High energy physics graduate student Rene Moncriefe had long pondered the relationship between mind and physical energy occurring in the brain. When his girlfriend Faye is killed by a truck swerving into his car, however, there erupt a succession of bizarre coincidences speaking to him of her death and seemingly necessitating for their occurrence direct interactions between his mind and the minds of others and the insentient, physical world beyond that. Rene abandons graduate school to work for the federal government in Washington, D.C. to both improve his life’s material circumstance and develop in non-work hours a mathematical model of mind’s interrelation to energy explaining the coincidences. That research, however, is invaded by phantasmagoric events which further speak to him in his private lexicon of symbolically significant coincidences. Their message is that his mathematical model, a manifold he names M(exponent 5), is merely a distraction from the guilt he would feel over Faye’s death if his mind were not preoccupied with the model’s development. Those otherworldly occurrences also disrupt his government work, and his struggle outside of employment for an abstract model of consciousness deteriorates at work into a struggle for economic survival. Nature, he concludes, would extinguish his life to protect its secrets from his mathematical explorations. That unprecedented threat would require a unique response.

Across time and space the energies of individual lives interact and seek moral equilibrium. There is only one anthropic force, shared equipotentially by saints and thieves, seekers and the ninety-nine percent who merely cling to life, living as responsibly as they perceive possible. The pathologies that contend and the gifts that inspire often defy expectation in their relation, existing not in isolated social domains but interacting in the same theater of history. Surely the lives of Gotama Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth separated chronologically by over five hundred years can be united only in the minds of contemporary spiritual seekers, but perhaps that's an illusion resulting from historical amnesia and temporal myopia. And what if there were an instance in which the innocuous lives of contemporary students -aspiring scholars- attempting to illuminate those ancient icons of virtue were stalked because of happenstance unsuspected by them by remorseless underworld gangsters? Should a provisional metaphor for such grotesquery be that of the magnet, that moral opposites attract, or might it not be apologetic, that the universe is a playing field of evil? Alternatively, the students' presumed innocence may be an illusion, and the gangsters and students coursed the same channel of deceit and obliviousness. Cogently an illusion if the most righteous of the students, the seminarian, is a vector for a centuries old agenda implemented by her family's eighteenth century windfall treasure of inexplicable origin. Such moral recursion in the here and now contextualized by supramundane influence achieves a narrative convolution that's usefully examined through the simplifying lens of a single life; such as that of Rene Moncriefe, catastrophically expatriated from undergraduate school in upstate New York to the New York City region. However, Rene's story is itself a testament of chaos, and herein his struggle to understand and master his psychic unraveling will provide the context for his companions' unsuspected quandary. Ultimately, Rene's relationship with the seminarian will project him into a dilemma of the plexiverse substantiating every reality.