Excerpt
There is a single moment set aside for every individual that can dictate the course of your life for all eternity. A moment when you find yourself sitting across the table from Death, and suddenly realize that it isn’t Death that has come for you; but God - himself. A moment when you realize that he has placed the book of your life before you, and is offering you a choice. To accept your life as it is written; or go forth and write your own story. For most - it’s a moment that comes and goes as easily as breath. And one just as carelessly ignored.

But I remember. Eighth grade - fifteen years old.

To say that I was the average guy would’ve seemed like an upgrade to me. I was tall, skinny - hell, rail thin would’ve been more appropriate, and I had a case of acne that would’ve made any pothole proud. I was an ok student, nothing to write Harvard about, but ok. My life wasn’t bad, it wasn’t great, but I couldn’t complain. I guess……ordinary would’ve been the best way to describe me: just the average black kid, in an average world, on an average day. A day like any other day.

It was fourth period, algebra, and Mr. Anderson was trudging along like usual. I actually liked Mr. Anderson: he was kind of cool - for a teacher. But I wasn’t paying any attention. I’d like to say that I was busy trying to pass a note to the sweet little cutie in front of me, but I’d be lying. My mind was filled with the memory of a strange dream that I’d had the night before. It seemed so vivid and clear, in my mind, but when I tried to concentrate on it - it just faded away. More precisely, it faded into an episode of Stargate: SG 1. That episode where Daniel was talking to the leader of the Tolans and he was trying to explain, to Daniel, how to bring objects closer together. He used a stick as an example, and Daniel immediately jumped to the obvious conclusion of folding space. The Tolan said that Daniel was wrong, that he didn’t understand; but in a moment of perfect clarity - I did. And by the end of the period, I had filled my entire notebook with a mathematical equation that could shatter the foundation of physics forever. It was the first time that it happened, but it wasn’t the last. They just kept coming. And the more they came, the more this Science Fiction, Comic Book Reading, Geek loved it.

I made my first T.A.R.D.I.S (time and relative dimensions in space - machine) a full two months after the first equation. It wasn’t hard. Most scientist are so intent on looking for something grand and overwhelming - that they look right over the obvious. You don’t have to master Time to traverse dimension; it’s all about the containment. The truth is, we create dimensional rifts every single day. The trick is to contain the rift and keep it open. And once you understand that there’s no such thing as a solid object - it’s all down hill from there.
By the time I was sixteen, I could pretty much do anything that I wanted. And trust me, you tend to lose all of your fears when you’ve mastered regeneration and cellular manipulation.
I guess I was midway through my Freshman year when I began using the T.A.R.D.I.S as a training room. It was an obvious transition. Every time I entered the T.A.R.D.I.S, I stepped outside of time and space - essentially freezing my own timeline and becoming immortal - and could live for millions of years within a single hour. Of course, being the average teenage male, I realized that I could also use this time to work on my physical attributes as well. That’s when the Gravity Well came into play. By slowly raising the gravity within the T.A.R.D.I.S - the simple act of walking was a challenge, and my efforts to become the next Bruce Lee/Greatest MMA Fighter, ever, paid off with instant results when I returned to my true reality.

It was the perfect life - everything that I ever wanted right at my fingertips. But I got careless. I reached for to much, at one time, and it cost me everything.
There’s a saying in the Bible that goes “ What good does it do for a man to gain the whole world; if it costs him his soul?” - I know now, that he was talking to me.
It seemed so innocent. So harmless. Nothing any different from what I had done a hundred times before. I closed the door to the T.A.R.D.I.S and activated the Gravity Well. But this time, I had introduced a simple computer program to create a virtual image of the world around me. This time, I would live a million years of human evolution and technological development. But it didn’t work out like that. Somehow the program became corrupted by the increasing gravity - essentially intertwining the inner dimensions of the T.A.R.D.I.S with the truth of my own reality, and what was meant to be a million years; became ten billion before I was aware of what had occurred.

Four hours, twenty-six minutes, and fourteen seconds - that’s how long I was in there before the “Automatic Ejection” alert notified me that the containment field was buckling from the weight of the gravity. I barely made it out alive. From start to finish the collapse had taken less than thirty seconds under a gravitational implosion the equivalent of a super massive black hole. The actual explosion happened on a microscopic level, a failsafe that I built into the T.A.R.D.I.S, but it leveled nearly thirty acres of my Father’s property and ended my life, as I had known it, forever.

It took five minutes for the Sheriff’s Dept. to arrive and twenty before the reporters showed up. Within forty-five, the Military was clearing everyone from the area. Ten minutes later - they arrived: all dressed in black.

I watched from the treetops, hidden from their view, as they interrogated my family to the point of torture. Everything, everything inside of me, wanted to kill them; told me that it would be ok; that God would understand why. But I couldn’t. I knew who they were, what they were, so I couldn’t do anything. Not if my family was to survive - if the world was to survive.
It was a cruel decision, but it was far easier for my family to explain that I had built a small cabin in the woods, where I worked out, and that there had been some kind of explosion; than to have them endure what these bastards were capable of placing upon them. To think that I had died in the explosion; than to deal with what would come if they knew I was alive.

I couldn’t stay. Not after that. Not in North Carolina. Not only because of what had happened, but because things had changed now. I had changed. You don’t live through ten billion years of human evolution and not be changed. I had seen atrocities, witnessed wonders of technology and spirituality, and had evolved beyond the wildest expectations of Man’s greatest dreams. I had to go, to hide, but I couldn’t leave things the way they were - not like this.

It was a trivial thing. I stole six bags of coal from a railway. The right amount of pressure, the right amount of heat, and inducing the molecular process - would guarantee me six bags of the most perfect diamonds on the planet.
It was easy to find a fence and a lawyer, slightly more complicated when they tried to kill me, but eventually we came to a ….”mutual”….. agreement that gave them eight billion dollars in diamonds while I walked away with five billion in cash. After that, it was only a matter of hacking the proper systems and falsifying some information.
My Father had served in the Army, Korea to be precise, so it was simple to create a fake person who felt that they owed him a debt of gratitude for saving their life. Of course this fake person, my Father didn’t have many fond memories of Korea so he wouldn’t remember him anyway, had recently died a very rich man and had left my Father a substantial fortune. Find a sleazy lawyer willing to look the other way, for a small fee, and two months after my death - my parents were three billion dollars richer.
It seemed like a fair trade, but sometimes - I wonder if my mother would see it that way, if she would actually take three billion dollars for the life of her child, but I already know the answer.

Two days later, I had that same sleazy lawyer make some arrangements for me, and I step off the plane at JFK. Hell, after all, if you really want to hide from the world, New York is the place to do it.
Three years later, I graduated from NYU. A year after that, I got my Private Investigator license. Twenty million dollars got me a sweet condo downtown, a Bentley coupe, and a Lincoln Navigator.
I don’t have an office, cases, or clients. I don’t work with others and I don’t charge a fee. I’m a hunter. A hunter of lost souls. Little souls. Children to be precise. Let the grown folks take care of themselves. Let them gripe and complain over their own choices. Free will is their right of birth, after all. But the children, they’re innocent. They have no concept of free will; they know only trust. And that trust - can be abusive. And this world, this paradise that we were given, is filled with far more darkness than the Light of Heaven could ever imagine.

My given name is Aaron Darcell Rouwer. I am twenty-seven/ten billion years old. I’m a Private Investigator. A hunter. A finder of Lost Souls. I know what’s out there. I know - because I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. They call me Mathuzalem. But you, you can call me……Thu.