Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati (4 page)

Chapter 5

TNARK project was the most ambitious science project in the 21
st
century. It was started 30 years ago by a group of amateur researchers at Cambridge University where a famous genetic scientist, Catherin Smith, proposed a study detailing the possibility for genetic engineering to modify human genes in order to create a super organism. Essentially, this would entail combining the best genes from all the other species in the animal kingdom. Her lab was able to generate a hybrid human-crocodile skin, and the modified skin looked like human’s skin but was as tough as the crocodile’s and resistant to cuts and abrasions. Hence Prof. Smith concluded that as genetic engineering advances, they would be able to do the same for all other human body parts to create a biological super organism.

In her famous TED talk, she criticized the common view among some AI and computer scientists that saw the next stage of evolution as the end of carbon based organic life and the start of non-organic life such as highly intelligent robots. She said, “Human extinction is not an option because our genes are programmed to survive and they will fight until the very end. Even if we were optimists and believed that science could someday transfer human consciousness into a robot, there is no guarantee that rigid metallic bodies could survive the unseen threats posed by Nature any better. We need to adapt ourselves by continuously reproducing and mutating to produce different variations of a trait then the natural selection would pass the best traits to the next generation. Nature has done a great job so far; however, humans can make the process much faster through genetic engineering technology.”

Someone from the conference asked Catherin whether a metallic robot could also adapt itself as it could be made to intelligently redesign and clone itself. Catherin was used to replying to this type of question, “Nothing can beat organic compounds in their ability to adapt fast and efficiently. All the diversity in organic materials comes from various combinations of only four elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. They make up nearly everything organic from oil to meat to the fruit you eat. Can you tell me any metallic material which produces compounds with such huge variabilities in their physical properties? Not only that, but these four elements are also among the most abundant elements in the universe. An organism either needs to be in the final stage of its evolution, which means that it can survive any imaginable catastrophe in our universe from the melting temperatures of hot suns to the crushing forces of black holes. In this case, this super organism is immune to extinction and doesn’t need to change and upgrade itself farther. However, if the organism is not in its final form it will have to be able to clone and adapt itself when facing a new challenge. Imagine if such an organism was made from rare elements in the periodic table such as iron or uranium. How could it multiply and increase if it’s made from scarce elements? It would definitely face extinction at some point and that is why I would not think that the next stage of our evolution is going to be non-organic.”

      Although Prof. Catherin Smith was labeled as the mother of TNARK project because of her influence and her detailed research on how to make hybrid organic tissues, she was not involved in the project by herself. TNARK project had started as an amateur idea in 2030 but had gradually grown to be a massive project with more than a thousand high profile scientists working on it. It drew the focus of many scientists after the famous astrophysicist Prof. Neil Baron threatened that life on earth would soon be over if science didn’t do something about the huge meteor heading toward earth and due to hit in 2068.

TNARK stood for ‘
T
he
N
ew
ARK
’, in homage to the ancient Noah’s Ark which purportedly saved life on earth from a great flood and the initial TNARK proposal was to build a spaceship which could save all life forms on earth by selecting not only a pair of each species but the entire human population too. Due to the technical challenges facing the designers despite the huge advances in technology, social media mercilessly started to mock the idea by questioning the size of the spaceship. The jokes also served to hurt believers of Abrahamic faith who believed in the original Noah’s Ark.

The obvious question was that even if the spaceship was successful, where would everyone go? The usual answer was Mars, Venus, or the moons of Jupiter. The Chinese billionaire and CEO of the largest 3D printing company, Lee Shark, made an intriguing proposal stating that if TNARK’s spaceship was successful, he would offer many of his large and expensive 3D printing machines to print houses or even entire cities on those planets in a matter of a few months. Lee’s idea was not fiction. In fact, 3D printing devices were already in work and were printing anything with unprecedented speed and negligible costs, however, the big problem was that all the planets in the solar system were inhabitable for human life. Life had evolved to survive the earth’s gentle environment not the very hot Venus or the very cold Mars.

