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. I hated my life. And I took happy pills to dull the pain, in order to stop the excruciating peeling of skin, the exquisite prick, and the searing sting. I never slept, and maybe that's where the drugs—the good drugs, the ones that make everything better—entered the fray. Yet truth be told, nothing was really lost: it was there, just warped and mangled behind years of callus. So was it the chicken or the egg? The age-old question of the half-wit: did the drugs dull my senses or were my senses already dulled and the drugs a cover-up? Either way, it had a price. It always has a price, and I had turned into a living sign—a caricature—of many before and many after. And the frustration: "I" was there but fossilized and buried. "I" was there but the excavation might very well alter the artifacts, for the artifacts had become one with the slate and sediment; for where the one begins, the other does not end. And there was no telling if any of it could ever be recovered.

"Can you have the data analyzed by next Friday?" I asked my assistant.

"You'll have to get Stephan and Gregoire to look it over," Bethany replied.

"Why?"

She gave me a stare. "I'm not going to be here, remember?"

"Wait just a minute. You do know what next week is? The InPom grant?"

"Of course."

"And you think you're just taking off?"

"You okayed it months ago."

"Bethany, you know the grant is coming up. Everyone in the lab has known about it ... for forever ... I mean, this isn't a big newsflash. If we don't get this grant, it's all over. They'll put me out to pasture, and then there will be no reason for any of us to show up anymore."

"But you said ..."

"Listen, Bethany, I'm beginning to think that you intentionally slipped this one past me. I've been running around like an idiot, and you know how the details sometimes elude me. I think you knew exactly what was going on and slipped this whole vacation thing in under the radar. In fact, I don't even recall you bringing it up."

"Do you really think that?"

"I don't know what to think."

"All these years I've worked in your lab, and this is what you think?"

"It's a good act, but I don't know if I'm buying. I mean, it's just a little too cute."

Bethany was incredulous. "A good act ... cute?"

"I have no idea what's going on here, what I did or did not say, but I will tell you this: you can't possibly go on vacation next week."

"And what if I do?"

"Well then, it appears that you have a choice to make."

"An ultimatum?"

"Sure ... why not?"

"But I've been planning this trip for months," she pleaded.

"Not my problem. And come to think of it, this whole conversation is in poor taste. It's beginning to upset me, and I've got a shitload of work to do. Let me know what you decide, really; but right now, I just don't have time for your hysterics."

On a professional and personal high, I walked out of the main lab into my office. I hated myself. I absolutely hated myself. I knew exactly what I was doing, and it had nothing to do with Bethany. She was but a hapless victim. Well, Bethany wasn't completely hapless; she was probably shocked as anything to hear me say "yes" to her request a few months ago. She certainly didn't question it, and why would she?

Bethany most likely asked me in one of my postdrug funks—when the haze enveloped me—when I would just stare at the holograms as if I were lost in deep thought. There used to be times when I would drift away and things would happen, good things, but there was nothing productive about this fog. And was that her fault? Bethany had been a stellar worker. She along with Stephan, Gregoire and Jainy—was loyal and had stayed when others had left the lab.

Once in my office, I checked my phone messages. Whitley had called, my old roommate from SFA, wanting to go out for drinks after work. And there was yet another message from the Libertarian party, which I quickly deleted. Finally, there was a message from Dr. Berninger, my mentor. He wanted to meet and said it was urgent. Great. Just what I needed. No matter how esteemed, no matter how well-published, they always paired the green with the gray, and Dr. Berninger was the big winner of the child prodigy sweepstakes. Our meetings had turned increasingly constipated of late; hopefully it was grant-related, but I doubted it. My behavior had been quite erratic around the lab lately. I knew it, and others surely must have noticed. I was hoping it would be written off as stress and not creative pharmacology. I'd end it all before entering rehab again.

Many moons ago, every living human had been implanted with a quantum bio-chip that worked like an internal cell phone. It was implanted in the cochlea and interfaced with the temporal lobe directly. Interestingly enough, the bio-chip also had a locator beacon that was only to be used by the World Council for "emergency purposes only." Much to their chagrin, I had continually found ways to deactivate it. I would be damned if anyone was going to have that much control over my life. To be at the beck and call of morons? No way, and I probably could never have gotten away with it if I hadn't been such an "integral" part of society. I had turned away numerous public officials and even a couple more impressive-looking representatives of the World Council. My parting words for all of them was, "Do something."

I returned to the floor of the lab and pulled Bethany aside. Bad enough I'd made an ass out of myself, but I had confronted her in front of everyone else, and I had a responsibility to not comport myself like an ass. I was the king of this little one-pony town, and no one said a word to the contrary. And saying a contrary word might very well mean their heads. I wasn't going to play little power games like my superiors. I was bigger than that. Well, so much for prudence and compassion, Dr. Vermillion.

"I've only got a couple of minutes because I have to meet up with Dr. Berninger, but I thought I would take a moment to apologize. You have worked harder than anyone on this project, including myself, and you have earned multiple vacations over and over again. Besides, I'm sure you told me and I simply forgot. I've been under a lot of stress lately, but it's no excuse. I apologize."

"That's okay, Dr. V. You know, I can stay if you really need me."

"I wouldn't think of it. No, go ahead and take the time off. As long as I pull my weight around here, there shouldn't be a problem. You've done most of the legwork anyway. You deserve it. Well, I've got to go. I've got a meeting with the brass."

"Grant-related?"

"I can only hope."

Bethany resumed her work as I headed out of the lab. I took the elevator up to the ground floor and exited into the main quad. The mystique of academia, once so alluring, had been allayed. I used to walk the quad in awe. It was different now, and it wasn't even the kids, though I wanted so badly to blame it on the snot-nosed little brats loping about, no ... it was me. I was the one who had changed.

I navigated my way through the steady current of students and trudged up the steps to one of the oldest buildings on campus, which housed the administration offices. It was an "original," over a thousand years old. It had been renovated numerous times, more times than I could recall or would care to recall. I doubted if any of the original materials were left in the structure. Dr. Berninger's suite was on the top floor. He was one of the more decorated veterans of the astrophysics department, which was why I figured they originally paired us together.

I strode right past the receptionist, who was trying to wave me down. Continuing on, I entered Dr. Berninger's office at the end of the hall and took a seat in a plush leather chair behind his desk and kicked up my feet. I opened up the latest Journal of Astrophysics and feigned an interest.

After a few minutes, Dr. Berninger entered in a burst. He always looked like he had ten things going on at once, and he usually did, but none of them were research-related. His well had run dry years ago, and now he was resigned to occupy his time with busy work.

"Make yourself at home, Varik."

"No worries."

Dr. Berninger took a seat on the visitor's side of the desk and began wringing his hands; apparently, this was a matter of life or death.

"What's up, Varik?"

"What do you mean, `What's up?'"

"What do you mean, `What do you mean?'"

I took my feet off his desk and straightened up. "You're beginning to confuse my fragile mind. Why am I here? You called me, remember?"

"Do I really need to spell it out for you?"

"I guess you're going to have to, because I have no idea what this little shindig is all about."

"I have a list of complaints," he continued. "But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on most counts. And since I have been blessed with the virtue of patience, I'm willing to let you speak your piece so I can listen to you first, unbiased, before reaming you a new one."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MACHINATIONSby J.S. BREVING Copyright © 2011 by J.S. Breving. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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