Altimexis

Born with hereditary spastic paraparesis, Simon had spent most of his life in a wheelchair, unable to walk and barely able to use his hands. To his parents, home schooling had seemed to be the only way for Simon to get an education; yet Simon was smart and yearned to be another Stephen Hawking - not to live with his parents until they became to infirm to care for him. He decided to take a chance on applying to the Bronx High School of Science, one of the best public secondary schools in the world. Going to a public high school would be scary, but there'd be new opportunities to live life, and to love.

Was this kid for real? I mean, I got that he wanted to make friends and that he’d been sheltered all his life, but what kid in their right mind would actually want to go to a public middle school? A kid with a disability, no less. Didn’t he realize he was in for a world of hurt? Well, actually, no he wasn’t real, although the story was based on the real-life experiences of Paralympic athlete Josh Sundquist, and the book he wrote, Just Don’t Fall. I was watching a new family-oriented sitcom

For those who are interested, the May 2022 issue of Scientific American has a cover story titled: The Key to Quantum Computing. The above link will take you to the Scientific American site, where you can read the story if you have a subscription, or purchase the issue if you don't. If you happen to have Applazon… oops… Apple News+, you can read the issue here. Although the article is primarily about the physical barriers to quantum computing and methods of error correction, it provides an excellent overview of quantum computing using conventional superconducting metals. This is right up J.J.'s alley! Too bad the author of this article doesn't know about J.J.'s discovery of room-temperature superconducting ceramics in the BBB parallel universe.

As has been pointed out to me, the depiction of the terrorist attack on the Sky Bridge in Asimov's Foundation series occurred only in the Apple TV serialization of the story and not in Asimov's writing. That's what I get for using the Hollywood version before actually reading or rereading a book I started to read in my youth, but never finished. I've started reading the Foundation series again and have run into the same problem I did as a kid - it's rather tedious reading, made worse now by numerous concepts that are seriously dated. I understand from the reviews that the writing improves in the subsequent books in the series, but it's turning out to be a bit of a struggle to get through the first one. His later writing was so much better. Jules Verne's writing was significantly better and more prescient, and that was from the nineteenth century! In any case, I've corrected this chapter to reflect that the catastrophic failure of a space whether occurred in the Applazon depiction of Asimov's series and not in the original writing.

To wrap up the discussion on a more positive note, now that the series is fully posted, it's interesting that the identity of the saboteur was never revealed. I think the key bit of information was when Marjorie Shapiro suggested that moneyed interests would stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. Although I didn't explore it any further, I think that it was someone in the fossil fuel industry who felt threatened by the new technology. Thanks to Jeff's huge deep pockets and widespread international public support, the field grew exponentially into something that was much more than any one individual, making sabotage useless as a strategy for delaying the inevitable. That said, in the end J.J. and Henry will play a significant role in the future development of technology and this will spill over into the political arena in a big way. It's not inconceivable that J.J. will come face to face with the man (doubtfully a woman) who ordered the slashing of his tires - not that he'd necessarily know it at the time - but the interaction could be quite interesting.

Wow! As you said, I can't fathom why you read so much of a story you obviously hated. I'll be the first to admit that my writing isn't to everyone's taste. I'll also note that you aren't the first to comment on the level of detail or the advanced nature of the presentation, or to suggest that I'm showing off. Believe me, if I wanted to show off, it wouldn't be in a story written for GA. My stories are character-driven and the advanced content is from J.J.'s way of compartmentalizing things and sequestering his history of abuse from his consciousness. This sort of thing is typical of people who are abused, and in J.J.'s case, it's because of his brilliance that he compensates by going into excessive detail about everything else. That's why he' told us all about the hikes he took with Henry, for example, but discussed his PTSD with great reluctance and even hallucinated when trying to do so. I'm sorry if you found it boring, but it's really typical of people in J.J.'s situation. That said, I admit to going to great lengths to do background research on my stories and to ensure that they're accurate. Nothing detracts more from a story IMO than when there are inconsistencies, yet the vast majority of stories you'll read on his site are full of them. Perhaps I'm unique in noticing when there are discrepancies, but believe me, if I ever make a mistake, my readers let me know. 8-Track tapes? Really? There were many reasons why they went out of favor, the size and lack of ability to rewind them being two of the major ones, but playing a tape by pulling on it is a bit like unplugging an appliance by tugging on the cord - sooner or later, something's going to break. If you ever owned an 8-Track player and had a favorite tape, then you know what happens to 8-Track tapes when played more than a few times. Now as to how many genius kids a genius kid can meet by happenstance, you'd be surprised. Bright kids tend to do things that other bright kids like to do. For what it's worth, there are just as many bright kids out there as stupid kids - they just tend to keep a low profile. In the case of the Gonzales family, Jerry Gonzales was not only an Air Force Academy graduate, but he went on to become one of the commanders of SratCom, having charge over America's nuclear arsenal. Military leaders aren't always known for their brilliance, but you don't get to a position of that significance without being at the high end of the bell-shaped curve. It's not much of a stretch to think that one of his kids would be a genius. Please don't shoot yourself. My stories aren't worth it. Actually, I did know a genius kids who killed himself over a girl. What a waste. -A.

