Dreamscapes: Shattered Realms

Adrien was sitting on one of the many work desks in his penthouse, as usual. He was on the cusp of achieving a major breakthrough in his current project. Not that his actions and demeanour gave away much of anything.

Despite the fact that he was about to achieve something truly exceptional, a once in a lifetime achievement, his face was the epitome of calm and detachment. This was just another one of the many projects he had pursued in his short life as a creator, and he would finish it like all others before it.

His slender, slightly bruised fingers continuously beating against his black mechanical keyboard. He was typing at well over four hundred words per minute. The amazing fact that the fastest recorded speed was three hundred and five went to show what a feat he displayed.

On his screen was a 3D image of an air particle, viewed in x300 zoom. The theory of Relativity, put forward be Einstein in the twentieth century, encompassed both special and general relativity. Special Relativity introduced the idea that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers and that the speed of light is constant, leading to phenomena like time dilation and length contraction.

General Relativity extended these concepts to include gravity, describing it as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, which explains the motion of planets and the bending of light around massive objects. Together, these theories provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the universe at both cosmic and subatomic scales.

Adrien intended to use these concepts to achieve a goal he had failed in all his previous projects. He was known as a genius inventor by many, responsible for the current state of earth. In regard to biological, technological and general advancement. However, all those were results of a failed, singular goal.

He was currently fifteen years old, and Mel, his aunt was his current guardian and has been for the past five or so years. His parents had both been victims of a deadly chronic lung cancer. It was unfortunate how their ailment had been diagnosed late.

After spending their family's fortune searching for treatment from numerous accomplished doctors, they were told there was nothing that could be done. Adrien was nine years old at the time, he was a well-known prodigy, inventing and creating numerous crafts. He participated and won many competitions and awards from a young age.

His parents' diagnosis urged him to begin studying medicine, cancer in particular. However, time was never on his side. When he was ten years old, his mother died, fast-forward five months later, his father followed her to the grave.

He could remember still vividly remember their last moments the words they spoke to him on their death beds, the smiles on their faces even as their bodies grew weaker, "Stay strong, and go on living". The tears would not stop coming for a while, he cried silently to himself, in the dark sometimes.

It had all been too much for him at the time. Being unable to do nothing but watch as both his parents left him in the span of less than a year. Grief had overwhelmed him; he was depressed for a time. It was like fate was playing a cruel game with him. Both his parents die to the same ailment, in the space of less than a year.

But his parents' words helped him to push through the grief, in their memory, he would continue to search the cure to cancer. His aunt Mel was assigned as his guardian by law. He stayed with her family for a while but later decided to stay on his own when he turned twelve, in this penthouse to concentrate on his projects. Not that he did not appreciate her or that he was being abused in any way, but he felt that he needed to concentrate on his goal.

His aunt was a kind person and took care of him well of course. She had lost her sister after all, and Adrien was all she had left of her. Her husband, Daniel was supportive in his own way and even agreed to adopt Adrien if needed, but Adrien had turned him down saying he did not want to be a burden.

Then there was Alex, Mel and Daniel's daughter who was two years older than Adrien. Adrien and her used to be close, but he had grown been growing distant since his parents died, she did not know what to do. Her attempts to cheer him up were usually met with an awkward silence.

Ironically, that same year, he found the cure for cancer, he developed a cure for all types of cancer. Only it was a couple of years too late. He cursed the world, himself and the cancer that took his parents. But he took solace in the fact that at least his cure would help those who were still alive. But he himself further detached from the world, drowning himself in tons of work.

He made a decision at some point. He would do everything in his power to find out why, then maybe in this journey of his he would find a way to revive or get his parents back. As delusional as it all seemed, he would delude himself till he found it, a way.

A part of him knew it was only wishful thinking, but he would not stop. He would remind himself every day, "stay strong". He had eventually found the cure to the disease that had taken them, maybe given enough time, he would find a way to bring them back to life.

His ideas covered a wide range of possibilities, after all, he had to start somewhere. The cure he had made for cancer worked by pulverising the cancer infested cells and quickly restoring them using cell replication. Using a similar concept, He made a serum that could extend life expectancy. By replacing older cells with younger, newer cells, the serum would extend any person's life expectancy by at least fifty years. People would look younger for longer as it worked the same way for skin cells

However, it could not keep on working indefinitely, after all the human body could only handle so much strain, not to mention the limited mental capacity. The human mind was not made to function for longer than a hundred and twenty years. As such, that was the longest most people expected to live on for before their bodies naturally gave out. The serum was dubbed, 'The Life serum'. The uproar that followed could not be described in words. Especially when it was mass developed and made available in hospitals around the world.

What followed was a way to replace limbs. Crippled people were healed en masse. Using a mirroring technique, an exact replica of a list limb could be made in seconds. People truly felt like they were entering the golden age.

At some point Adrien felt like the lack of resources was impeding the progress in his research. It was taking too long to the gather resources he needed. Worse, computational data was slower than he liked.

