Drew is an impressionable and ill-at-ease youth who grows up in the quirky, rural town of Eastern. With the help of his best friend Anjali, he struggles to find the real truth hidden just beneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic community. A thousand years in the future: Varik Vermillion, born and raised a child prodigy, becomes the youngest (17) tenured professor in the astrophysics department at the esteemed San Francisco Academy. Disgruntled and now in his mid-20's, he impulsively takes a plunge forsaking his "chosen" profession to enter the world of politics. Soon Varik realizes he has merely traded in one set of shackles for another, but in the political arena darker influences are at work. After a few missteps and mischances, his life takes a series of stark and unforeseen turns. In a shocking twist, these ostensibly disparate worlds become intertwined on multiple levels-and now, the survival of both worlds may depend on the success (or failure) of both Drew and Varik.

MACHINATIONS

By J.S. BREVING

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 J.S. Breving
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0774-5

Chapter One

The Renaissance Man: Dead and Buried

"I sprung from the womb a child prodigy."

Even I cannot utter such words without so much as a smirk. Yet it is true and had little to do with me, but all began when my parents first met: at least that's what my court-ordered therapist alleges. Nonetheless, if I am brutally honest, I guess I'd have to admit that this line of thinking absolves me of culpability. It would have been convenient to blame my parents. My therapist so badly wanted them to shoulder the blame, dangling the bait; I nibbled but thankfully didn't indulge. It's okay to revisit the past, once armed with the realization that blame is useless in the here and now, nor does it have utility the day after.

But to say my early environs were mere window dressing would be equally premature. Most children aren't reared in preschool on Newton's laws of gravity and Einstein's theory of general relativity. By nine, I had moved onto the grand unification theories, the weight of the world squarely planted on narrow shoulders, with expectations that never relent. I mean, why would a child want to publish research papers in astronomy? Sure, I had an interest and was obviously bright, but kids, left to their own devices, don't have that kind of drive. Conversely, that kind of drive is imposed, and once it's hardwired, all plasticity fades. If there's one thing I've learned in my years, it's that change is not a normal human operation. It's never invited graciously but compelled, and we rarely go gently. In fact, change usually only follows the pounding of fist and gnashing of teeth, endured but rarely reflected upon. The learning is in the pain, but the trick is circumventing the missteps leading up to it, that is for sure.

So I published a couple of articles in astronomy journals at the tender age of eleven. My parents were unaware at first, as I had published them under a pseudonym from a pseudo-college. I hesitate to even mention the topics, not as a slight to their quality, but because they shrouded a time of my life laden with an unabashed enthusiasm and naiveté that had already started to witness the first signs of rot. The first article was a little abstract, insinuating that the universe was not expanding but, in fact, contracting, so buckle up and strap in tight for the final "Crunch." It turned out to be, in actuality, false. But it did debunk the misinterpretation of the red shift, allowing scientists to more accurately date the age of the universe, which resulted in a more precise map of space-time as we know it today. And the repercussions were far-reaching; the next article even led to revisions in some grand unification theories. The subsequent articles were more esoteric and convoluted, failing to garner the publicity of the first two, but it mattered not.

The kicker was that I was still in grade school, and yet the spirits groaned: "I" yearned for more, so I doctored up some phony credentials, with the help of some street toughs who knew people who knew people who could help a brother out. I forged a résumé and sent out my application to academic institutions. It was an impressive résumé, which is why I guess it was never questioned. I even showed up for a few interviews, one, for a department chair. Well, when the truth finally came out, there was quite a buzz ... an eleven-year-old kid ... no shit ... an eleven-year-old kid? The media (but not academia) absolutely loved it and didn't seem fazed that I had been less than forthright. In fact, it seemed to add to my allure and struck them as positively adorable. The public likewise slopped it up, and it wasn't long before some of the most esteemed colleges (which in the end found it in their hearts to look past my transgressions) were knocking on my parents' door, to admit me as a student this time around ... mind you at the tender age of eleven. I found the whole thing perplexing, but I can't say the attention was unwelcome. In the end, I did it for my parents, and they, in turn, basked in the attention by proxy.

In due course, the San Francisco Academy came a-courting, and it had always been my parents' dream to have one of "their own" attend the most prestigious university in the world. This is how I ended up in San Francisco, the capital, as a twelve-year-old child, wading amid a moor of grizzled teenage dullards at university. SFA fast-tracked me to professorship by the ripe ol' age of seventeen. A lot of kids skip a grade or two, but my rise was truly unheralded in this day and age of specialties, subspecialties, atomic specialties, and quantum specialties.

The Renaissance man: dead and buried. Find your station early in life, young man, sink your teeth and never let go; one only has to look out the window to view the alternatives.

So there I was in San Fran, tenured in my early twenties and beginning to ask those questions inevitably asked (however, with child prodigies, good at the abstract but not so good with the practical, the symptoms present later). And as if that weren't enough, I had veered into a professional rut: the thoughts, the innovations, the new ideas just weren't percolating. The peers that I had previously surpassed were beginning to catch up, and it didn't sit well with the old self-image; neither did it sit well with my bosses. Astrophysics is a young man's field, and for some reason, the well runs dry early.

I guess I allayed frustration with a little garden-variety rebellion, originally as a thorn in the side of the administration. Behind closed doors, I brazenly pronounced their methods half-baked and atavistic, a throwback to the educational practices of the late twentieth century. It didn't engender any goodwill on their part. And when they began ignoring my antics, I veered toward more political forums, which was a likewise convenient outlet for some of the aforementioned rants.

You can probably gather a general idea of my idiosyncratic routine. It was your basic anti-everything establishment party line, which always begs questions ... inevitable questions ... and yes, I definitely had my issues. But placed to task, I always returned: do my biases and inherent inclinations at all take away from the truth? Do they make reality any less real?

All of this was just cud to ponder while standing in my underground laboratory, under the quad of the SFA campus, in front of a holographic bas-relief of the known universe. My head assistant, Bethany, and I were re-creating initial sparks and watching the massive, now extinct early particles devolve into an infinite multiverse of possibilities. By changing the parameters, I could create beautiful scenarios, others ending in a fizz, and still others that looked eerily familiar, almost a mirror image of our universe.

And yet there was so much more. At any given moment, we had streams of data beaming in from probes, satellites, and numerous space missions simultaneously from all over the known galaxy, streams upon streams of data transfigured by this thing that spewed the data out onto a screen in front of me. And this thing didn't exist, at least not spiritually, but had a dizzying capacity to sift through data streams and transmute. And yet, in the end, it was just a reflex.

And as for my brain, it just wasn't cranking anymore. Had I lost my imagination? Or could it be that I had just run out of ideas? It happens; the proverbial well can run dry. But in the end, I knew the reason. It was simple. I hated myself....