“I’ve read your latest book, and I’m intrigued by the concept that we’re entering a post-employment era. I’m still not sure I understand how your ideas can be used to create a stable society in which work isn’t the basis for remuneration,” the Vice President-elect continued as we sat together in the library in Jitendra’s house. “The sole basis,” I corrected him. “The idea of the job is central to the functioning of our society and the origin of money predates recorded history by thousands o

Thank you for reading the Brilliant Boy Billionaire and sticking with a posting schedule of nearly a year. This is the longest novel I’ve written by far, clocking in at just under a half-million words. J.J. and Henry aren’t the first boy geniuses I’ve portrayed in my stories, nor are they the smartest. My interest in the balance between the development of intellectual and social skills in exceptional youth is very personal, not that I’m anywhere close to being in J.J.’s league. I grew up in a ve

As per the introduction, this is a very long story. More importantly, it’s character driven, so all that detail is from the way the main character thinks. That said, very little of those details are wasted. Seemingly trivial stuff will have a way of showing up again. All of Adam’s belongings will resurface, years later, in a way that’s currently unforeseen.

The funeral was held on Saturday, and it was certainly well-attended, as might be expected for one of the richest people in the world. The Vice President-elect and his husband were even in attendance. Jitendra had been an agnostic, just as I was, and so one might have expected the service to be a cross between ecumenical and secular. Because his children were raised in the Jewish faith of their mother and Jews consider cremation to be a kind of desecration of the dead, cremation wasn’t permitted

No doubt, escape to Canada would be a knee-jerk reaction with the potential for disastrous consequences. Certainly, Shawn and his husband would advise against it, but in a misguided attempt to minimize risk, JJ and Henry won’t even discuss it with them. How foolish. Although the most obvious way to protect the children would be with professional security services, but that won’t even be discussed. It seems that JJ didn’t learn his lesson when he himself was kidnapped. He was scarcely older than Trina at the time. It seems to me the State Department could be of enormous help in dealing with something like this. Hmm…

“Shaun!” I exclaimed as I opened the door to see my long-lost ex-boyfriend. He was older now, as was I, but he looked so much as he did when I knew him that it was as if no time had passed at all. His features were a bit more rugged now, and his hair had darkened, almost to the point of being what I’d call an ebony brown. At first, I wondered if perhaps he’d colored it, but then I remembered the unique way his hair lightened almost to a blond in the summer but was a dark brown the rest of the ye

There’s a great lead editorial in today’s NY Times about the loss of free speech in America. Actually, it’s more about free expression and, yes, there is a difference. The bottom line is that between so-called cancel culture and outright censorship, people feel less free to speak their minds. What the editorial fails to note is that the Times itself is partly responsible, not by stifling free expression, but by the nature of what it prints. So anyway, your point’s well taken. i don’t think America is unique with regard to a judge calling a recess when notified of a family emergency. Obviously there are limits, but a short recess to deal with an urgent matter is an uncommon but not rare occurrence. Thanks for the feedback.

It felt like my head had barely hit the pillow when Alesia started ranting from a display on the night table, ‘Three unknown individuals are at the main gait.’ Noticing that the time on the display was only 7:38 AM, I said aloud, “What the fuck is someone doing at the main gait at 7:40 in the fuckin’ morning?” The sound of a laugh from the doorway alerted me that Randy had been awakened, too. Our son was staying in the adjacent bedroom, one of three guest bedrooms on the upper level in the

We arrived at the gate in Seattle a bit earlier than expected and had the unusual experience of arriving at an earlier time than we left thanks to the change in time zones. Grabbing our luggage from the carousel, we headed out the door and across the arrivals zone to rental pickup, where our Audi Q7 was waiting, fully charged. Using my phone, I located the space where it was parked, unlocked it and signed the rental agreement. Ordinarily, we’d have rented something smaller, nimbler and less extr

