Inventing a Response: The Verbal Eraser

My invention for Oskar is a Verbal Eraser. It looks like a regular eraser except it's electronic and when you want to use it you press the button and swipe it around. It's an eraser that erases things you've said instead of things you've written. You could use it to take back things you didn't mean to say, or things you shouldn't have said. Even if you said something and a person hear it, the eraser would erase the words from existence - even from someone's brain. In the first prototypes, it probably would only be able to erase things you just said, but maybe in the later models you'd be able to reach back days or even years to erase things you had said.

Oskar says a lot of things that he shouldn't. Sometimes it's because he doesn't understand what's appropriate and what isn't, and sometimes it's because he can't express himself clearly, and sometimes it's because he doesn't know what will hurt people and what won't. This invention was particularly inspired by that one moment when he told his mother that he wished that she had died instead. As soon as he said that, he wished that he could take it back, but he couldn't. With the verbal eraser, he could use the knowledge he had gained after he said something bad to erase the thing he'd said and make things better.