Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati Read online

  He remembered the day when he forced himself to forget about his little sister and tried to get rid of her picture through burning it. He looked straight into her bright eyes which had survived the burn, and saw innocence, purity, love, and everything could have been seen through her eyes. The flashback of his sister’s seizures, pain, and suffering all came back to his memory. ‘I failed to save you despite considering myself a god, in fact I was responsible for your condition. My anger made you stress out and become vulnerable to the condition that took your life! I have been an arrogant person outside but nothing inside. I couldn’t keep any of my promises. I had promised my mother to protect you but I failed. Above all that, I tried to burn your picture and dismiss you from my memories!’ he thought to himself while tears and rage from his past behavior took over him. ‘I swear that is not me. I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t keep his promises. I’m not the kind of person who gives up easily, so just wait and see. I will bring you back even if I need to change the rules of physics!’

  ***

  According to the theory of relativity, time is relative and it can be made to pass slower or faster depending on the speed of a reference frame, however, the change in time is barely detectable unless on frame velocities approaching the speed of light, and according to the theory, time would stop when the speed of a frame reaches the speed of light! Although Einstein’s theory set the ultimate possible velocity to be the speed of light in a vacuum, some physicists suggested that in a hypothetical case if a frame passed the speed of light then time could be reversed.

  The technicality of the procedure to make things move faster than light was impossible to be achieved anytime soon. Young Nimrod knew this, and he also was aware that the entire thing was out of his league. No matter how much he studied, or how smart he became, he would never ever be able to invent a time machine by himself. Luckily, that time in 2040, there was a respected science project called TNARK which had started ten years ago and all the scientific media were talking about it due to its ambitious futuristic goals.

  The project’s aim was to imitate Noah’s ark, but not by taking a pair of every animal species into a ship and saving them, but by taking the best genetic characteristics from all the animal species and combining them into one body which would result in a super smart and a super powerful organism which could survive any environment.

  Young Nimrod thought if TNARK project was successful in transcending humans into super-humans, their immortal bodies could survive the crushing forces of the black holes. Hence, a super-human could safely pass through the wormhole, a bridge for space-time travel at the center of black-hole, without disintegrating inside it due to the immense gravitational force. ‘If I have the immortal super-body, I could travel back in time using a wormhole bridge at the center of one of the black holes to save my sister in the past,’ he thought to himself.

  Young Nimrod’s attention diverted toward the TNARK project. All his plans since then were how to get closer to that project and participate within it. He felt lucky that he lived in a time where such a trans-humanic project did exist. However, one thing puzzled him: if time travel was possible, then why he hadn’t he seen any super-humans coming back yet? Was it because time travel was impossible or that the future super-humans deliberately chose not come back? He kept thinking about this puzzle until one day he saw a TV interview with the renowned astrophysicist, Neil Baron. The interviewer asked him some questions about the time travel.

  “Do you think time travel is possible?” the interviewer asked Neil.

  “There is no question about that. Einstein’s theory of relativity clearly says that ‘time’ is a relative concept. It can be slowed down, sped up, or even reversed depending on the relative movement of one frame to another frame,” he answered.

  “Then why hasn’t anyone come back from the future at least to say ‘Hi’ to us?” the interviewer asked.

  “To be able to say ‘Hi’ to your past or to the people in your past, you would need to go back in time as an independent observer,” Neil answered. “I don’t really know how someone could do that, but my guess would be that even if you could do that, you couldn’t change your past because your present depends on it.”

  “Even saying ‘Hi’ to your past can change it?” the interviewer asked eagerly.

  “Even saying ‘Hi’,” Neil confirmed. “It’s like the butterfly effect. Think of it as a movie with a coherent story. Each event in the movie leads to the upcoming event, you can’t simply edit any specific event in such movie without changing the outcome.” He continued, “Let me put it simply, if someone went back in time and killed your great-grandfather, then you would not exist, and if you don’t exist many other things that depend on your existence would not exist too, so the chain would go on forever.”

  “So you are saying the super-humans of the future will never choose to travel back in time?” interviewer said.

  “And why should they? They are now in their perfect form, immortal, and living happily. Why would they choose to disturb their existence?” he said.

  Young Nimrod bit his tongue from rage while watching the interview. ‘How can the future super-humans be so cruel? Seeing a past of pain and suffering but yet deliberately choosing not to come back?’ he asked himself. The content of the TV interview was very disturbing for him because it meant he couldn’t go back to save his sister without making a series of changes to many other interconnected events which could ultimately affect the entire reality. ‘If TNARK is able to produce the super-body in my lifetime, then I will definitely choose to travel back in time to save those who were suffering in the past,’ he thought. ‘I will never accept to live in any attractive future without saving my sister and all the other people who have been sacrificed in the past. The fact that no one has come back from the future to save my sister means that TNARK was not able to produce the super-body in my lifetime and its future outcome is a heartless super-human who doesn’t think like me!’