The famous astrophysicist, Neil Baron, thought that not only should we be able to adapt to our surrounding environment, but we should be also able to change the environment to suit us too. Although it sounded difficult, Neil was convinced that in order to maximize survivability we should find efficient ways to deflect meteors and even to change the weather on planets in our solar systems to make them habitable to suit our needs. One way to achieve this was to change their rotational speed around their axis. For instance, Venus, a very hot planet with a thick atmosphere, takes about 116 earth days to rotate around itself making it have very long days and very long nights. Its weather could become better if we could speed up its rotation around itself, and this could make the thick gas layer surrounding the planet disperse and make the planet colder. Also, we could make some very distant and cold planets hotter by stopping their rotations around themselves. This would make the sun facing surface hotter and hence suitable for life.

For a while, TNARK started a subproject called TNARK-planet lead by Neil to investigate the plausible ways of changing planetary rotations, and although he made detailed proposals for the project, due to the huge expenses, TNARK gave up on Neil’s project and sought alternative ways to save life on earth from the Doomsday Meteor.

In time everyone came back to the original ideas proposed by Catherin which were to try to genetically engineer a super-organism which could survive harsh environments and adapt itself further when needed. To understand how scientists could achieve this, Catherin often used this example. “If all the species on earth were placed on another very hot planet, not all of them would suffer equally from the new environment. Some could endure the hot surface easily such as desert ants or the Pompeii worm. Likewise, if you put all of earth’s species on a very cold planet, polar bears and penguins were likely to endure and survive longer. Similarly, if all the species were placed on a heavy plant with an extreme gravitational pull, birds and small animals would suffer though large muscular animals would cope better.”

In short, it was clear that natural selection had already found the solutions on earth for such hostile environments. The only problem was not all species shared these traits, but if the virtues of all species were combined into one organism, the resulting super organism could survive any other planet in our solar system.

***

Initially, many of the proposals of the TNARK project were mere science fiction, but because of the real threat proposed by the Doomsday Meteor, the project attracted clever minds from all around the world. It became a lab for imagination where everyone proposed his cutting edge ideas for survival which were then reviewed by leading scientists in their field. In this way, many other side projects and amazing inventions came from TNARK. It became clear that TNARK-project was useful for scientific advancement even if it couldn’t achieve its intended goal. The global support for the project grew day by day and it came from local and international governments. Huge international companies started to invest and fund different offshoots of the project.

Bernhard Johnson was TNARK’s chairman in 2060. He was a well-known neurosurgeon and researcher, and during his period the project did complete genetic mapping for nearly all the animal and plant species on earth. It also ranked all the traits based on their survivability in various harsh environments. Now after 30 years from the project’s start, its first super organism ideas had become almost a reality as scientists were starting to make animal hybrids from very different kinds of species. For instance, they were able to isolate the genes that made up the respiratory system of an aquatic animal and made a hybrid lung for an experimental monkey which was able to breath underwater. This was the crowning achievement of the project and was celebrated all around the globe. The super organism was no longer just a dream.

Some scientists began to think about post solar system survival and what could be the final form of evolution. The celebrated evolutionary biologist Prof. Schwartz suggested that humanity’s final enemy in the universe were black holes. These were invisible dense stars with huge gravitational forces that could crush and swallow anything. No information, not even light, could pass through its gravitational field at the event horizon, the point of no return where space itself was reduced to nothingness. If an organism was able to survive the event horizon, then ta da! It would be the ultimate super organism with no further need to upgrade.

It was unthinkable to survive a black hole, but some physicists suggested that if two equally massed black holes met when their event horizons touched together, an organism might be able to pass through them as the gravitational force exerted would be equal on either side. A gazillion virtual particles would be generated in this narrow space between the two black holes which may even work as a fertile medium for an organism who needs to evolve further at the level of subatomic particles.

One last question remained majorly unsolved in TNARK project was how someone’s consciousness could be transferred to a super organism. Among all the other scientific fields, neuroscience were still behind due to the complexity of a human’s brain and the remaining riddle of consciousness. To solve the issues, Prof. Ericson Sanders, a leading neuroscientist at TNARK, asked companies to direct their funds toward this field so that it could catch up with the other fields.

The current proposal for transferring consciousness was to scan and record all the connections between all the neurons inside a human brain, and then by using a special 3D Bio-printer, print the brain tissue with all its neuronal connections again into the body of the super organism.

