Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati Read online

  “She destroyed my work,” Young Nimrod said defensively.

  “She is just a little girl,” his mother replied.

  Young Nimrod realized he had overreacted over the sketch, but looking at the clock he realized that he was late for school so he hurried to quickly get dressed. His mother put a sandwich in his backpack before he left for school. That day he was generally inattentive to his lessons. All he was thinking about was his aggressive response toward his little sister. ‘If I want to become God, I should become a loving god not an aggressive one,’ he thought. ‘How can I be so upset over such a minor thing!’

  Young Nimrod thought he owed his sister an apology, ‘When I go back home, I will hold her and show that I love her. She will have only me to protect her when our parents die.’

  That same day, in the last class, the teacher finished the subject early before the bell rang. She decided to spend the remaining time asking the students about their hobbies and what they wanted to become in the future until the class was over. This is what she usually did in other classes when they were about to end and she was feeling too lazy to start a new topic. So she sat on the desk and held the attendance notebook looking for a student’s name.

  “Let’s see, Adam, what do you want to become in the future?” the teacher asked the first student on the list.

  “I want to become a lawyer,” Adam replied.

  Then she turned to Helen and asked her the same question and she replied that she wished to become a doctor. The teacher continued to ask the students in the class one by one in the order of the alphabetical appearance of their last names. After asking around twenty students, most of the answers were: doctor, nurse, teacher, and engineer. Then she peeked at the clock and saw it was only couple minutes to ring, so she followed the same routine to ask the remaining students in the list. “Sarah, what would like to become?”

  “I want to become an engineer,” Sarah Sarkawt replied.

  Finally, the teacher turned to Young Nimrod and asked him the same question: “What would you like to become, smart boy?”

  “I want to become a god,” Young Nimrod replied.

  “A guard?!” she wondered if she heard the word correctly.

  “No, a god,” he repeated more firmly.

  The teacher failed to grasp the word again as it was very alien to what her brain expected to hear for a career, so she repeated for the third time, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you said. Can you please repeat?”

  “I mean I want to become like ∞Illuhim∞,” he clarified.

  “Oh! I see…,” the teacher responded with a smile although a bit irritated with his proposition. “∞Illuhim∞ is the only god, and no one can become like him,” she said.

  “Why? What if I worked very hard?” Young Nimrod asked.

  At that moment the bell started to ring and the students stood preparing their bags to leave the classroom.

  “I know you are the smartest student in the class, but ∞Illuhim∞ was the smartest in the entire universe,” she said while turning away from Young Nimrod toward the classroom exit door.

  ***

  Later that day, a group of three boys from his class who had the reputation for being bullies stopped him on his way back home. They started to beat him until he bled from his nose.

  “How dare you compare yourself with ∞Illuhim∞?” one boy said.

  “If you are God then why can’t you defend yourself?” another boy asked aggressively while punching him in the face. “Say I’m the slave of ∞Illuhim∞, or we will kill you now.”

  “Say it now,” the other boy repeated while he kept kicking Young Nimrod as he fell onto the ground.

  “I’m slave of ∞Illuhim∞,” Young Nimrod said then followed with a lower voice, “not.”

  “What did you say?!” one boy said angrily when he heard him and began to kick him again. “Say it again loud and clear.”

  “I’m the slave of ∞Illuhim∞,” he said again a bit louder than the first time while he kept repeating: not, not, not … in his mind.

  The bullies left Young Nimrod on the ground. “∞Illuhim∞ will give you cancer if you repeat your blaspheme again!” one of them shouted while they were about to walk away from him.

  Young Nimrod tried to stand up again. His clothes were torn and dusty and his nose was still bleeding. This was the unluckiest day for him: first his masterpiece sketch were destroyed, second, he made his little sister upset and now he was bullied and humiliated. ‘Maybe this is a curse and warning from ∞Illuhim∞ to me,’ he thought to himself as tears started to fall from his eyes mixing with the bleeding from his nose. He walked slowly and regretfully toward the home that day wishing that he could forget about everything by tomorrow. When he got back home his mother saw him in his terrible condition and she quickly hugged him.

  “Tell me who did that to you?” the mother asked furiously.

  “Nobody, I fell on the ground,” he replied.

  His mother felt he was hiding something, but she was in a hurry. Her young daughter had developed a high fever and dizziness a few hours ago, and as a nurse the mother had tried to reduce the fever by giving her daughter some antipyretics and cold pack applications, but the fever hadn’t subsided, so she decided to take her daughter to the hospital.

  “Your father is on his way driving back home to take your sister to the hospital,” she said.

  “Why, what is wrong with my sister?” he asked.

  “Your little sister has a high fever. Go check on her while I grab and collect some things before we set off for the hospital,” his mother said.

