In my novel Not Like Us, to be released later this year, one of the key secondary players is Yitzak Goren. He is a leader of the Lazarite resistance, working to bring down the overbearing socialist government (“Solity”) of Verdant Prime.
Modeled after Einstein, Yitzak is a brilliant man, a highly intelligent visionary who has come to realize in his long life that he will never find his intellectual equal. He is 74 Verdant years old, the equivalent of 62 Earth years, with simultaneous doctorates in psychology, physics, engineering, and art completed at age 19. He sees connections across dissimilar fields, often recognizing linkages that most people have never seen.
“Have you ever thought about the ocean, Jake?”
Not Like Us, Doc Honour 2022
The shift in topic caught him by surprise. “Uh … sometimes?”
“The ocean touches every shore on Verdant. Waves happen because of wind and earthquakes and random motion. And those waves caress every shore.”
Confused, Jake looked at Zofia. She had finished tapping menu buttons and was listening, enthralled. He turned back to Yitzak. “Yes, that’s true.”
“When a large fish—say, one of the dangerous tsiftim of the northern seas—swings its tail to swim, its motion makes a wave that eventually washes up on the white shores of Timpi, right?”
“I guess so. But it wouldn’t be very large by then.”
“Large or not, the point is that the ocean is completely interconnected. And so is humanity.”
In Verdant Prime, children are taken from their parents at age 6 and have no relationship with them afterwards. Yitzak was recognized and removed at age 4. The age difference with his classmates, coupled with his unusual intelligence, led to his being bullied for months by an older boy. He solved the problem when only six, by setting a deadfall trap that broke Gamast’s arm and leg. The well-laid, violent solution earned Gamast’s respect, and the two became friends for life.
Yitzak has largely lived a lonely but fulfilling life. It was not without love; in his twenties, he had a fraternization-authorized affair at age 24 with Daiyu, another researcher in psychology. Despite Solity restrictions and monitoring, their affair was fully sexual. It lasted a full year, but gradually died away as it became clear that, intelligent as she was, she couldn’t keep up with him. They are also still friends, and occasionally get together.
Yitzak has a wealth of friends, none of whom understand him. He uses his knowledge of psychology to be with people in positive ways, to affirm people. Very few even try to compete with him, so they respect him instead. Sadly, he lost many of those friends when he started doing General Defense research.
His research, prior to Defense, was internationally known in three widely disparate fields.
- His primary work showed how to interpret mind waves using particle physics, a wonderful combination of his knowledge in psychology and physics. He astonished people by using his equipment to gain a scary “prescience” of what they were thinking.
- He created a completely new form of computer art with what he called “broad brushes” linked to music, then “frozen” into active displays. His artwork hangs on a wall but gives an amazing immersive experience.
- In electrical engineering, he crafted particle generators and particle readers of such a small size as to use in a normal lab. As a side benefit, this development increased the available bandwidth for ansible communications by a factor of ten, and is used on all three remaining human worlds.
Unfortunately, his prominence in “mind reading” led to Director Berndt Denmark drafting him into General Defense late in life. The Director tasked him to extend his technology into “mind control.” Ostensibly, the new technology would be used as a weapon on enemy soldiers, but Yitzak saw through the ruse and realized they would also use it on the people of Verdant Prime. He would have refused, but in Prime, one cannot turn down an Assignment. The socialist Solity insists that it knows more about what is good for a person than does that person.
It is Yitzak’s dissatisfaction with his situation that led to his finding and joining the Resistance. His mind wave technology is key to the entire story of Not Like Us.
Doc Honour
June 2022
Doc Honour Books 