Emperor of the Universe by David Lubar

Author:David Lubar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Nicholas shrugged. This felt both amazingly futuristic and embarrassingly similar to going shopping with his mom.

“Let’s stay basic,” Clave said, touching black. “Watch this.”

“I’m not even going to blink,” Nicholas said.

Clave stepped back and said, “Process the order.”

A mist drifted from the nozzles. It took the form of a shirt, though it was still made of mist. Then, the mist started to pull together and drift toward the table. A moment later, a black V-neck T-shirt lay there.

“How…?” Nicholas said.

“It’s complicated,” Clave said.

Nicholas touched the shirt, half afraid it would leave a wet smear on his hands. But it felt like a normal shirt, except a lot nicer than the T-shirts he bought. He pulled his old one off, and put the new one on. “Would it be okay to get some underwear?”

“At this point, I think it would be mandatory,” Clave said. He turned toward the Thinkerator and started to speak.

Nicholas cut him off. “I’ll get it myself. Thanks.” After he ordered the underwear and watched it appear on the table, he said, “Is it just clothing?”

“Hardly,” Clave said. “You can get pretty much anything that’s in stock, anywhere. And pretty much everything is in stock somewhere. Check out the catalog.”

As Clave said that word, a catalog emerged from a slot on the wall and dropped to the table. On the cover, the word SHIRTS shimmered in large letters.

“Paper?” Nicholas asked. His parents still got a few catalogs in the mail, especially around the holidays, but he’d never looked at any of them. “And you call me a barbarian?”

“Paper is wonderful,” Clave said. “Many people don’t like swiping their hands through images in the air. There’s something nice about flipping through a thick catalog. It’s perfect for daydreaming.”

“Or chewing,” Henrietta said. “Paper is the best thing ever for chewing.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” Clave told her. He turned back to Nicholas. “Take a look.”

“I already have a shirt,” Nicholas said.

“What else are you interested in?” Clave asked.

“Cars,” Nicholas said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.

Clave tapped the catalog. “Put your hand here, and say that.”

Nicholas did. The cover image and wording changed. Nicholas realized his hand was now resting on a car catalog.

“Cool!” Nicholas said.

The catalog changed, displaying refrigerators and air conditioners. Nicholas lifted his hand. As much as he wanted to play around with the catalog, he knew he had something more important to take care of. “I should read that contract first.”

He sat down with the tablet and tried his best. But pretty much everything past the opening sentence made little sense. And it seemed to give Morglob all sorts of benefits, including the total, perpetual, and unrestricted right to use Nicholas’s image in any form of recording either now existing or invented in the future. Some of the sentences were so long and convoluted, with all sorts of wherefores and henceforths, they made his English lit assignments seem like nursery rhymes.

“Here, take a look at this. Maybe you can figure it out.”

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