Jarrod Conrad was raised in a household dedicated to academic achievement. His father, Richard, was a math teacher at a community college, and although brilliant, he lacked the ambition to teach at the university level, content with schooling students not quite capable of a more rigorous curriculum. His mother, Gemma, was also a teacher and more devoted to the discipline and success of her students than she was of her own son. The relationship between Jarrod and his mother was anything but typical. The only thing that mattered to Gemma was that Jarrod was smarter and better than her sister’s son, Ryan- which was true from the time the cousins were born.
Jarrod basically raised himself, detached from his parents and with very little supervision. He had no academic peers, and believed the world was his for the taking. Never lacking in confidence, he discovered early that he could use his superior intellect to bend people to his will.
Jarrod was the spitting image of his father. He had the same wispy blond hair, gray eyes, and lanky build that made them look nerdy. Jarrod, however, inherited oversized hands and feet from his mother’s family, which made him look rather misshapen. He was not plain-looking, but neither was he handsome; really the only thing ordinary about Jarrod was his looks. He also developed the characteristics and beliefs of his father, including a more liberal philosophy, which irritated Gemma, who was decidedly more conservative. This divergent ideology was a source of continual friction in the Conrad household.
Through his formative years, much of the trouble Jarrod instigated was due to his parents’ inability to restrain his naturally malevolent temperament. It became very uncomfortable to cross him, and because he was extraordinarily brilliant, they mostly ignored his behavior and left him alone. In nearly all regards, Jarrod was head of the family, and his parents catered to his every whim.
Jarrod became a brilliant physicist who inherited his grandfather’s inquisitive nature and thirst for knowledge. But where Amerigo Metatucci only tinkered with ordinary labor-saving devices after his early success at Ford, Jarrod aspired to much loftier goals. His burning desire was to unlock the intricacies of gravity in the universe-a solution which the likes of Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking had simply given up on. He knew the answer was attainable; it was simply a matter of rearranging the four fundamental laws in a way that had never before been done.
Utilizing his brilliant aptitude for quantum physics, Jarrod became obsessed with finding the solution to the super unified theorem. To succeed, he would need heretofore unresolved mathematical equations to bring gravity-the fourth fundamental law of the universe-into alignment with the other three forces. Gravity was considered the weakest of the fundamental forces, but it also exhibited the most far-reaching influence in the universe. It had eluded even the renowned theoretical mathematician Albert Einstein, who offhandedly dismissed the SUT as “unavailable to discovery” because gravity would not yield its secrets. Resolving this daunting enigma was the challenge of Jarrod’s professional life.
It was Jarrod’s personal belief that the elusive gravitron was the secret to solving the mystery of gravity. Astrophysicists held to the common understanding that every particle in the universe could be traced to a moment before the Big Bang, a point in time when all energy in the universe was combined. This meant that each of the four fundamental forces existed in homeostasis before the Big Bang. Gravity was in harmony with the remaining three forces-electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces-and each force was indistinguishable from the others. Scientists hypothesized that this pure energy state would resemble a dense black hole with infinite gravity-one-hundred percent potential energy. Mystics called this: God Consciousness.
Jarrod coined the term gravitron to define the subatomic unit that comprised gravity, much like electrons and neutrons were the subatomic components of electromagnetism and atomic energy. By identifying gravity’s subatomic particles, it could be quantified and harnessed, just as electricity and nuclear energy had beforehand been quantified. If the gravitron could be harnessed, the SUT could finally be resolved.
Largely through Einstein and Enrico Fermi’s work on quantum theory, the unified theorem dramatically advanced when the strong and weak nuclear forces were united with electromagnetism. Mathematicians revere Einstein’s brilliant equations for the strong and weak nuclear force-the first two fundamental forces-which led Robert Oppenheimer to develop the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. By theoretically splitting the atom in his landmark treatise, E=mc2, Einstein showed that massive (but quantifiable) amounts of energy exist within all atoms in the universe.