But that isn't what happened in BBB at all. Most of the events in BBB are covered in detail with the exception of chapter 36, Recovery, which covers nearly two years of J.J.'s life, during the time in which he travels all over the world, upgrading servers during the pandemic. That was also the chapter in which J.J. makes a scientific breakthrough in discovering the mechanism underlying superconducting ceramics - a breakthrough for which he will receive his first Nobel prize, as we'll soon find out. The decision to cover two years via an overview in a single chapter was an easy one. Although some might have found the detail in earlier and later chapters, particularly during his roadtrips, to have been tedious, those were times of great discovery for J.J., and this is very much J.J.'s story. The years of globetrotting were a whirlwind for J.J. in which one country blended into another and one hookup into another. For a fifteen-year-old boy, it was all overwhelming. Chapter 79, however, doesn't cover thirteen years in only one chapter - it skips thirteen years, which is an important distinction. I can think of several stories and books I've read over the years which do exactly the same thing. In some cases, the skip occurs at the beginning, with the first chapter serving as a kind of prelude. In others, there are multiple skips separating the different key phases of the protagonist's life. In the case of BBB, I'd originally planned to end the story with Chapter 78, but the story didn't feel complete. There were many loose threads, not the least of which was Shaun's story. Shaun figures prominently in the final four chapters. Also, now that J.J.'s seen the rot beneath the corporate mask of Applazon, I wanted to show a bit about what happened to the company and that J.J.'s relationship with Jeff remained cordial. Finally, I wanted to provide a peak into J.J.'s and Henry's roles as adoptive parents. There are other threads that were left incomplete, perhaps for a sequel down the road. I'd have liked to have gone a bit more into Franklin's life, for example, and the introduction of the lesbian couple and their two sons in North Dakota was supposed to lead to another recurring thread that never materialized - there just wasn't time. Regarding James Buchanan, that he may have been gay is pure conjecture. He was in fact our only bachelor president, but the fact that he wore tights in an era when that was still common for men and that he shared a bed with another man is hardly evidence. Male roommates almost always shared a bed in the nineteenth century, as twin beds were uncommon and guest rooms were found only in the mansions of the truly wealthy. However, Buchanan's presidency was overshadowed by the events leading up to the Civil War. Pro-slavery and a fervent believer in states' rights, he's considered by some to have been America's worst president. Personally, I think that Andrew Jackson, the man on the $20 bill, did far worse. Not only was he pro-slavery, but believing that America's central bank gave the Federal government too much power over the states, he dismantled it. That act, along with his attempts at 'compromise', did far more to amplify the differences between North and South than anything Buchanan ever did. But then as long as we're talking about demagogue's who fomented insurrection - there's Donald Trump.

Talk about memories! For me, Junior High was grades 7-9 and Senior High, grades 10-12. The first day of sophomore accelerated chemistry, in 1971, we were told to go out and buy a slide rule if we didn't already have one. My dad gave me his from college - a 6-inch aluminum pocket model in a leather case. I used that trusty slide rule all through high school, and up until my first exam in college. One test in which I tried using a slide rule and I went out and bought a calculator - an HP45 that cost $400. In 1991, when I was in my first job at the National Institutes of Health, the director of the NIH visitor center put out a request for slide rules for an exhibit. When I showed her my dad's old slide rule, she told me it was a rare find and thanked me profusely. So the trusty slide rule that got my dad through college and me through high school had become a museum piece.

College algebra? They teach algebra in college? Isn't algebra something kids take in middle school? Sorry - J.J. got control of my keyboard for a moment there. Not everyone is cut out for higher math. Seriously, however, I took algebra in 8th grade and a lot STEM students enter college with two years of AP calculus under the belts, and yet they're still behind their counterparts in countries like Germany and Japan. Doing anything technical these days requires some pretty advanced math skills, and even running a business involves some basic skills in calculus, and not just in the metaphorical sense. That said, even a high school dropout should be able to estimate what they'll have to pay at checkout, know when they're being ripped off or apply basic logic to realize that a post on Instagram is total B.S. But I digress… The math and science in BBB may be over most of the readers' heads, but the story is told from J.J.'s viewpoint and he's just not capable of expressing himself any other way. As the author, I've made every effort to tell the story from the realm of J.J.'s genius, but yet to make everything relatable, even if the specifics aren't understandable to all by a few. For those who are curious, a lot of the theory behind room-temperature superconducting ceramics and everything that stems from their discovery is conjecture, but all of it is plausible. I read some papers on the subject, but the math was way beyond anything I could understand, even with all the graduate math, science and engineering courses I took in college. People who do that kind of research aren't capable of talking in mere English. Anyway, thanks for all of your comments and criticisms. A.

