Uptempo (Paperback)

Unless circling the drain counts as velocity, Victoria Swift is anything but.

The City moves around her like she's a hazard cone, mocking her surname. A runaway at seventeen, she clawed her way through grit and a bit of corporeal currency to something resembling a life. At nineteen, drug-resistant tuberculosis ripped even that away. One lie to the discharge nurse about having somewhere to go, and with everything she owned stuffed in a backpack, the last thing she did swiftly was learn the first law of the streets: invisibility.

Still, it's remarkable what one can find while haunting the City's forgotten corners. For Vicky: an abandoned industrial complex, a still-smoking crater, a sparking device, and canisters sloshing with glowing quantum metamaterial. Despondent, she drinks. Instead of dying, she gets a protective golden aura, vibrations that crumble stone, and speed...

...Velocity, at last.

The City owes her a debt, and with a thrifted leather jacket, a bright star on her chest, and a purple theater mask, Vicky's ready to collect.

When her first act of payback rescues mob boss Leandro Caruso's moll, Lydia Greaves, from his goons, Vicky dubs herself "Tempo" and they both become marked women.

And the canisters belonged to someone: Nigerian child prodigy Dr. Chidi Babajide, who sacrificed every connection to home and family to seek his fortune in America, was presiding over his quantum-communication demonstration when catastrophe scattered his molecules. He's reconstituted as an "axiomancer." His mind is fracturing under infinite possibility. Worse, some of his essence was in the fluid now coursing through Tempo. The only way to fill the hole it left and quiet her intrusive quantum "echoes"? Drain her dry.

As the two women flee their relentless pursuers, Tempo's most dangerous decision becomes what to run toward: Payback? Or connection?

Uptempo (approx. 80,000 words) is Book One of the Axiomancy Movement. Written by a psychologist who studied childhood blinding disorders, it honors patients who thrived despite their grim diagnoses: the ones who were, unironically, the most seen.

The author will be dedicating all royalties to his local food pantry in Dedham, Massachusetts.

A Ph.D. in experimental psychology, Jim Akula spent decades studying blinding disorders of childhood, first as a student and eventually running his own laboratory, before leaving academia. He has authored more than 50 scientific articles and textbook chapters, and untold grant proposals (some of them successful). When he left the ivory tower, he had one firm resolution: No more of those.

Yet a long-ago but never-forgotten immersion in role-playing games, especially the superhero RPG Champions, convinced him that the creativity required for world-building must still be in there somewhere, perhaps seasoned by the lessons learned from working with children facing devastating diagnoses, and the families who rallied around them. The mixture of science, wonder, loss, and resilience forms the foundation of every story he tells.

He lives in Dedham, Massachusetts, with his wife, daughter, and son. And a dog, a cat, a hedgehog, and a turtle.