Synopsis: Equilibrium

Ruth Hauser is a 17-year-old high school dropout, and if she’s inherited one thing from her father, it’s a love of physics. While her village is rural enough to feel safe from the power outages, riots, and increasingly heavy-handed judicial systems found in the energy-deficient cities, she dreams of leaving and risking it all to attend UCLA – the only university left in the country.

She’s been accepted to the Maine Science Academy – an intensive, government-run winter program. But her government scholarship has an expiration date, and to stand a chance with UCLA , she will need to come up with an unforgettable research project before spring.

Just getting through the Academy will be hard enough – there’s the seemingly harmless flirtation with her Physics TA, the need to break into government property just to have a place to stay on the weekends, a classmate who knows far too much about Ruth’s family, and the lingering feeling that she’s betraying her father by attending MSA in the first place.

Throughout it all, Ruth struggles with entropy – the law that predicts the eventual death of the universe as electrons and planets alike go irreversibly to equilibrium. She sets out to make her UCLA science project prove the unprovable, even while her world falls apart around her.