I took the last week off, so here’s a bit of Drinking Heavy Water.
The Great State of Soviet Texas was designed from the dirt up so that nobody would hate their work. Unique among Earth’s four hundred and eighty-one nations, the Texas Datacore existed to optimize the health, happiness, and liberties of Soviet citizens. Nobody was in charge of anything beyond themselves. Chevy had trusted the datacore all through school, even when the post-doc work in experimental mathematics at the University of New Houston had almost melted his brain. The first year and a half had been torturous, but eventually the inexorable, irresistible, intoxicating equations had kept him awake all night, luring him far past what his fellow students could understand. The datacore had been right to put him there. He not only had a talent for the edges of mathematics, he enjoyed it. He’d had no higher ambition than to work at a university, expand the scope of human knowledge, and repay a dozen times over the Soviet’s investment in the miracle of his life. One wife, two dogs, three kids, and four months vacation would round that up to the ideal life.
Then the Soviet had traded five years of his services to the Montague Corporation.
You can grab Drinking Heavy Water as a standalone novel, but the best value is the Montague Portal omnibus Aidan Redding Against the Universes.