Halloween is a really busy time for mad scientists, reanimating the dead and creating monsters is in high demand so remember to be kind to any mad scientists you might know! Offer limbs you don’t need for their projects (I mean really? Do you need that fingers?), or perhaps suggest a fun night out grave robbing!
[image description: A watercolor portrait of a smiling young strawberry blond in wide wire-rimmed oval glasses and a yellow t-shirt with a black biohazard symbol on it. Behind Cooper, a group of dark robot silhouettes with glowing eyes. Behind them, huge high-tech towers. And behind those, the starry night sky. Text reads, “191, COOPER • THE SMALL GOD OF MAD SCIENCE”]
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Children are full of questions. It’s their natural state. What they aren’t full of is limitations. To a child, turning off gravity or repealing the square/cube law seems just as reasonable as a game of tag or a baloney sandwich. It’s just that for most of them, the games and the sandwiches are easier to come by than the death rays or the massive revisions to the laws of physics.
And then there are the outliers. The smart kids with the stars in their eyes and the static in their heads and no real concept of the line between “can” and “should.”
Those are the ones he adores. Those are the ones who adore HIM, the ones who whisper his name in the night, or a name that he recognizes as his own—he’s Cooper, yes, but he’s also Raj, and Shinji, and Jordan, and Marie. He is whatever his faithful need him to be, as fluid as thought, as mutable as the ideas he represents. He comes to the frustrated and the furious, and he makes them better, and he encourages them to change the world.
Some of them outgrow him, shift into the service of other small gods of science, pledge themselves to OSHI, small god of lab safety, or Grant Grant, small god of proper funding. Some of them abandon science entirely. But others will remain his forever, dreaming of dinosaurs and science without limits, dreaming of changing the world.
Some of them will do it. And in the end, that’s all Cooper wants. Science unfettered, science running wild and free and unrestrained.
He wouldn’t mind a few dinosaurs, if you’re taking requests.
And he’ll be there the whole time, death ray by his side and not a safety light in view, ready to change the world as soon as he can figure out a reliable power source.
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Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world:
