A Scientist is Born
Story by Ghost_Wolf17 on SoFurry
Apparently the mathematical equation did not survive the move over x.x anyways, I hope everyone enjoys the back story of my character James Furhart. Oh, and there is more coming your way, this is just the beginning.
Moscow, Russia
2016
The Beginning of Change
The mad scientist, Ivan “James” Sokolov, was working in his lab, creating something… awful. As he worked, he had a chemical next to him… well… it was a mix of different things. Well, as he was working, he ended up knocking it over, the glass vial crashing onto the floor at his feet.
The fumes were overwhelming so, holding his breath, he tried to not breathe it in… but all of his efforts were futile. He fell to his knees, choking on air before he fainted.Whatever was in that vial, well, it would change his life forever.
Moscow, Russia,
1915
The Beginning
I was born in 1915, in Moscow, the heart of Russia. My father, a veteran of the Great War, was grateful that he had a son to continue on the name. As he looked to my mother, he would smile, grab her hand, and then tell her that I would be successful for I was the first born.
Well, my mother would laugh at him and she would tell him that his son still had to grow up… and he needed a name.
And from henceforth, I was named Ivan. And I would be successful… just not how my father imagined.
I wonder if he is proud of me… I wonder if he is proud that his son became a…no, I won't spoil it. I do believe he is proud of me... or at least, I hope he is.
Switzerland, Basel
1933
My father and my mother were very upset that I was accepted to a school in Basel… Switzerland. We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents and my brother scrounged up what we had to send me off to school.
“But father, I don’t want to go if it means-” and my father cut me off. He placed his hand on me and, with a smile, he says, “Son… if it meant the difference between you staying here and you becoming successful, even though I will miss you greatly… I’d sacrifice every single ruble just so you could accomplish your dreams, my son.”
I… I didn’t know what to say… so I hugged him. I… I was crying and I could tell he was too… but after our moment, he would pat my back before he said, “Go on my son, Basel is waiting for you.”
And here I am, in Basel, after a couple of years learning and improving my knowledge of chemistry and physics, I was in one of the main auditoriums attending a seminar. They said some great German physicist was to make a visit.
As a Russian, I wasn’t entirely thrilled that some German prick was going to give us a speech about physics… but the scientist in me was excited. I mean, really, who cares what ethnicity they are, so long as he knows what he’s talking about.
What I wasn’t expecting was some elderly man to walk on the stage. And then he started to speak to us… I don’t know if it was in German or Swiss… well, probably German cause I can at least understand Swiss.
So as he talked to us, I didn’t understand what he was saying… till a light turned on… and behind him, on the wall… was some mathematical equation… I understood it. He was explaining what his mathematical equation meant.
Well… hmm… e=MC2… um… let’s see, if I thought like a scientist… wait… I’ve read about this before… wait, he’s not explaining it… he’s relating it to… no, he’s explaining…
One of my colleagues looked at me and, in Russian, he said, “You must have never learned about it in Russia… it’s his theory on relativity. Energy equals mass times the speed of light in a vacuum squared.”
Well, so much for me solving it… but he said 1905… why was he explaining something he discovered in 1905 in 1933? You’d think he would tell us something new… well… this was new to me…
I hoped one day I could be just as great as Einstein. Maybe even better than him.
The Great Patriotic War, 1943
When I returned to Russia to advance my career in science, another Great War broke out. Well, having no career… I was conscripted into the military.
My first time fighting, they gave me five rounds while my partner had a gun. And they released us into some war torn… I think it was Leningrad? No… that was at the coast… we were much deeper into Russia than that. So, as we pushed hard against the Germans, well… I must have been lucky because…
My partner died and I hid. I didn’t want to fight… well, I felt two men grab me so, as I was dragged out, I soon found myself in front of three German soldiers. And as they raised their weapons at me, I knew I was going to die… until something fell out of my pocket. Oh fuck… it must have been the bullets… they were so going to kill me now…
However, when the soldier next to me leaned down, he came back up holding a pendant I had gotten at the University of Basel… and looking at it to me, he shouted something. It was all garbled to me, but one of the soldiers lowered his rifle and asks me, in some weird accented Russian, “Did you go University of Basel?”
That’s what he said to me… it didn’t make any sense so… “Uh… I went to the University of Basel… I got a science degree… I’m a science graduate…” I said the most basic things so he didn’t get lost with his shitty Russian.
“Ah, graduate of science…” He needed to practice more. He would then turn to the others and I guess he told them I’m a scientist. Instead of killing me, the two simply pushed me down and all five of them walked off, heading back to their… whatever they call them.
I would wait till they were gone before I stood up and ran. Maybe they thought I was too stupid to be any use to them… good cause that was the most frightening moment of my life… so I managed to return to one of my commanding officers near Moscow.
Guess he thought I was a pathetic soldier so he put me in intelligence. Oh, intelligence. What did I do you ask? Was it spy stuff? No… I put out the weather report everyday. And I did this till the war ended… but I got to live and that was the most important thing…
It was then that one of my officers began asking me why those German soldiers never shot me. So I told him that it was because I was a scientist. Well… he would place his hand on my arm and, chuckling, he would tell me that he never thought he’d see a scientist survive this war…
Honestly, I think he told his superiors because three years later, when we entered a Cold War with the Americans, two government officers came up to me and asked if I wanted to do some science research for the great Soviet Republic? I should have said no… instead, I found myself in a research facility near Moscow.
I wasn’t allowed to go home after that...