  Young Nimrod remembered that he owed an apology to his little sister, so he quickly went to her room to check on her. To his shock, he found her lying on the bed looking dizzy and tired. Her breathing was fast and her forehead felt very hot to him. At that moment his sister opened her eyes slowly to look at her brother. She tried hard to say the words, “Sorry brother for touching your stuff.” She was barely able to say it in her primitive voice, but the message was clear to Young Nimrod; she was still concerned about him even when she was in this terrible situation. A large tear rolled down his cheeks while he tried to reply to his beloved little sister, but then his most terrific nightmare started at that moment!

  Her little sister’s body began to shake involuntarily up and down, and her eyes rolled upwards and her mouth started frothing. Young Nimrod stood there terrified! He screamed loud for help. The remaining god-pride inside him shrunk into a freaked desperate chicken. The mother quickly got there to see that her daughter was having tonic-clonic seizures, so she immediately put her onto her left side and asked Young Nimrod to call for an ambulance.

  That moment, his father arrived home and came to the room, but luckily the seizure had subsided quickly. He suggested taking their daughter to the hospital using their own car because waiting for the ambulance might take longer, so the mother took the ill child onto her lap and they quickly got in the car with Young Nimrod on the back seat.

  The father quickly drove to the nearby hospital. Fifteen minutes later, they took the child directly to the Emergency ward’s pediatric section. There doctors and nurses were able to put in a cannula after many trials into her little invisible veins, and they also put oxygen tubes into her nose. After taking the initial life saving measures, her blood was taken for medical tests and a CT-scan was taken of her brain. The little child was admitted to the pediatric ward, but only the mother was allowed to stay with the child. Both the father and Young Nimrod waited outside wishing for reassuring news soon which sadly did not happen.

  Young Nimrod’s little sister stayed for the next few weeks in the intensive care unit, and with every passing day her condition deteriorated. Young Nimrod needed to skip school frequently, and even when he attended some of the classes, his mind was inattentive. All he thought about was an apology he owed to his sister. He was waiting for the day to see her wake up again from her coma, speak and point to the things in the room again
and call out their names with her funny and cute accent.

  Unfortunately, weeks later the horrible news came. The neurologist who was in charge came to tell the parents that their child would never be able to return to her normal state. Her brain cortex was badly damaged and she would no longer remember anything. Her body was totally paralyzed and she wouldn’t be able to even chew food by herself because her mouth muscles were paralyzed too. All they could do from now on was to feed her through a tube inserted from her little nose directly to her stomach. Her brain stem was still intact which meant her breathing and heartbeat would continue, but in reality, she was in a persistent vegetative state, a situation between life and death, and nobody could do anything for her at this stage. All what could be done was to take care of what have remained of her, to feed her and clean after her until the day came when a cure was found or she finally rested in peace. That was the doctor’s conclusion.

  Young Nimrod was looking and listening to the horrible news from behind the doors, and although he couldn’t hear everything the doctor said to his parent, he knew from their emotions and responses that nothing looked good. ‘How can I apologize to my sister?’ he thought. ‘She will never hear me or remember me again.’

  Since the mother was a nurse herself, later that day the hospital staff decided to discharge the disabled child to clear the intensive care unit bed for other needy and newly admitted children. They instructed the parent on how to take care of her and how to feed her through the naso-gastric tube. They also needed to administer the dissolved anti-seizure medications through the tube to prevent future seizures and to turn their daughter from side to side several times in a day to prevent her from developing bedsores.

  The parents realized the new conditions they had to face. There was no cure for their child’s condition and nothing yet discovered to bring back their beloved daughter, but they decided to stay patient and to do whatever they could to take care of their disabled child until one day a cure was found.

  That night they all came back to their house tired and depressed. Young Nimrod remembered his final words to his sister wishing that she didn’t exist;he couldn’t stop crying from the guilt as he secretly hid under his blanket. When midnight came, he realized his parents had fallen asleep. He got up from bed and went close to his comatose sister. As he switched on the small light bulb beside her, he was shocked to see his sister lying on the bed like a lifeless body, and he almost didn’t recognize her. Before, she was so beautiful with full cheeks but now she was emaciated, just skin and bone. Her eyes were sunken and dry, the orbits swollen because of edema, and there were multiple lesions and previous sites of bleeding on her tongue and nose because of the tube insertion and frequent tongue biting due to the multiple seizures. With each breath Young Nimrod could hear a high pitch but faint sound as if she was still suffering in pain and asking for help. Her weak and thin hands were all reddish and bruised at multiple sites due to the frequent trials of cannula insertion and intravenous injections.

