Davina regained her health after a six-month stay in the sanitarium, but almost relapsed upon discovering she was moving into a brand-new home, freshly furnished and ready for her arrival. How the family managed to keep this a secret from her was a miracle in itself. She finally recovered from her shock and they spent the first of many blissful nights in this little house on the outskirts of the developing town of Albuquerque.
Over the years that followed, the resourceful Metatuccis built their oil distribution business into one of the most successful companies in New Mexico. They entered a contract with Standard Oil (precursor to Chevron Oil) for exclusive distribution rights and developed dozens of service stations throughout the state. Tulio ran the distribution arm of Standard Oil and Amerigo developed the service stations. When the brothers finally retired and transferred their respective interests to their offspring, the value of their oil empire had grown to well over $13 million. The American dream had become fully manifest in this hard-working and determined immigrant family.
Throughout the remainder of his life, when anyone was facing adversity, Amerigo would often advise: “ The hardest steel passes through the hottest fire,” a favorite saying born from his days in the foundry. This metaphor was a poignant reminder of the incredible hardships and wonderful achievements of the brothers from Lucca. They had succeeded against incredible odds on their way to prosperity, and their shared qualities of honor, determination, and persistence were instilled in their offspring.
Amerigo and Davina had three children in the course of their lives together. Their oldest son, Diego, ultimately took over the service station business and continued to build the empire he inherited. Twin daughters, Regina and Gemma, were born into the family next. The twins were two of the most competitive sisters imaginable. Regina’s son was Ryan Marshall; Gemma’s oldest was Jarrod Conrad. It is from these humble beginnings that the intense rivalry between Ryan and Jarrod was born.
TEN
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.