Read Turbulence for Free Online Page A

ocean of grease stains, spilt paint and burn smudges, dotted with islands of more clustered junk.
    In the centre of the room stands what appears to be a metal statue of a man, with green-glowing wires coiled around it like veins. Beside this stands a thin, short man in his fifties, clad in a frayed white shirt, pyjamas that were white once and big, bug-eye goggles. His head is exceptionally large, and bald except for a few wisps of hair drooping from above his ears in a defeated sort of way.
    “Uzma, this is Sundar Narayan. The Scientist,” Tia says.
    Uzma is surprised when the Scientist does nothing to acknowledge her presence. She’s even more surprised when he moves and she sees that his face is completely slack, his mouth hanging open. He’s drooling slightly, and his movements, for all their speed and dexterity, are somewhat odd, puppet-like.
    Narayan hovers around his growing creation like a moth, prodding, poking, adding wires and circuitry, fingers almost blurring. It’s as if he’s a sculptor, or a musician playing the most complicated piano in the world. Whatever it is he’s building, it’s something that’s already perfectly designed in his head. Occasionally he darts off to another part of the room, plunges his arm into a heap of assorted junk and emerges holding something shiny, which he then runs to add to his strange masterpiece.
    Uzma is irresistibly reminded of a video she’d seen on National Geographic years ago in Oxford, when a visiting uncle from Pakistan had insisted that she stop watching Friends and learn something instead — she’d switched channels unwillingly but had soon found herself engrossed in a show about a weaverbird building its nest, creating an elaborate colonial home with just its beak, its incredible skill rendered eerie by the madness of fast-forward TV. Narayan looks more like a token Indian extra in a zombie movie than a bird, but he, too, is constructing something solid and curvy and beautiful out of little bits of detritus the world has no further use for, another wondrous device that seems to follow scientific principles its maker should not be aware of.
    “You’re taking all of this in very well,” Tia says. “The first time I saw him do his thing, I was completely freaked out.”
    Uzma stares at Narayan in bewilderment, still waiting for some indication that all of this is an elaborate prank, some kind of bizarre household initiation ceremony involving balloons and streamers. As if in response to her searching stare, he turns away from his machines and towards her, his goggles making it impossible to see if he’s looking at her. She almost screams when he snores loudly, and his head lolls to one side. Then he swings and sways, a flesh scarecrow, and returns to his tinkering, leaving Uzma breathing in great gulps and shuddering at Tia’s reassuring pats.
    “Is he… asleep?” Uzma asks, resisting the urge to run.
    “Yeah. He does all this stuff in his sleep, and when he wakes up he spends all day in here trying to understand his inventions. I don’t think he’s got anywhere yet,” Tia replies.
    “Makes stuff from his dreams? How is that even possible?”
    “Well, poets do the same thing, don’t they? He says it’s something to do with his subconscious working out the engineering problems his everyday mind can’t. Id-Design, he calls it.”
    “So what has he invented so far?”
    Tia gestures to Uzma’s right and she sees, in the far corner of the Scientist’s den, a strange assortment of objects in glass cases on little stands, a small exhibition of the insanity she feels snickering and gurgling in the air around her. There’s what looks like a lava lamp, amoeba-like green globules floating in a viscous orange gel, with a sign in front of it that proclaims XONTRIUM EGO SUSPENSION in a child’s shaky handwriting. The next case contains what looks like a toy gun, the sort of thing aliens in science-fiction B-movies use when asking you to take them to