The lonely wander of run away galaxies

Chapter III

"There is no way in hell those cocky bastards did not find an experimental energy supply up there ! I'm telling you ! Why would they send yet another exploration rover if not for something to pillage or overuse !"

Newton is looking cynically at the shouting bearded lumberjack-looking man in front of him,  wondering how many more of his paranoid conspiracy theories he has already been subjected to. The man can spit out a thousand of them after drinking only one beer. Today, it's about Mars, but it could as well be about politicians cloning or pharmaceutical manipulation on worldwide virus spreading. Newton still wonders to this day what brought the two men together.

 Sometimes he gets scared, goosebumps shivering along his arms, when he imagines not spending those unproductively irrational nights, listening to Ilya's new theories and drinking beers on his building rooftop. Where would he get his most needed amount of scientific doubts wrapped up in a refined proportion of swearing ? Where, indeed. As much as they bicker, Ilya is crucial to Newton's life, he is aware of the fact. The man is a father to him, a friend, a confident, a brother, a safe place to vent his anger, sometimes even an annoying little sister pestering him. In a way, they are family. Newton trying to find his identity in the universe, Ilya living far away from his homeland, they found each other as it often happens to lost souls.

Newton and Ilya first met a few days after the teenage Newton had illegally accessed a children's hospital server. Actually, it was Ilya who found him. He was, at the time, in charge of a cyber crimes unit at the university he was teaching at. After tracking him down, he went over to Newton's school. He expected to find a hardened hacker with a developed network of web burglar collaborators and identity thieves.  But what he encountered left him speechless. A fourteen year old red cheeked, angelic ocean eyed Newton. A forgotten misty child drifting around aimlessly, unaware of the potential he was dubiously harnessing. Newton had no knowledge whatsoever on cybernetics. "I just did it instinctively", he had told a gawking Ilya. 

Ilya Pavlov took it upon himself to take the marauding boy under his imposing wing, before someone else did and acquire the merit of raising such a skilled kid. He taught him everything he knew. Which turned out not to be enough to satiate the young Waltz's unsatisfied mind. Soon, the quick witted teenage Newton quickly surpassed the experienced master, as expected of someone with such peculiar skills as him. Truth be told, Ilya did not apply to the paternalistic role model he had set himself to be. The outspoken go-getter had simply jumped on the surprising opportunity to benefit from Newton's spectacular ability, and did not expect to care so much about the little brazen bastard that was Newton. But as always with the boy, he sneakily grew on Ilya even before the opportunity grabber could notice it, with his cheeky remarks and detached intellectual brightness. 

What made them build their profound yet ever so squabbling connection lies probably in the deep understanding and self preservation tying them together. Whatever they may tell themselves to justify their attachment, there is an ever floating certainty above their overflowing heads. And that is that Ilya needs the composed yet deeply filled with complex emotions Newton, and Newton needs the persuasively bossy yet organically honest Ilya. As long as the equilibrium string knotting them together balances one and another to never quite reach the hazardous edge of their Daedalian mind cliffs, these two human beings will not jump to their end. Won't they ?

One day, after two years of knowing each other, and Ilya slowly making its gigantic way into Newton's lonely life, the teacher asked his prodigy student about his raid on the hospital server. The reserved boy wasn't keen on displaying his unknown roots and sleeping shadows. Nonetheless, under the unexpectedly warm and pushy protective influence of the plain spoken Easterner, the young Newton had indeed found himself breaking the walls of his asocial shell of clever sassiness and adequate cynicism.