My little brother is some kind of mechanical genius.
He is a nervous wreck when trying to interact with people, but when he is alone with machines he comes to life.
I’m not sure if austistic is the right word, but Ed is definitely different from the rest of the family. Maybe that’s why I look out for him so much. Ed is a young man who needs to be protected, sometimes even from his own family! Whenever we have a little extra money I will drive Ed out to the junkyard. He likes to buy broken things and try to fix them. One time he found an old, beat up air conditioner in the junkyard. It was the boxy style of A/C unit made to be mounted on a windowsill. Ed asked me to buy the broken air conditioner for him so he could try to fix it. Since it was only five bucks, I thought nothing of it. Ed took the air conditioner out to his workshed and puzzled over it for several days. At one point I checked on him and he had completely taken it apart, so that the metal housing of the air conditioner was empty. Somehow Ed rebuilt the inner workings of the HVAC system inside a metal barrel. He installed his own air vents along the top and bottom, and I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t actually work! He didn’t just fix a broken air conditioner, he used the parts from it to build his own custom air conditioner from scratch.