D.I.Y by John Wiswell

Author:John Wiswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

I asked, “How do we kill a drought?”

Noah sat back, smug, on his bed. “The way I start all my research.”

Noah went to one of the big forums—I won’t name it, but one the neckbeards in your life probably frequent. He used my VPN and created a new account. He typed up a post with the subject line: “WHY CAN’T THEY JUST DRINK OCEAN WATER?”

His post was trash. He thought every existing pipe system could take the same volume of water. He wanted to disperse water using aquamancy that “literally everybody knows how to do.” His post called the government and the wizard industry lazy for not thinking of using oceans as water supplies.

I read it between my fingers. “It’s salt water, Noah. You’d die of dehydration drinking it.”

He posted it anyway. Thirty-two minutes later, a mod locked his thread.

In those thirty-two minutes, he got more than six hundred comments correcting every angle of his bad assumptions. More commenters than you’d think linked to external articles. We were barraged with starting points to our research.

Noah said, “There is no educational resource in the cosmos greater than a nerd who thinks you’re wrong.”

Every time we hit a wall in our plan, we made another account and trolled forums pretending to be someone who believed what we actually wanted to do was impossible. We never thought we were smarter than everyone else; we just had to trick people into making us smarter.

We didn’t invent the wand or Wi-Fi or the keyboard. We wanted to add something to the big pool of ideas so everybody could use it.

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