  Young Nimrod called his sister but she didn’t respond as she was in a deep coma. She wasn’t aware of him or anything, and the only thing she was aware of was darkness, suffering, and pain. Young Nimrod burst into tears. Profuse big tears came from his eyes, and the carpet beneath him became immersed in them. He closed his eyes and started to pray to ∞Illuhim∞, a prayer that he had never done so purely and humbly. He began begging to the higher being for his mercy and forgiveness. He prayed with all his heart. ‘Please forgive me for my arrogance. How dare I compare myself with Your Majesty! I’m nothing but your humble servant. Please give me back my sister, please. I will become your biggest slave in the Garden of Eden, and I will serve you forever. I will bow to you forever. I will be the slave of your slaves and you can torture me, burn me, do anything you wish to do to me, but please give my sister’s health back, please. I don’t want anything but my sister’s health back. Please give her health back, please …’

  That moment a human-like figure immersed in light appeared. He looked like a perfectly symmetric being with a halo of a strong energy around him as he approached him in the darkness. The closer it came the stronger the light became, and Young Nimrod continued repeating his prayer hoping that his prayer was being answered. He continued to devalue himself and beg for the light figure to save his sister, but after a moment, the perfectly symmetric lighted figure stopped approaching and began to turn away from him and from his sister as if the light figure changed his mind and no longer wanted to cure the little disabled child!

  ‘Please come back! My sister needs you,’ he begged. ‘I will do anything you want me to do. Please come back, please, please, please. Why you don’t forgive me?’ He continued to cry with his eyes closed, then a warm hand touched his shoulder.

  “He can’t cure your sister,” a voice behind him said.

  Young Nimrod opened his eyes and saw his father’s hand on his shoulder.

  “But why?” he said.

  The father came closer to him. “Because ∞Illuhim∞ doesn’t exist. The only one who can do something for your sister is you.”

  “How?” Young Nimrod asked desperately.

  “You can become a smart doctor and cure her,” his father said.

  “But there are no cures for her condition,” he said.

  “You can find one,” his father said. “Your sister is not the only one suffering from this condition. There are many other kids like her, and it’s nobody’s fault. The world we live in is imperfect and it’s the job of smart people like you to think and find a solution to relieve Nature’s imperfections.”

  His father’s words were very effective; they ignited the god inside Young Nimrod and gave him hope again. The next day, he went to school. His attention to his lessons improved and he was able to answer most of the questions again by himself. His confidence returned, and the smile gradually returned to his face. Even though his sister’s condition didn’t get better, Young Nimrod was hopeful that one day he would be the one who found a cure for his little sister and then apologize to her.

  From that moment onwards, he started reading complex medical and neurological topics online and asked his father to buy for him medical textbooks. He was only nine years old by then so many of these books were clearly out of his league, but he was so determined that nothing at that stage seemed to stop him from his goals. He always kept on his desk a picture he took with his little sister when she was healthy, and the picture was fuel for him to keep studying and looking for a cure for her sister’s condition. Day by day he was closer to understanding her illness and the available treatments which were all palliative and non-curative measures. The more he studied his sister’s condition the more he understood the difficulty of saving her.

  The main reason for his sister’s paralyses was due to the extensive degeneration of her cortical neurons. These neurons were responsible for holding long term memory, implicit and explicit, conscious awareness and all the other information required to make the body function correctly. The promising thing was that children’s brain were more plastic than adults which meant their neurons could regenerate, so with time, the partial paralyses could be alleviated by properly exercising the limbs. Also, stem cell and genetic engineering by that time was making promising leaps. The only problem with conditions similar to his sister’s was that even if the cortical neurons are regenerated the information and the memory wouldn’t be retrieved. In other words, it would be like having a damaged computer. Even if you could restore the corrupted hardware, there would be the chance that the corrupted or deleted files would not be able to be restored without a backup.

  Young Nimrod thought that a large portion of his sister’s memory and personality was already backed up in his own brain since he used to play and spend a lot of time with her. He remembered everything about her: her personality, her voice, and what made her happy or sad. He thought if science advanced enough it should be able to track his sister’s data and information in his own brain and then it s
hould be able to transfer it back to his sister’s brain.

  ***

  Young Nimrod began his scientific journey at a very early stage of his life spending most of his time reading lots of recent papers and books on his sister’s condition. He emailed various labs around the world faking his age and representing himself as an interested PhD student through which he was able to share many of his ideas with them. He was hoping that some of his ideas would be taken seriously, and he himself was working on the details as he have already found some theoretical solutions for his sister’s condition. He thought that by the end of the following year that he would have a complete model and design on how to fix and restore the permanent cortical brain damage. However, the technicality was still a major obstacle for him, he needed some time to arrange for the necessary tools and equipment to achieve the intended goal. Nevertheless, everything now appeared clear to him that within a short time he would be curing his sister and apologizing to her again.

  That day he came back from the school skipping all the way home from happiness. As his mother opened the door for him she saw her smart young son with a wide smile on his face.

  “Mother, I promise you will see my sister recover. I have found out how to cure her condition, so just wait for me!” he said to his mother eagerly.

  “I’m proud of you, son, and I believe you can do it,” she said.

  In the night, Young Nimrod arranged the list of things he needed to collect to build his own lab and translate his theories into practice. He thought to himself, ‘Everything is ready. Now, I can keep my promise to my mother and not only protect my sister but save her too.’ He remembered his father’s strong words which had ignited the god inside of him again. ‘I’m now much stronger, much smarter. I have taken the challenge from Nature and I will win soon. I feel like I’m God,’ he thought to himself.