Michael’s completed 79,000-word novel—Bursting the Bubble: When the Guns Fail to Defend, There is One Man, One Mission, and One Dream for a New America—is best classified as a political thriller but journeys through an expansive field of diverse themes: love, longing, war, betrayal, science fiction, education and murder. Agents and publishers who have landed on this page by a stroke of fate can get more details about the story below or by reading the beginning.
Synopsis
The disaster had before only been seen in movies. Monuments of patriotism crumbled to rubble. Homes of civilians—from the oldest of great-grandmothers to the youngest of babies—flattened by the thousands. Endless other instances of devastation from sea to shining sea. All a result of the creditors conquering land when a broke America had no way of fulfilling its debt. But the U.S. does manage to build two advantages: the ability to send a single person back in time, and a man capable for the job. A selfless hero who, if he follows the mission that has been set before him step by step, will give his family, his lover, and his country a chance at survival.
After two years of grueling training on a compound surrounded by endless Utah desert, the odds against 18-year-old Private Allan Hassen will only grow higher. First, on the night of the transport, the weakened American defenses must struggle through a deadly assault just long enough to send Allan back to 2005. Once there, he must power through the loneliness, the empty realization that he is isolated in the past with no way back, existing in a decade when his mom and dad are yet to be born.
Not to be without an identity, Allan must become Nathaniel Chapling, a recent high school graduate who, as an old man in 2060, responded to a government ad campaign asking for Allan lookalikes from their youth. Allan has been given the strictest of orders not to kill anyone for fear of possible complications. So, with a video of the war and of the old Nathaniel pleading, Allan is to recruit the young Nathaniel to the mission. Also aiding Allan will be the endless funds that come with having futuristic foresight of the stock market and the shifty and meddling Larry Litchfield, Allan’s hired broker who keeps trying to figure out how his client predicts the market so well.
As Chapling, Allan is expected to go to college and achieve excelling grades, build esteemed fraternal connections and become student body president, find a woman to marry but not necessarily love, transform an investment firm into the industry’s greatest, be accepted into the most secretive of societies, and work his way up the political ranks under a slogan—“Burst the Bubble”—that is code for the simple moves that will save a country from the enemy and itself.
Such an elaborate scheme will be a challenge for even the ruler of the heavens, and Allan and the mission planners have prepared for a countless number of obstacles. But it will be unforeseen hardships that present the biggest problems—and they’ll be the product of three types: unknown enemies, assumed accomplices, and Allan himself.
