Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati (19 page)

“I need to visit my family first,” Hast said while driving the car.

“I thought you said the entire world is in danger if we don’t get to New Delhi soon?” Mark asked to protest against Hast’s proposal to visit his family, but soon he regretted his stance as he thought a father’s feeling toward his son would be immense.

“You are right. I shouldn’t visit my family, after all my family is not more than any other families who are in danger,” Hast replied. “But I need to tell the truth to my wife. We do have very similar views, and she will understand very quickly,” he continued. “I think this will be my last trip, and I need my wife to take on the mission and save people from the Antichrist when I’m gone,” Hast said.

Chapter 31

October 23, 2060 was a sunny day in New York and for Tom it was an exhausting day at work. During his lunch break he found himself a spot on a bench in Central Park to enjoy the hamburger he had bought from McBurger Queen. On his first bite he was quiet satisfied with the taste, so he brought up his hand up to take a look at the contents of the hamburger, but as he extended his hand up and away to enjoy looking at the layers of salad and beef while he chewed, he also saw the vast green field of New York’s famous park. People were laying around, children were playing, and further away there was the compelling view of Manhattan’s famous skyline. The entire view was beautiful.

That moment he remembered his lengthy discussion with his colleagues at work today about the faith-healer, Padsha Mali, and whether he was the Antichrist or just a good guy. One of his colleagues went even further saying that if US government didn’t do something about Padsha Mali, he would soon become the Antichrist and bring destruction to the entire world.

‘What a waste of time,’ Tom thought to himself. ‘Why is everybody nowadays talking about the Antichrist and the signs of end-days? They are more eager to see an apocalypse than the Doomsday Meteor itself! Why shouldn’t we all just enjoy a peaceful life without talking about the end-days?’ he asked himself. ‘Tomorrow, I’ll warn them that if they ever bring up this topic again at work, I will complain to the boss.’

Then he turned around and saw a beautiful lady sitting next to him, and she was looking at him! Tom wasn’t sure whether the lady was making eye contact with him or just looking at his hamburger. He brought his eye back to the hamburger, but he couldn’t see the hamburger anymore, but neither could he see his hand, or anything! Everything in front of him was engulfed in a very bright light, and he instantly had a strange feeling that his entire body no longer existed. He felt that his head was floating in the emptiness! ‘What the hell is happening?!’

This was the first question that came to Tom’s mind as a group of neurons in his brain processed the new information they had received from Tom’s visual center. His logic neurons concluded, ‘If suddenly nothing is visible, then something terrible must have happened. Tom should immediately run away from the danger.’ Once the logic neurons began to process the sensory information so that they could choose which direction Tom should run to, they realized the dilemma. ‘Wait! If everywhere around Tom is now invisible, then where should he run to? And how can he run without a body?’

The intensive signaling forward and backward among the interconnections of different logic neurons had now reached the next solution, ‘We need to make Tom scream, and if we do that, someone will come to help him.’ The logic neurons started to send pulses downward voting ‘yes’ to stimulate the executive neurons, however, before reaching the target, their message was outweighed and inhibited by a group of very conservative logic neurons called dignity neurons voting ‘no’ for screaming.

Conservative logic neurons were a group of neurons whose job was to vote ‘no’ for any new idea that defied a pre-stored protocol in the human’s superego, a list of optimal voting decisions that were filtered with natural selection through millions of years of life and death of members within a species. Since screaming was not completely a new idea, after all, shouting for help was one among the extremely important traits for survival, this decision was not against the standard protocol, however, the voting ‘no’ to screaming came from another group of neurons called dignity neurons, and these were extremely conservative neurons. Their job was to vote ‘no’ against any proposed idea that could affect Tom’s image as a tough and respected gentleman.

Dignity neurons were the reason why Tom existed in the first place. Tom’s mother was attracted to Tom’s father solely because he was a tough guy with a sense of pride. The dignity neurons insisted on voting ‘no’ for screaming because looking tough increased the survival chance of Tom’s genes according to their previous experience in the environment Tom’s ancestral tree came from.

Although the logic neurons tried to look for other solutions but they couldn’t find any because Tom’s current situation was unprecedented. The logic neurons were having a big dilemma; on one hand they were experiencing a very weird condition which looked very serious, a floating head without a body! On the other hand, dignity neurons wouldn’t let their only solution pass. This was Nature’s democratic system where the brain was the parliament, and the neurons were parliament members. Their main goal was to vote for optimal decisions that lead to Tom’s survival or at least the survival of his genes.

