didn’t have any weapons to sell. He’d done plenty of hunting as a young man, but he shed his guns when his children were born in order to shield his family from careless accidents. Besides, Byron didn’t need to sell anything. He already had too much money. His spins were north of three minutes each, and he was perfectly content to let the Humanium craze run its course without him.

He did think of his childhood friend, Terry Dorland. Terry lived in the “Dorland Apartments” down the street from Byron’s childhood home in small town Ontario.

Terry mysteriously died from a shotgun blast when out on a hunting trip. Byron sometimes wondered if Terry had accidentally killed himself, intentionally killed himself, or if he was murdered by another in his hunting party, either accidentally or on purpose.

His friend John had been accidentally shot by his other friend Mark in high school. He sometimes wondered if that was an accident. Mark and his family moved away shortly after it happened. John and Byron remained friends into adulthood. Byron sent John a Humanium top.

As guns receded from the landscape, so did gun violence. As gun violence plummeted, police forces across America started converting their caches of weapons into Humanium, which provided a new, important funding stream. As police arsenals were converted into cash, the level of gun violence dropped even further.

Byron smiled when he heard a podcast that suggested Humanium was scheduled to be bigger than Covid 19. He had survived the deadly virus and had a stack of face masks at the bottom of his dresser drawer to prove it. He laughed out loud recalling an Internet meme that was riffing off the Margaret Mead quote. Something to the effect of, “Never underestimate the power of a single person to change the world until you have eaten an undercooked bat.”

He was pleased that the public had turned its attention to Humanium. He enjoyed spinning his top, but it was not enough to alleviate his boredom.

One night when he was shopping online he discovered a tincture that allegedly opened pathways in the brain that enabled the user to have empathy for diametrically opposing points of view. He shrugged. Apparently it wasn’t yet available, but he found a contact for its maker and enrolled in a small beta test anyway. Just so he would have something to do…