The Absent-Minded Professor

Professor Arthur Ellis Pembroke is, by any reasonable measure, harmless. He is sixty-one years old. He studies pre-Consolidation ceramic typology. He forgets appointments. He submits very long letters to administrative offices about archive lighting. He has, on multiple occasions, gone to the wrong transit platform. The Aurigan Directive, which has been systematically imprisoning and eliminating the greatest scientific, mathematical, artistic, and philosophical minds in the sector, has reviewed his file. Their conclusion: absent-minded. Politically irrelevant. Obsessed with ancient pottery. They are not entirely wrong. What they have missed is that a man who understands how bureaucratic systems work - who has read every provision, every clause, every obsolete pre-war regulation buried in the administrative historical holdings - can move through those systems like water through old walls. Quietly. Without force. Leaving behind nothing but paperwork that is, somehow, always in order. Behind Professor Pembroke's rumpled coat and his briefcase full of ceramic samples and his genuinely excellent lectures on Third Period glazing techniques, one hundred and eighty-one of the sector's most brilliant minds are being moved, one by one, out of Aurigan custody and into freedom. Every rescue is conducted under the noses of Aurigan security. Every success leaves behind a bureaucratic mystery and, occasionally, a shard of pottery. And Commander Erika Voss - the most thorough investigator in the sector - is building a case that is overwhelming in its circumstantial detail and, by every evidentiary standard she can apply, completely unprosecutable. The Absent-Minded Professor is a novel about paperwork as resistance, bureaucracy as battlefield, and the particular kind of courage that looks, from the outside, exactly like a man who has forgotten where he put his keys.

Pages: 244, Paperback, Independently published