Tom was lucky because he had the best parliament members. The decisions coming out from these members made him survive through all difficult life situations thus far, but not all humans were lucky enough to have such clever parliament members. In Tom’s case their votes were fine tuned and hierarchies upon hierarchies of different neurons, diverse opinions, and lots of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voting lead to one outcome, an outcome that either determined Tom’s survival for another day or lead to his final extinction.

Hence, the basic logic neurons began to send some impulses to the advanced logic neurons. These neurons were higher in the hierarchy and their processing of information required more time, but if they decided to vote ‘yes’ for screaming, then the dignity neurons couldn’t override their decision because advanced logic neurons ranked higher than dignity neurons.

The advanced logic neurons concluded, ‘If everything looks white and invisible around Tom, then there is nobody around so Tom can scream without degrading his image in front of anybody…but wait! If nobody is around to help, then what is the use of screaming in the first place?’ The advanced logic neurons stuck into a loop without being able to decide ‘yes’ or ‘no’!

That moment memory neurons at hippocampus came to help as they sent information to the advanced logic neurons reminding them that Tom was at Central Park and was surrounded by many people who could potentially come to help. That moment the loop broke and the advanced logic neurons were about to vote ‘yes’ for screaming, but just before that happened, more specific memory information came from the hippocampus reminding the advanced logic neurons that there was also a beautiful lady making eye contact with Tom! The advanced logic neurons began to re-think. ‘The beautiful lady making the eye contact with Tom could be into tough guys, hence, she had the potential to become a future mother for Tom’s children!’ At that moment, the advanced logic neurons switched their vote to ‘no’ for screaming siding with the dignity neurons.

One billion years ago when the first logic neurons appeared in the first host, they were able to survive and pass themselves to the off-spring hosts recreating different copies of themselves in different hosts, with some luck and some wise decisions they kept spreading and copying themselves with their main responsibility being to maximize their survival by learning from their host’s life experience and their surrounding environment. With time as their host needed to adapt and change while facing new challenges and new environments, the logic neurons diversified into different subgroups like: memory neurons, feeling neurons, basic logic neurons, liberal and conservative neurons, dignity neurons, etc.

Some of the very highly ranked neurons became ‘pain neurons’ and their job was to make their host uncomfortable when he/she was in danger so that their host would either run away from the source of the dange
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or at least scream for help, but to assess whether a situation was dangerous or safe, another group of neurons acquired analytical abilities and became the basic logic neurons. These neurons further diversified into conservative logic neurons and liberal logic neurons.

The conservative logic neurons acquired a ‘good past experience’ saving ability. This was their logic for assessing what was dangerous and what was not and it was very simple: since their host survived so far, that meant what their host was doing so far was good for survival, so let us keep repeating that and avoid doing new unexplored things.

However, this logic was severely counteracted by the liberal logic neurons, and their logic was more complex: if we keep staying in the same environment and repeating the same things, then we will not have the chance to discover many new things in this reality which could later prove to be useful for survival so let’s explore and try new things. Unfortunately, this logic came at a big price for the short term which was risking the life of many hosts and sacrificing them for the possible greater good in the long term.

Among these two groups, neurons diversified into more extreme subgroups such as ‘dignity neurons’ which were set to vote ‘no’ for anything new without compromise, and ‘far-liberal neurons’ which were set to embrace or try anything new without thinking too much about the consequences. The proportion of these two subgroups varied a lot among the hosts living on earth depending on the environment each host grew in.

As for Tom, the supporters for dignity neurons were far outnumbering their opponents, hence, things got extremely tough for the basic logic neurons to pass on their only proposed solution for Tom’s current situation. ‘We need to do something. We can’t simply give up now after so many years of successful decisions. We don’t want to fail now!’ The basic logic neurons reached the conclusion that Tom’s condition was so serious that there was no room for dignity here, and democracy would not help at this stage because the dignity neurons would not listen and their supporters in this current host were too many! Hence, they decided to ask for emergency laws to be applied to inhibit the dignity neurons temporarily.

The basic logic neurons began to send impulses to the ABC-survival neurons. The ABC-survival neurons were at a lower hierarchy than the logic neurons but they had direct communication with the highest cognitive brain centers including the highly ranked pain neurons. The basic logic neurons sent their complaints to these neurons reporting the situation as extremely dangerous. The ABC-survival neurons immediately sent extreme warnings to the pain and conscious centers at the highest level neurons in the hierarchy to apply the emergency law and strip the dignity neurons from their voting rights.

Once the highly ranked pain neurons received the warning from ABC-survival neurons, they began the process of generating an uncomfortable feeling that would make Tom experience a very severe pain consciously; a pain that would urge him to forget his own name, a pain so severe that would make him scream like a one year old child!