The call came in the early evening not long after Henry and I had arrived at home. Randy was working out in the home gym, Jake and Clark were watching a movie or maybe a TV program in the home theater and Terrence, as per his texts, was out with friends. With four boys in the house, two of them in their teens and two who acted as if they were in their teens, I sometimes wondered if Nithya and Jack had had the right idea when they moved into a large brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. However, we lov

To put the timeline of BBB into perspective, JJ returned to Omaha, after upgrading servers all over the world, in March of 2022, so he’d have returned home, just as the war in Ukraine was underway. I could’ve never predicted it and so the war in Ukraine won’t be part of BBB. The interesting thing is that I wrote of JJ’s abduction by the Russians and even of the demand for NATO withdrawal from Eastern Europe long before Putin demanded as much, and then invaded Ukraine. My writing turned out to be amazingly prescient. i stand by my assessment of the tech sector and when we return to the story this Saturday, we’ll see JJ and Henry some thirteen years hence. The major tech companies will have been broken up and the players will be jockeying to re-amass their power. Getting back to Ukraine, however, the Ukrainians are willing to fight to the last man for freedoms they’ve only recently acquired. That’s what Putin truly fears - the corrosive effect that Western democratic reforms could have on Russia itself. He yearns to restore the old Soviet Union or even Imperial Russia, in effect setting it up for the very same conditions that led to its collapse at the end of the Cold War, or even the Bolshevik revolution itself. Putin has won the hearts and souls of half the Russian population, much as Trump has in the US, but he seems oblivious to the wants and needs of the young urban professionals who’ve never known a world without Western goods. This cannot end well. As Thomas Friedman said in his column in The NY Times, the only thing more dangerous than a strong Russia is a weak Russia. Clearly, the Russian military is no match for NATO, but the fact that the Russians would indiscriminately shell the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, even if it was pure recklessness, illustrates what we are up against. Russian military doctrine includes a strategy known as escalate to de-escalate. It involves the first use of tactical nukes to force their enemies to back down. They believe the West has no stomach for nuclear war and will capitulate rather than risking a global nuclear conflict. They couldn’t be more wrong. To be fair, tactical nukes are low-yield, battlefield weapons and although not as powerful as some conventional weapons, they leave behind a much different kind of devastation. More importantly. the nuclear nonproliferation pact obligates the US to come to the aid of any country victimized by a nuclear attack - and we made a promise to Ukraine when they gave up their Soviet-era nuclear weapons. i fear the likelihood of a greater war is far greater than not, but unlike some who say we’re already witnessing the start of WWIII and who call for a no-fly zone, I think we’re far better off giving Putin just enough rope to hang himself. He’s already shown the world how pathetic his war machine really is and so long as cooler heads in the Russian military prevent the conflict from going nuclear, Ukraine will ultimately win. Sadly, the massive carpet bombing of Ukraine will happen, with or without NATO’s intervention. The best we can do is to arm the Ukrainians and hope for the best. And let’s hope that the Russian people aren’t willing to give up their Macdonalds.

“You know, there’s a reason I’m no longer with Allied Semiconductor,” Gideon responded when I related a bit of what had happened in Michigan. Of course, I couldn’t tell them everything, but I told them enough for them to understand why I was as conflicted as I was. “I just wasn’t cut out for the corporate culture any more than you are, J.J.” We were sitting in the living room in our apartment. Henry was by my side, and our now best friends were across from us. I’d spent the night pouring ou