So, in the year that followed, he invented things like flying cars, faster jets, as well as providing blueprints of extremely tall buildings, that went as high as the stratosphere. The most significant leap, however, was how he made a self-sufficient hundred percent clean energy source in the form of large twenty metre nuclear fission reactor orb in a tower.

The mesh design on the orb's reactor that had miniature components was responsible for containing, controlling and cleaning up the fission reactions. After that, he made an ultra-fast satellite internet system that vastly improved data processing times.

Adrien and his relatives lived in Metropolis, formerly Tokyo in old earth. The city had changed so much in these quarter decade, to the point of changing names. It had become the central hub for the planet earth, major companies and industries moved to areas in and around the city.

It had always been very large and overpopulated, but the tall buildings had been made even taller to accommodate all the incoming new residents, reaching even higher than the clouds. It was now a place where every type of individuals gathered.

All because The Adrien lived here. After all, they could receive benefits from just his presence in this city. Any new products he developed, they would be the first to receive. And because the city was so large and overpopulated, it was the ideal place for any businessman.

Now in June 2066, Adrien was experimenting on relativity. It had been almost four months since he had decided that he was not any closer to finding a way to bring his parents back. So, he decided to change gears.

After looking through past studies and possible methods he could try, which he had not looked at before, he came across Einstein's theory of relativity. In particular the space-time part of it, specifically time travel. It was a long stretch, after all, it was only a theory.

According to Einstein's theory, time dilation occurs at high speeds and in strong gravitational fields, meaning time can pass at different rates for different observers.

For example, if you were to travel at near-light speeds, time would slow down for you relative to someone on Earth, effectively allowing you to "travel" into the future. However, traveling back in time is much more complex.

After building a particle accelerator with an extremely strong gravitational centre, Adrien was currently about to reach a speed high enough for the desired phenomena to occur as intended. 

Looking at the numbers on his screen, he was engrossed in his work. There were bags under his eyes, his lean body looked malnourished, His black hair had grown long enough to brush comfortably on his shoulder, even slightly obscuring his eyes, not that he noticed. His gaze looked almost empty and lifeless; he was truly tired.

Putting a hand on his brow he let out a tired sigh, "How long has it been, maybe I should sleep just a little bit."

He looked out the windows across him, the sun was barely visible above the trees, spreading light across the horizon. "Oh, its morning, Sarah must be on her way here then". His voice came out in barely a whisper.

Adrien had barely gone outside since the day he started working on his 'Space-Time continuum project' as he decided to call it. Sarah was his secretary. His aunt Mel assigned her to assist him on his projects as a condition for letting him stay alone in the penthouse which he gladly accepted.

'Ding dong!' The elevator to the lab section of his penthouse where he was currently working had just been used and was coming up. Considering the few people with a keycard to his penthouse, 'That must be Sarah' the doors slid open a second later.

A beautiful young lady in her mid-twenties with long auburn hair tied in a ponytail that stopped just above her waist walked out confidently, she wore a black formal suit for ladies, with a white lab coat over it.

Black meshed leggings covered her slender, long legs, and she wore a short black skirt over them. She held a tray with two coffee cups in her left hand and box wrapped in a decorative blue wrapping paper in the other.

Her sharp black eyes scanned the entire room in a second before stopping on Adrien's dishevelled figure on the computer desk. Their gazes met and held for a moment before her expression softened, a warm, serene and welcoming smile graced her plump lips as she spoke, "morning Ren".

"Morning Sarah" He responded in kind. His secretary was one of the few people he cherished and appreciated, even though he never showed it. But she knew he cared. Sarah was the one who took the most care of him since he moved and started living alone.

From his food, basic necessities and the business side of his developments. She was actually Daniel's younger sister, so they were related in a way. Since never cared much for making money off of the products of his experiments, someone else had to take care of that.

Adrien was currently the richest person in the world, his company, Quantum labs was valued at well over three trillion dollars and it was still growing thanks to a steady supply of new products.

The sad truth was that he did not care much for the money and the company, if it were truly up to him, most of his inventions would have been rotting in different corners of this lab.

This was where Sarah came in. She was somewhat of a genius entrepreneur of her own, which was why Mel decided she was the best choice for Adrien's secretary.

Sarah was neither short nor tall for a lady, standing at 5'5". Her lab coat did little to hide the bountiful curves on her figure. Her D cup bosom bouncing ever so slightly as she walked into the untidy lab.

She tried to stop a frown from appearing on her brow when she noticed the bags under Adrien's eyes. It was a bad habit of his, she had lost count of the number of times she had told him to get enough sleep every day.

"Did you spend the whole night up again? Urgh why am I even asking, of course you did." She now stood over his desk, laying the tray on the table, she ruffled his hair and chuckled lightly,

"By the way, happy sixteenth birthday Adrien" her black eyes glistened as she handed him the wrapped package in her hand.

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