  Young Nimrod began to realize the horror of the reality he lived in with the terrible, unfair Mother Nature which everyone loved! Evolution itself was entirely based on sacrificing poor creatures who couldn’t survive through Nature’s harsh environments. The survival of the fittest was necessary to filter out faulty genes, and given enough time, evolution would be able to produce a perfect creature which could perfectly pass Nature’s ultimate challenge. A super-human who would become the crowning achievement of evolution, a perfect form that could accommodate and survive any environment. If it came back to its past, it could see the past imperfections, and it would see the sacrifices made for it, but it couldn’t intervene or save those who were suffering in the past because saving them would mean the extinction of the super-human itself. The entire thing was like a one direction path where there is only one winner at the end, and everybody else is just a mere sacrifice for the winner!’ The realization of this unfair reality rendered Young Nimrod completely powerless.

  He looked at the burnt picture of his sister. ‘Every time I think there is hope, the impossible strikes again and all the doors are closed on me!’ he said to himself in a frustrated voice while shedding tears of sorrow. ‘But does a future super-human have a heart? Emotion? Mercy or any good quality? How could it simply live on the pile of sacrifices and sufferings made for it and yet be happy?’ For Young Nimrod, this was morally unacceptable. This was the first time he wished that ∞Illuhim∞ of the Abrahamic faith was real. ‘At least there is some hope in that reality,’ he thought to himself.

  Then he remembered the figure of light he saw during his prayers for his little sister. ‘Was that ∞Illuhim∞ himself?’ he wondered. ‘Could ∞Illuhim∞ himself be a super-human from the future? Could he be the future product of TNARK or something similar?’ he kept thinking then he looked up and shouted in an angry voice, the voice of someone who felt betrayed, “∞Illuhim∞ I know you are up there in your perfect form, living in the Garden of Eden with many angels and looking down upon us!
How could you see my little sister suffering but not save her? I just can’t understand that. Is it because you can’t sacrifice your current perfect state for the past?” He followed “A real god would give up his kingdom and choose to sacrifice himself for everyone”

  ***

  That night Young Nimrod fall into sleep on his desk, but his sleep was full of nightmares. A hopeless dark reality was immersed in broken symmetries as the gods of the future fed upon the sacrifices of their pasts! How unlucky to be born into such a reality! What was our purpose in this universe? Are we here to find the cure for Nature’s imperfections? Are we here to prepare a fertile ground for evolution and merciless Nature so that a god will emerge from our sacrifices? Are we here to serve his existence? Will he appreciate the sacrifices made for him? Will he ever decide to come back in time to end our endless suffering?’ Young Nimrod was immersed deeply in a sleep where these thoughts came back to him repeatedly until the next morning when a ray of light came through the window next to his bench and hit his face. He opened his eyes and lifted his head trying to expose his face fully to the light to escape from the dark nightmares which were still haunting him even with eyes half-opened!

  Suddenly, he saw another door of hope opening to him ‘If super-humans own our future, we own their past,’ he thought. ‘I can change their future by changing their past. I can change the mind of a future super-human by trying to understand how a mind works and how to control it, then I can intervene in TNARK project with a plan to control their future outcome and make it behave like I want.’ He had the crude thought, although he didn’t know the details of his plan, but the idea was an enough fuel to get him going.

  He decided to study more about the human mind to understand it better. By the age of 28 he had already made a fortune, so he began to close himself from many of the world’s big laboratories by either funding their projects or contributing to them directly especially TNARK project since it was the leading trans-humanic project at that time.

  Many years later, TNARK held its annual private meeting among its high profile scientists and funders, and in the meeting the latest findings and technologies that science had reached which could help to make the super-human possible were presented.

  A group of scientists presented their latest achievement in genetic engineering. They showed a model of a body that looked like a human but the underlying structure was a hybrid from many species. They also exhibited organic skin that looked like human skin but was tough, resistant to burns, cuts, and stretching. The internal body was a highly configured system of energy production. It didn’t have stomach, kidney and intestine, because after all the super-body didn’t need food to get energy since it derived its energy directly from nuclear fusion inside him.

  For many scientists, it looked like within years TNARK’s dream would become a reality but their final obstacle was the brain. How could they transfer human consciousness into the super-body?

  There was another problem that came up at the meeting. Some of the elementary materials that were necessary to produce the proposed super-body was extremely scarce! The question which presented itself was: how could they produce a super-body for everyone living on the planet, nine billion super-bodies?!

  According to the group, given the availability of some of the rare but necessary elements such as promethium and yttrium for their project, they could only build few super-bodies! This brought back Catherin’s warnings about using scarce materials in the project. Nevertheless, scientists decided to take advantage of any possible idea that could be successfully implemented in practice without caring much about which elementary materials were being used.