Without getting into the specifics, my work experience involved the National Institutes of Health, two major academic medical centers and a renowned hospital that had been bought by a for-profit organization. All of them had their own pathologies, but they shared one thing in common - dissent was always handled internally and thus the institution always spoke with only one voice. The least political place was the NIH, believe it or not. Survival, in effect, depended on being able to navigate the vagaries of the different administrations without ruffling feathers. The academic medical centers had the worst politics of all. In fact, I witnessed the firing of the CEO of one of them because he'd been too successful. How can one be too successful, one might ask? When the parent university is a small liberal arts college and the medical center grows to constitute 80% of the overall budget, it becomes a direct threat to the leadership of the university. The Medical College of Wisconsin resolved such a dilemma by divorcing from Marquette University, but my university chose to fire the CEO so as to install a leader who would recognize his subservience to the Board of Trustees. More than likely, the document J.J. refused to sign wasn't a mandate to agree with the decisions of the leadership, but an agreement not to challenge those decisions. That's an important distinction. Jeff had every right to demand that J.J. sign such an agreement, as an open challenge to his leadership could undermine the organization and cause irreparable harm. Had J.J. been a bit older and more seasoned, he might have been able to work out a compromise that specified conditions under which the company would revisit those decisions, allowing him to sign off on the internal memo. J.J.'s outright refusal to sign would have been considered grounds for termination in any corporation, and not just in fiction. I promised a look beneath the mask and that it wouldn't be pretty. Now as to the patents, there's a pretty standard arrangement in both academia and in the corporate world that all work done while working for the company is the property of the company. Some corporations even go so far as to specify that they own the rights to all work done, regardless of whether or not it's on company time. Yes, that's perfectly legal, and it's often done to prevent an employee from doing consulting work on the side and saving their best ideas for themselves. The rationale that the company can own all of an employee's work is that there's no way to compartmentalize your thinking and to prevent you from working on your private ideas during company time. Apple's new series, Separation, is a sci-fi thriller based on a company using brain surgery to do just that. In any case, most engineers are salaried and don't work on the clock, and any outside work must be cleared with their supervisor, if it's even allowed. Most companies do provide for sharing of royalties on patents, but it's often a token amount such as 5%, and only after all development costs and even the costs of filing the patent have been repaid. In the tech world, the shared amount can be as high as 50%, as the best people might otherwise go elsewhere. I didn't look up the actual policies for royalty sharing with Apple and Amazon, as this story is about a fictional company, but it's likely that Applazon allowed the employees to share in 50% of the profits, after paying off the development costs. Applazon would have still owned the patents, however, and you can be sure that Jeff wouldn't have sold them for anything less than what he expected to make from them. Was it irresponsible for Jef to have let J.J. and Henry go? To answer that, you'll need to read the final six chapters in the saga.

Distracted with dick? Bamboozled by balls? The reality is that few things are more of a turn-off than being naked in a room full of naked people. Being naked makes one nervous and being surrounded by nudity desensitizes one to skin. No, that’s not from personal experience, but I’ve read up on this. I used to know an administrative assistant who was a nudist. She and her husband and their two teenage sons spent their summers at a nudist camp. To me, it was the stuff of nightmares, but to her, it was perfectly natural, pun intended. Actually, I used distraction extensively in BBB to keep your focus away from where I didn’t want it to go. Remember Carl, the valet in St. Louis who’d been through so much? I never did get around to telling just what he’d been through, and that was by design. I needed you to focus on Carl so you wouldn’t realize how absurd the coincidence of running into Franklin really was. Distraction. J.J. and Henry were far more valuable to Applazon than from the media attention they brought the company. They made discoveries that were bound to earn a Nobel prize, and Applazon holds all the patents. One of their greatest discoveries of all is still to come, so why would Jeff feel compelled to give that up. Why did he appoint J.J. to a CEO position in the first place? Weren’t J.J. and Henry more valuable as senior engineers? Surely Jeff must have known that J.J. would never survive the corporate culture. All will be revealed in the next chapter, and then we’ll move on to the next phase in J.J. and Henry’s lives.

It was after seven o’clock, and the session was still going strong. Dinner wasn’t scheduled until eight o’clock, with the program continuing until 11:00 PM. I guess that was reflective of the fact that everyone else beside me was coming from the Pacific time zone. I’d long ago stopped thinking about the fact that I was naked or that everyone else around me was naked. Not even the nudity of the servers registered anymore. What was registering was my distended bladder, which was full, due to all t

I doubt that you'll ever see a nudist corporate retreat for just the reason J.J. cited - that there'd be way to much money to be made from getting pictures. Of course all of the employees at the retreat facility would have been vetted and they'd be nude too, but with the potential to make millions from a decent set of pics… The facility would go to great lengths to sweep the facility for hidden electronic devices, but with tiny cameras similar to the ones on most smartphones, and even smaller, it would be easy to sneak some in and hide them in places they'd never be found. Or someone with the skills might simply hack into the security cameras that are already bound to be there. Am I deranged to think of a nudist retreat? There was nothing sexual about it. People like President Johnson have long used the strategy in public gyms and the like, as already noted. With the popularity of corporate retreats involving extreme activities such as sky diving or wilderness camping, I could easily see a nudist corporate retreat happening, were it not for the potential of pictures leaking out. I guarantee you that things will get very interesting in the next chapter, and the end, while not a cliffhanger, will leave you with your mouth hanging open.