Late Summer 2015, Palo Alto, California

I was born in 2190, and I have no idea how I got here or now or whatever this is.His words echoing in the seemingly endless hallway, just like in his father’s lab, only moments before.

A group of physicists and two security guards were standing around this twelve-year-old boy, his eyes darting wildly around the room, strange outfit emitting an odd glow, pants and shirt made of a material none recognized. His hyperventilating was amplified by the incredibly long building.

With Dr. Mendes, the senior scientist, off on a holiday, Ren Summerville was acting lab chief. He shook his curly brown hair, badly misarranged, like a young Albert Einstein, and he frankly didnt know what to do. He didnt know what was more difficult to believe, that the boy suddenly showed up in the middle of an experiment in the very secure Stanford Linear Accelerator, or that he just happened to drop in from almost two hundred years in the future.

However, the boy was starting to panic, and Rens first duty was to calm him down before trying Mimis cell, which she may or may not answer, her golf weekends almost a religion with her. He introduced himself and said there was a quiet lounge with a couch and a snack machine where the boy could rest and they could talk. He took the boy’s hand gently, and slowly led him down the long hall.


Chapter 1


Phil Radovich had a boarding pass, a boring past and a bag packed for the next phase of his life, not realizing that a course correction in life is less a simple change in direction than an emersion into a new, complex web with unknowable connections and uncountable blind alleys. His first twenty-eight years were spent between Dover Delaware and New York City, with a few excursions to Atlantic City and one weekend at Cape Cod. He was about to get on a plane and put all that behind him. His final destination would be someplace exotic, like Istanbul, Rome or Athens, but in the short term, hed always wanted to see California, so he was headed to San Francisco, a city romanticized by many easterners.

It was doubtful that anyone in the airport, anyone who bumped into him or interacted with him would have remembered him a few minutes later. In fact most people who met him would describe him as a nice looking young man, not handsome, rugged, sexy or anything like that, simply a nice looking young man, with his average height and weight, light brown hair, combed with a neat part, light brown eyes and average features. In fact, Phil would probably find himself at the crest of almost any bell curve, physically, mentally and emotionally, average and almost painfully so.

After high school in Dover, Phil spent three years working in his fathers store while trying to decide what to do with his life. Wanting more, he entered the university and got a degree in accounting. Then he found a job in a small company in Brooklyn, New York. Within a year, he moved up from accountant to financial manager, which meant, in such a small company, that he was now the number one person in a two person office. There was nowhere else to go,