But Einstein’s theories came decades after British physicist Michael Faraday first made his revolutionary discoveries in electromagnetism. Faraday’s greatest breakthrough was unquestionably his invention of the electric motor. He invented two devices that produced what he called electromagnetic rotation. Ten years later, in 1831, Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction. These experiments formed the basis of modern electromagnetic technology.
Building on Faraday’s discoveries, Thomas Edison applied electromagnetic induction to tightly wound copper wire within a magnetic field to generate an electric current. With electrical conductors, he generated alternating current, which he used for the first incandescent electric light. All of these advances in energy led Einstein to reconcile the strong and weak nuclear forces with the electromagnetic force. It was the culmination of a long journey that began when Ben Franklin flew a kite in a Philadelphia thunderstorm.
Jarrod became fascinated with energy flow in his high school physics class, and decided to resolve the fourth and most elusive of the fundamental forces. He had finally found something worthy of his intellect, something he believed that he alone could solve. His obsession to resolve the fourth law launched him on a journey that would dominate his life’s work.
As a young boy, Jarrod had often dabbled with physical phenomena, enthralled by how the universe operated. He learned that a magnet could be fashioned by wrapping iron pipe with copper wire and introducing electric current-the steel rod became a polarized magnet. Fascinated by the opposing magnetic poles, he split the magnet and discovered that each resulting half retained the characteristic North and South poles. He pondered the logical conclusion of this theoretical exercise; halved enough times, the magnet would be reduced to atoms. Did the atoms themselves then become polarized? Did the subatomic particles of neutrinos and pisons also exhibit polarity? Or were there separate magnetrons that governed this fundamental behavior? He won his first science fair in fifth grade, posing these profound but unresolved questions.
Building on this logic, Jarrod reasoned that there must be a fundamental unit of magnetism. He figured it was immaterial that the magnetron- the definition he coined for whatever force was emitting the magnetic field- was undetectable; its influence was nonetheless unmistakable. Instead, he relied on the incontrovertible fact that magnets worked without fail, and creating them could be repeatedly duplicated. It seemed to him, then, that the same must hold true of gravity. Harnessing gravity became an all-consuming passion and occupied a majority of his thinking.
Jarrod attended UCLA, where he earned a Ph. D. in astrophysics and met his mentor, Dr. Ron Bruckner. It was Bruckner who influenced Jarrod’s life more than any other before him. His recognized Jarrod’s tremendous potential, but also tamed his unruly, undisciplined manner. He challenged his gifted graduate student like never before, and taught him how to conduct research that would deliver measurable results. Jarrod’s unbecoming superiority never abated, but his mind grew capable of solving problems of incredible difficulty. No longer did he waste his time on foolish, irrelevant pastimes.
Under Dr. Bruckner’s close supervision, Jarrod developed the first theoretical construct for defining the gravitron and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject. As the four fundamental forces were somehow inextricably linked prior to the Big Bang, Jarrod spent his time searching for how the other three forces could influence gravity, rather than vice-versa. He became convinced that the universe consisted of a vast, but finite, number of gravitrons- undiscovered bundles of energy similar to electrons, neutrons, and magnetrons. But he continued to believe that isolating the gravitron was immaterial, thinking it more important to control gravity, akin to controlling magnetism.
It was this pursuit that led him to the Stanford Research Institute after graduation from UCLA. He believed that with financing from SRI and the research principles he learned from Dr. Bruckner, the secret to harnessing gravity would soon be uncovered.
Jarrod began work at Quantum Dimensions in Stanford and embarked on an ambitious plan to build a machine that could control gravity. By harnessing the undetectable gravitron, Jarrod believed he could levitate an object by lessening gravity’s influence or magnify gravity, making an object heavier than normal.
To achieve these results, he placed a small amount of medical-grade uranium into a magnetic field and applied an electromotive force. Just as copper wire generated electrons when spun inside a magnetic field, Jarrod
