Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati (15 page)

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 they 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.’

From that day onwards,
Young Nimrod
began seriously to set a plan, an effective plan that could achieve the spread of his presumed high ideals.  He remembered a thrilling technology for brain control that he had come across during his studies. It was called optogenetics, and although it has been around for 50 years, it didn’t have any practical application so far. Its use was mainly restricted to scientific research, but for
Young Nimrod
this technology could have the potential to control people’s minds directly, however, the process was intensive because it involved direct stimulation of the genetically modified neurons by pulses of blue light which required opening the skull and exposing the brain tissue directly to achieve the stimulation.

He created a detailed plan with its execution spanning over several years. His master plan was to make as many people as he could on earth think like him, share his ideals, and to think about everyone’s suffering not only in the present but in the past too. ‘What is gone is not gone. What is gone has to be fixed.’ This was the new motto people should believe in, according to
Young Nimrod
. ‘We should not submit to Nature. Nature has to submit to us. We are not bound by the rules of physics. The rules of physics are bound by our beliefs.’ These were the new ideals
Young Nimrod
kept thinking about and how to impose them upon everyone. ‘If I make more people think like that then TNARK’s super-brain would not rest unless it found a solution for the poor souls and the sufferings in the past.’

He remembered his mother’s words about Nature’s sacrifices to progress herself toward perfection. ‘No mother, you were wrong. Nature made her biggest mistake when she tortured and sacrificed a poor soul in front of me! If this is what Nature has to do to progress, then I’m anti-Nature. If that is the law of the universe, then I’m the lawless,’ he said to himself in a confident voice.

Young Nimrod
also found a loophole in the Collective Consciousness proposal. If an idea was shared by many people, it would dominate over the other solitary ideas. What was more, because the ideas were embedded within heavily interconnected neurons, they were also connected to other separate networks that may hold other ideas which could dominate too even if they were less commonly shared ideas! This problem existed in the Collective Consciousness design because it was inherent within the ‘democracy’ system itself. For instance, the majority of voters may have a strong opinion about some controversial topics such as same-gender marriage or immigration, hence, they might vote for a candidate who strongly shares these views with them on a narrow domain of issues without knowing or caring about whether the same candidate shared with them many other ideas such as the candidate’s views on the health system, economy or taxes. Thus, the candidate’s views on these topics could survive the election and could be imposed upon the public even if they were not shared by the majority of the voters.

Young Nimrod
found that the Collective Consciousness proposal, since it was based on democracy, was strongly liable to the same issues, but these could play to his advantage now that he didn’t need to copy all his ideas to the people. If he made the majority of people follow even a narrow domain of his ideas strongly, then his entire personality could dominate over the TNARK’s super-brain. ‘The future god would be me, or at least thinks and behaves like me,’ he thought to himself.

***

In 2055,
Young Nimrod
had determined his long-term plan which involved several steps:

First, he needed to genetically modify the neurons in the human brain, since a genetically modified virus could do that, all he needed was to work with some biochemical laboratories to build a harmless airborne virus so that it could infect as many as people as were on the planet with it. He also wanted the lifespan of the virus inside the human body to be short and the immunity of the human system to be able to fight and remove the virus from the body, as this would make the evidence disappear and ensure the harmless nature of the virus.

Second, since the blue light couldn’t pass through the human skull, the virus needed to be able to modify the brain neurons to be stimulated by higher frequency lights such as ultraviolet or x-ray as these frequencies had better penetration and could reach deep brain parts such as the amygdala and hippocampus without opening the skull. These brain parts were important for emotion and memory formation, but unlike the cortex, they were situated deep in the brain.

Third, he needed to have access to the brains of a large number of people. Luckily, this was quite possible at his time because of large companies that were using a helmet to interface with their users through reading their emotions and their brain signals like the gaming company Virtual-world™ and the social web page zanzor.com. At that time, it was estimated that 70% of young children and teenagers were already using the helmet for interacting with their games and social media, and that age group was preferable for
Young Nimrod
because of their fresh and adaptable brains.

Fourth, he needed to build and promote for some specifically designed games and online posts that promoted his ideals during the stimulation of the brain parts that were associated with memory and emotion. This would reshape and consolidate the brain of the recipient to be similar to that of
Young Nimrod’s
, and they would gradually dream about similar things and share similar ideals to
Young Nimrod
.

Finally, he began to fund various labs to make his plan possible, but he still needed some new technologies to be invented before he could be able to execute the plan, nevertheless, he was so sure about his plan, that he didn’t even shed a tear when his parents passed away because he was certain that he would find the cure for everything! All he needed was to make sure that the future super-human thought like him and had his morals.

***

By 2058
Young Nimrod
has already spent millions of his own fortune to achieve the plan. He expected to get a reply from the many laboratories he funded and urged them to make the necessary changes in the optogenetics field, but years later, none of the laboratories were able to send him the good news he waited for! He had received emails and reports from several labs detailing their failures in making neurons excitable to ultraviolet or x-rays, and few weeks later he received another report from another laboratory he funded to make a harmless airborne virus for the optogenetics. Again, the report yielded all negative results!