Dark Matter

Zak Ransom is an awkward teenage prodigy plagued by a compulsion to count his lace-holes. To avoid painful memories, he leads a double-life as renowned hacker Hadron Collider, a virtual Robin Hood who returns stolen digital loot to its rightful owners.

After receiving death threats from notorious cyber-thief Ominous Swarm, Zak messages his distant father, Nyquist Ransom, a Nobel-winning physicist who works deep beneath a mountain. But Nyquist has disappeared, apparently consumed by a dark-matter generator called The Halotron.

Whilst trying to evade Ominous Swarm, Zak receives an impenetrable silver package from his estranged mentor, Drexter Moore, a legendary hacker and chess grandmaster, wanted by the NSA.

The package soon attracts the attention of a ruthless agency called The Dominion and a mysterious neighborhood stalker who looks like an Enderman from Minecraft.

Zak learns that the package contains the key to ending a battle between ancient and modern forces over who controls The Halotron and its ability to harness an astonishing property of dark matter particles.

Enlisting the help of an eclectic gang of geeks and odd-ball inventors with reality-defying gadgets and self-driving cars, Zak must race to open the package and neutralize The Halotron before it falls into the wrong hands and brings about the the collapse of the Universe!

Dark Matter was written for today’s smarter kids by a Silicon Valley inventor with British origins. Besides being a thrilling and fun adventure with a dual timeline plot, it is ultimately a moral tale that visits contemporary topics like privacy, rationalism and scientism. For the more observant, it also contains various mathematical, engineering and historical curiosities.