Gorgeous Evasions

Tom Deadlight, born 1970 and a founding GenX-er, dedicated his life to teaching literature to Millennials and Gen Z college kids. He picked up hitchhikers and stray animals. He believed in ghosts and other dimensions and panpsychism-the idea that all objects have consciousness. He tried to be selfless. But he made mistakes. There's the divorce. The alcohol use disorder. The neurodivergence. But now, in 2075, thanks to the Tech Revolution, at the end of his life he's been chosen for bioregeneration to serve as a professor at a new type of university called SAJE, pronounced like a wise person, a joint venture between still rural and poor Louisiana and Mississippi, with funding from the feds and multiple Tech giants, one that crosses the Mississippi River with a new bridge and has campuses on both sides. Everything about it is next level, and the students, Gen Q for Quantum, come from across the US and Alliance countries. The college is an incubator in the race for what they call Dominion. Tom teaches an unconventional course on what it means today to be a "self." Problem is, a hallucinogenic, pink recreational drug the students call "pank" is being circulated at SAJE, and they say it makes them travel through time. But it's also affecting them in bizarre ways. When a young woman in Tom's class succumbs to it, he is drawn into discovering its origin and the conspiracy that surrounds it. At the same time, readers are faced with reconstructing Tom's troubled past, while students are challenged to define their ultimate beliefs and explore the limits of human knowledge. In directions far more profound than typically discussed, an array of disputes that essentially overlap with contemporary "asleep" versus "awoke" culture are revealed. So read on for Scifi, Southern Goth, & Strange Seminar Questions!