Great Minds

By Steven D. Bennett

A Twilight-Zone-esque story. Sebastian Sage--scientist, genius--is hard at work on the problem of global warming, on which he believes he has a solution. He is approached by a man representing a group called GREAT MINDS. Their belief, based on the diminishing intelligence of man due to social media, is that the problems humankind will face in the future will require a greater mind-force than will be available. They therefore propose to send the greatest minds of the present into the future; their method: cryogenics. Sage is mildly interested, but becomes more so when he learns that well-known scientist Niles DeMoss Yardley has agreed to take part in the undertaking. To Sage, Yardley is more of a populist than scientist, who has gained a large following and undeserved reputation based on simple-minded slogans. Though Sage would never admit it, Yardley is also his nemesis.
With the promise that he will be the future leader of the Great Minds and that his present work will continue after he is "gone," Sage mulls over his boyhood dream of seeing the future, as well as having Yardley being subservient to his intellect, as it always should have been. He finally agrees to the idea and the procedure begins. In a blink, he awakes forty years in the future, his mind being connected to the other Great Minds. He marvels at his ability to hear and communicate, though he is, of course, just a brain. But his excitement at tackling the current problems soon wanes as he finds that political correctness has also made the journey, and their mission has changed to one he should have anticipated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven D. Bennett
• Release date: Nov 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370502561

Steven D. Bennett

I was born in Boston and grew up in Connecticut and San Diego, which gave me a good background in both history and tanning. I have four children and six grand-children, remarkable in that I am only 35. The fact that I have been married for almost 36 years is the result of an in-utero wedding and honeymoon. I have published many short stories, poems, songs, and recently wrote and directed a musical melodrama that was performed in the San Diego area. With six books under my belt (THE PATH OF DAYS, TRACE THE DEAD EYE, HUMOR OF THE GOSPELS, HUMOR OF THE GOSPELS Daily Study, THRONE and THE CHUCK-IT LIST) I am looking for a bigger belt to stuff the seventh, which hopefully will be completed in time for the Christmas season. It is about a writer who finds to his horror that a mistake he made on page 47 completely invalidates the plot, forcing him to thus track down and kill anyone who has bought the book lest they spread the truth about his miniscule talent. It is titled DON'T READ THIS! and looks to be a best-seller, unless people take the title literally. Fortunately, nothing I write can be taken literally. It is also fortunate I did not stay with the working title: DON'T BUY THIS! Personally, I don't buy a word of it. I also have a blog, I Wandered Off the Tour: A Journey In Self-Publishing, which contains my thoughts and experiences through the tormenting process of creation. Other than writing, I like listening to the same dozen albums and re-runs of the same dozen TV shows I've heard and seen hundreds of times, to the endless delight of my wife.

Book preview

Great Minds

Steven D. Bennett

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Copyright 2017 by Steven D. Bennett

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Smashwords Edition

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Have you considered your place in eternity?

Sebastian Sage had never envisioned being asked that question once, let alone twice, and yet the proof stood before him.

The first instance was courtesy of Kenneth Cross, who would appear at inopportune times to blather on about the eternal carpenter. Being a trained physicist (PhD at 23, IQ 185) Sage was above superstition, and though he considered Cross a colleague, he wondered how much he could trust the disposition of one whose reasoning led him to believe in people rising from the dead and a universe born by the imaginings of an invisible being. Frankenstein was fiction and random chance the creator.

No, eternity held no interest; his challenge was the immediate. He had been immersed in the study of climate change for some time, working on the idea that the disintegration of the polar ice caps could be reversed by seeding them with chemicals, binding the