  It was obvious if that proposal was successful, then because of the limited number of super-bodies, only a subset of humanity might be able to take advantage of the trans-humanic projects! This was simply not acceptable among the scientists and everyone insisted that if such project ever became reality then its services should be available to everyone.

  The limited number of the super-bodies which TNARK could produce and the inability to transfer consciousness to these super-bodies became the project’s major enigma. From that moment on, the attention and the effort of all its scientists and contributors was directed toward solving these two remaining issues.

  ***

  In 2050 during the annual private meeting of TNARK, one of the neuroscience laboratories claimed that they came up with a solution for the two riddles at least in theory. They claimed that TNARK didn’t need to make so many copies of the body since the body was immortal and resistant to the threats posed by the universe’s deadly forces, hence, reproduction and gender defining parts were not necessary. For the brain part, they came up with a design that could potentially combine the memories and the conscious awareness of many people into one single super-brain. They called the process ‘Collective Consciousness’.

  The super-brain would be able to hold the memory, personality, opinion, and the conscious awareness of all nine billion people alive together. The Collective Consciousness proposal presented itself in the meeting as the most practical design and the least costly since it required only one super-body, so the committee decided to give huge funds to that solution.

  According to the Collective Consciousness proposal, since all the necessary information that defined human identity and the sense of self-aware are embedded within the configurations of the heavily interconnected neurons inside the brain, then the proposed interconnections between the neurons of the super-brain should be proportional to that of population. There were a lot of differences among people in the way they used their brains to think and remember, but there was a high degree of similarity which was supported by many brain imaging studies.

  For Collective Consciousness to work, the super-brain should be able to fairly represent the entire brain population of all the nine billion brains composing it. Hence, the ‘democracy’ concept came into play, and this involved the ancient idea of combining many brain efforts together through voting. If 90% of people were against ‘something’ then the super-brain should be against that ‘something’ with 90% probability. To achieve that, 90% of the inter-neuronal connections within the super-brain should be arranged in a similar way to the 90% of the brains who voted against that ‘something’ and only 10% of the inter-neuronal connections within the super brain should be arraigned to yield an opposite decision.

  The committee was not 100% happy with the proposal, but it was the most plausible and practical one in their hands at that moment because the neuroimaging technologies for reading inter-neuronal connections were already available, and the large 3D bio-printing companies were already close to be able to bio-print all human organ tissues including the brain tissues.

  There was another non-science related problem associated with the Collective Consciousness proposal and it was discussed intensively during TNARK’s private meeting: What if some people refused to be a part of the Collective Consciousness or opposed it? Some argued that people should have the freedom whether to participate or not and be a part of the super-brain or stay in their current form, similar to evolution where some cells in the past decided to stay as free living amoebas while others combined to form multi-cellular organisms. After all, the purpose of evolution was to maximize the variability among its species so that it increases their chance of survival from unexpected threats which may lead to the extinction of one variety but not another.

  Finally, the committee agreed that the discussion about how many people should participate or not was a political one and it was not of their concern at the moment, but as scientists they should be able to find new ways to save life on earth, otherwise, life would face extinction sooner or later because of various threats such as the Doomsday Meteor.

  ***

  When Young Nimrod received the detailed report from the last private TNARK meeting, the proposal of Collective Consciousness irritated him a lot. ‘They are misunderstanding democracy’ was his initial feeling. ‘How did the
y agree on this plan?’ he asked himself. The problem of democracy for Young Nimrod was evident. With democracy, common ideas would dominate, rare ideas would be dumped, the process wouldn’t recognize the quality of a specific idea, and all it would assess would be quantity! The Collective Consciousness presented the same problem for Young Nimrod. ‘I have the best idea. The best plan to save this world is embedded in my brain, and I’m the only one who possesses a high quality moral ideology that cares about everything. If TNARK made its super-brain to be based on the collective knowledge of nine billion people, then TNARK will be the grave of my ideas. Silly, selfish, common ideas which are shared by the majority of people would excel and dominate over the super-brain! On the other hand, rare but high quality ideals such as mine would be dumped forever and, hence, the ideas of common illiterate and ignorant people would control the most sophisticated super organism in the universe!’

  He realized that this could be one of the reasons why probably nobody had come back from the future yet. ‘If ∞Illuhim∞ is the product of such collective knowledge then no wonder why it is not coming back to save us from our horrors,’ he thought to himself. ‘I need to make some changes. TNRAK has already decided to play by democracy. If they insist on that, I will need to play their game too by making the majority of people to think like me before TNARK is able to build its super-brain. I need to make everyone on this planet think like me, and even if I die, the future generation should think like me. I own the past and I’m currently living it, so I can do something to make future humans think about coming back to save us from this cruel Nature no matter what the odds are.’