Basil's Machine

It was a typical summer day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Basil was on his garage work in on his new project. It was a strange machine. It looked like a toaster, with a calculator screen and a cheap computer microphone taped onto it. Right besides him was sitting his best friend, Olive, playing with her phone. She put the phone down and looked at the strange device.

"Where are you going with this again?" She said, with a disinterested expression on her face.

"Y-you don't know?! B-but I told you a few minutes ago..." He looked brokenhearted.

"Ah, yeah. I wasn't paying attention"

He could hardly be surprised. She was always like this. She never listened to anyone unless they were praising her, and she often ignored him unless she needed something. Right now she was at his house because she had broken a vase, and they were waiting for Basil's dad to come so he could fix it.

"Uhm, a-as I said before, the X-pro translator 3000 is supposed to translate animal speech into english. I've tested it a few times but it keeps failing, so now I'm gonna try and-"

"Why don't you give up?"

Basil looked back at her.

"W-what?"

"Why don't you give up?  It has failed all your other attempts at getting it to work and it will probably fail again, right? Besides, it's a stupid idea. You can't translate animal speech, not without magic, and this thing is the least magical thing I have ever seen." She touched the small spring that protuded from the machine.

He supposed she was right. It had never worked, and probably never will. It wasn't magic. It looked stupid. Almost everything was stacked against him, and yet he could not give up, precisely because of that. He had always been regarded as useless, a good for nothing and an idiot who couldn't contribute to society, even by his closest friends, and he was aching to prove them wrong. He had to, he had to do it so they knew that he could do it, that he was capable of something, that he wasn't a nuisance. So, even though most of the time he would do what she wanted, today he wasn't going to. And he had to let her know.

"No. I won't give up." He said simply, in a sudden bout of confidence, confidence he lost as soon as he finished that sentence.

"Why?"

"B-because... Because..." He couldn't tell her, not really. He couldn't afford to do that, he was too small and pitiful and she could punch him. "Because... I want to." It was the most simple answer he could find.

"Huh. Fair enough." She said, and looked back at her phone. 

He kept working on it for a little while, then tried to turn it on. He switched the little lever besides it, and waited. The screen began to flash and come to life. Basil could barely believe it, it had never done that before! He got closer. Olive took her eyes off her phone again, just to look. The machine started to vibrate, and it began  to release sparks of light everywhere, before it made a loud "BOOM" noise and broke into thousands of tiny pieces. Basil face was black with soot and frozen in a disbelieving smile. Olive was laughing so hard she started to cry. 

He got up to pick up the broken remains of the machine, so he could start again.

 "What are you looking at?"