So far only 900 milliseconds had passed since all these back and forth votes were happening in the subconscious of Tom’s brain. Now the conscious feeling of the situation and the pain started to emerge for Tom, however, the conscious processes required much more time and effort. Before Tom began to feel actual pain, everything became dark and he disappeared into a void. He had been sitting only 100 meters from a detonated nuclear bomb!

Chapter 32

Hast and Mark were now at the airport heading toward their private jet to fly to Padsha Mali’s town near New Delhi again. Moments ago, Hast met his wife and little son to say farewell to them, and he revealed Antichrist’s horrific plan to them. It was too late, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything to prevent the upcoming catastrophe. Regardless, Mark and Hast decided to go to New Delhi where the Antichrist’s destination was. Mark looked at the news from his mobile and realized that the beginning of the horror had already started.

“Oh, God! The news says a nuclear explosion happened at the center of Manhattan just now,” Mark said in shock.

“The Antichrist is going to ignite a nuclear war between the world’s big powers to make them busy while worse is planned,” Hast said.

Mark called Interpol again to warn them about possible global earthquakes and tsunamis, and he told them the name of the main suspect responsible for all of these and he urged Interpol to send extra forces to New Delhi where they would be able to arrest the suspect, but before he could finish saying everything to Interpol, his cellphone connection was interrupted.

“Stupid Interpol,” Mark said once he realized the connection interrupted. “They didn’t take my previous warnings seriously enough.”

“I don’t blame them. It’s hard to convince anyone with this story, but I hope they act quickly now,” Hast said.

“I wasn’t able to tell them everything before the connection was lost,” Mark said in a frustrating voice.

***

Meanwhile in Russia, the head of the Russia, President Dimitri Pavlov, along with his own ministers were in an urgent meeting in a deep underground secret basement near the city of Orenburg. They were all sitting around a long table while a big screen showed live views from Moscow and other major cities in Russia.

The ministers were involved in an intensive discussion about what should they do or expect after hearing the horrible news of the nuclear detonation in New York. All their satellite based communications with the world had been disrupted for an unknown reason! The Russian authorities tried hard to condemn the act and to say they were innocent, but because of the worldwide sudden disruption in communications, their message was not widely spread or heard everywhere properly. Now they were afraid of an inappropriate reaction from the other side.

“We should act now before they destroy all our cities,” one minister said.

“But why will they blame us? We have nothing to do with what has happened,” the president replied.

“The US government will not believe us; they were accusing us from the beginning of planning against them when one of our nuclear bags went missing,” the minister of foreign affairs said.

“Do you think the US hacked our satellite system so that we would not be able to do anything while they are preparing to attack us?” Dimitri said to the defense minister.

“We still have our wired and non-satellite based communications intact with our nuclear weapon bases, so we can still attack them on your orders!” the minister of defense replied.

The discussions went on for a while whether or how they should they act if the US attacked them, and how should they defend themselves if what they feared happened.

At that moment, one of the ministers who was sitting near the big screen shouted with a thrilled voice, “I HAVE AN IDEA! This idea could save us all and prevent the third world war,” he said eagerly.

Everybody in the room turned toward him, but soon blood left their faces as what they saw on screen brought shock and fear!

“My idea is …,” he continued.

“The third world war has already started,” someone interrupted him. “Look behind you!”

He turned to the screen to see that his brilliant idea to stop the third world war had already vanished! It was too late to prevent it. The live view screen was showing a huge and scary mushroom cloud over their beloved capital Moscow!

“How dare they attack our capital without even waiting for a day?!” the president said angrily.

“We don’t know if it’s them. It could be the same terrorists who stole our nuclear bag,” the foreign affair minister said.

“I’m sure it’s the US government. The mushroom cloud is huge, and they are the only one who have the power to hack into our satellite system and own such a massively destructive hydrogen bomb,” the minister of defense said. “Now please let us answer them appropriately before they annihilate us.”

President Dimitri thought there was no other option at this stage. Their only communication and messaging with USA will now have to be through nuclear heads, so he brought his secret national security bag onto the table. The bag had several red buttons on it, and it was connected to all their nuclear base powers through different modes of communication systems: earthly wired, wireless, and satellite. These were all to make sure that at least one of them would work in case of a hack or any unexplained malfunctions in the system.

The screen on the bag showed multiple lines and spaces for several passwords, and each password was known and kept by a minister. The final password was only known to the president himself who would have the final say to initiate the process. They had enough nuclear weapons to destroy all the major American cities. Everyone in the room entered their passwords and finally the president pushed the red button which would send the message to all the military commanders around the country to act on their own and gives them the green light to start hitting the predefined targets in the US and its allies in the west.