Prototype 3

A quiet monologue from a man who built something better—and was punished for it.

You build something better. People don’t want it. What do you do with that?

I used to think the hardest part of building something was getting it to work. The circuits, the code, the calibration—that’s the stuff that keeps you up at night, right? You stare at the same three lines of logic until your eyes sting. You solder the same joint twice because it looks wrong, even when it isn’t.

But that wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part was getting people to believe it counted.

This one—Prototype 3—was the first mower that could edge around a garden bed without eating the flowers. I spent three weekends fine-tuning the sensor drift. I was so proud of that. Showed it off to a few regular clients. One of them said, “Huh. So you don’t even mow the lawn anymore?”

That’s when the ratings started to slip.

I read every review. Tried to ignore them. “He just stands there.” “Feels lazy.” “I could’ve done it myself.” They didn’t mention the straight lines. The precision. The time savings. Just that I wasn’t pushing.

So I stopped building.

People don’t really want better. They want familiar. They want visible effort. They want sweat and noise and a guy with grass on his shoes.

I still mow. I mean, technically I still mow. I stand on one of the old machines and steer it by hand. It doesn’t need me, but I hold the bar so people feel okay about paying. Sometimes I hit manual override just to make it look more… real.

The weirdest part? I started forgetting how the system worked. Not the mechanics, but the feeling—that spark when an idea clicks and you realize you just made something simpler. Cleaner. Yours.

It’s like… I built a better way to work, and then I buried it under performance. And the longer I pretended, the more I started to believe them.

Like maybe it really didn’t count.

Like maybe I was just standing there.

This quiet monologue is a companion to Standing There—a short story about a man who built the perfect mower and watched the world reject it.