The first of my inventions to be misused was my toasting butter. I had made these little packets, you see, that look like the pads of butter one gets at pancake houses or with hotel breakfasts...Except! The butter was a special blend that would start to react once it was introduced to the air such that, after spreading it on plain white floppy bread, an exothermic reaction would occur and you’d end up with perfectly toasted, warm, and buttery bread.

Admittedly, there were...problems. A reaction like that can go awry and sometimes my beta-better-butter testers tried to eat it too soon, when the reaction hadn’t finished and...

That one didn’t make it to the food aisle. The public couldn’t be trusted to follow instructions, you see. Undeterred, I had tried to sell it to the more regimented and rule abiding military — for use in their ready made meals for warring soldiers in the field. Fresh toast with no light, no fire, and no hassle!

They bought drums of it. Drums and drums.

Turns out they were using it like a flame-less napalm. To have a warm meal wielded as a weapon was an affront to my anti-war ways. I abhor violence and realised after the fact (whilst seeking to recoup costs) that even if they had used it for its purpose, my butter would be part of the war machine that I was so firmly against. There was nothing I could do to stop them now.

They had bought the recipe.

Disheartened and damned near destitute (I had donated every dollar drawn from that disastrous, demoralising, dairy-based, death-balm debacle): I turned my mind back to making — to invention!

As penance for the harm I birthed into the world, I set my heart on the creation of a toy. Something innocent, innovative, and uninvolved in the suffering of humans in any way shape or form.

Thus: Clarence the Wonder Turtle was born. He was a friendly little chap that you could teach shapes to, and who would learn the faces of your family so he could greet them, and who would run from strangers or wheel towards them and honk and sing in a welcoming song! Aaaand the government used him as a suicide bombing drone.

They made him mean and coated him in camouflage first, obviously. He was cheap to make and knew enemies from friendlies and was small and nimble enough to get in and sing a song of kaboom! My finances weren’t strong enough to make him myself. I partnered with a manufacturer who specialised in domestic quad-copter drones.

Turns out they were a division of a military contractor and someone saw potential for my friendly little turtle. This time I held on to some of the money, a lot wen to charity, but I knew I needed to invest in making a change.

I couldn’t undo food-fight fire-flubber and track-treaded terminator turtles by being broke and I had learned I could not trust another company...not another soul. Anyone and anyone could corrupt my creations — I had to keep control.

So I started an Agriculture Technology start up. Vertical Farming. Super crops. More food for less water and less waste. All with no nasty chemicals. Higher yields and lower prices for all.

My pacifism wouldn’t stop me from waging war on global hunger. I could save the world and salve the wound of my past misdeeds. It couldn’t possibly go wrong.

Do you know what a technologically advanced steel cylinder with self-contained power generation and inbuilt food-processing can be turned into, with only a bit of know how and a couple drums of fire-butter? The countries I had donated my food generators to converted them into rudimentary, very effective, V2 rocket clones.

Not as advanced, war-like, or worrisome as the missiles made by the military industrial blood machine...but enough of a boom for border conflicts and to once more stomp my heart.

I almost ended it. The AgriTech business, I mean. (I had had dark thoughts, though, and had sought and received help). We stopped shipping food generators and converted to direct food production — no inventions, just hard work and keeping an eye on our potentially deadly silos.

Then, in the throws of creativity and necessity, I engineered an adaptive fertiliser. A feat of chemical and material development. A biodegradable nano-wafer delivery system for readily usable growth enhancing—they stole the formula and made super soldiers.

Fffffuck!

At that point I sold it all, donated a bunch and moved to the middle of nowhere: content to invent for myself and only myself. The money I had put back into the world and some of the good done in technology assisted farming, would have to do for my karmic debt. Clearly any attempt I made to make a difference in the world for the better would inevitably backfire.

Better to stay alone and out of the way. The world would be better for it...

Guess how long it took for me to make something that was used for murder, again? Didn’t sell it. Didn’t sell it or gift it to the world or anything.

I was in the middle of a vast and lonely desert, holed-up in my well-earned dilapidated shack of solitude, and out of boredom and drunkenness I made something. A hinged spoon. That’s right. A spoon with a hinge in the handle so the bowl could fold against the stem, and a spring and latch to let it flick open with just a shake.

Next thing you know, some lost guy driving by breaks down out the front of my shack! Fella asks if he can use my phone, sees the spoon and proclaims that THAT would do it. That would make a simple and effective mechanism to impact the blasting cap on a new type of bomb they were testing not too far away.

So, I walked into the desert. Let’s see if they can weaponize my latest invention: giving up.