Chapter 6

Hast headed to the Erbil international airport to catch his plane to the UK to meet Mark and visit TNARK headquarters. Mark had told him that he had already made an appointment to meet Prof. Ericson Sanders, the leading neuroscientist at TNARK. Two days before the trip, Hast did some online search investigating about TNARK project and it became clear to him that looking for the Antichrist in TNARK would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. After all, the project had over a thousand scientists in addition to a huge number of funding organizations and affiliations. Nevertheless, Prof. Sanders seemed to be a good starting point for their investigation because his lab had close connections with the Virtual-world™.

Ericson’s lab provided the commercial gaming company with the cutting edge brain reading techniques and the company used these in their gaming consoles. In return, the Virtual-world™ provided Ericson’s lab with the data they collected from recording brain signals from gamers’ brains through the game controlling helmet.

As Hast remembered what Mark has told him about the suspicious gaming helmet he began to ask himself ‘How could a blue light emitter installed on a helmet be used for mind control?’ He typed key words ‘blue light brain control’ into Google and to his surprise he found many web pages talking about scientific experiments controlling monkey’s brain with a blue light! There was even a separate neuroscience field on it called optogenetics. Several YouTube videos showcased an optogenetics application where a controller was attached to a mouse’s brain by a wire, and at its end a small diode was installed that emitted blue lights. These directed the mouse to the left or to the right. To Hast’s shock many of the videos had been published back in 2010! ‘Oh my God, this is real! If they could do that 50 years ago, what they can do now!’

He realized his findings might not be new to Mark and this might explain why the set of 120 unexplained blue light emitters on the helmet drew Interpol’s attention to the matter. Hast kept thinking about his shocking finding before boarding the plane to London. ‘The Antichrist is probably already here and plotting to diverge us from the true God ∞Illuhim∞ through mind control.’ With this fear rising in him, he recited to himself, ‘God help us all.’

Chapter 7

Hast arrived at London’s Heathrow airport early in the morning. He was due to meet Mark and then they were to take a train together to a small town 10 miles north of Cambridge where TNARK headquarters resided. While there, they had a late morning appointment with Prof. Sanders at his office to take a tour of his lab.

“Hi Hast. I’m here,” Mark called from in front of the arrivals exit. “Let’s hurry up to catch a tube to Kings Cross station; otherwise, we will miss the next train to Cambridge.”

“By the way, do you know about optogenetics?” Hast tried to start a conversation while rushing toward the exit.

“Yes, I have read about it,” Mark answered.

“Do you think the blue light emitters were put in by an optogenetics expert?” Hast asked.

“That is quite possible. I guess Prof. Sanders should know about that and he might have had a hand in it, so we shouldn’t immediately bring this topic up to him,” Mark claimed. “I will try to ask him some random questions and let’s see if he mentions it by himself.”

“Oh, I see. You want to monitor his behavior,” Hast said feeling that they might be close to finding the culprit.

“By the way, Ericson is Jewish. Do the prophecies say anything about the race of the Antichrist?” Mark asked.

“Well, the prophecies do say that the Antichrist will be a man who descends from the ancient Babylon, one of the first cradles of human civilization,” Hast said. “But you know, ancient Babylon no longer exists, but now most people around the world in some way or another may have past descendants from ancient Babylon.”

“So he could be any race?” Mark asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Hast replied.

“That is not helpful in narrowing the suspect,” Mark said frustratingly.

Before they caught the train to Cambridge, Hast saw a big poster hanging down from a building advertising the recent hit movie,
The Rise of the Antichrist
. Hast had watched the movie twice in the cinemas and nearly watched all the online trailers and interviews about the movie. He thought the movie was the first massively successful religious blockbuster movie in decades! Although followers of different sects of Abrahamic faiths didn’t agree on some details presented in the movie, they all agreed that the basic plot was reasonably accurate.

“Have you watched
The Rise of the Antichrist
movie?” Hast asked.

“No,” Mark replied.

“I think you should watch it, although I don’t agree with their depiction of the Antichrist, but it was a good movie,” he said.

“It was on my list to watch but now I have you,” Mark said.

“Don’t depend solely on me! You should watch it too,” Hast said laughing. “It is quite informative about the Abrahamic views of the end-days.”

Hast thought it was surprising how only recently the movie industry had started to appreciate the religious stories told in the holy§cript. A few years ago the story of Adam and Eve was also made for the big screen and before that there were remakes of
The Exodus
and
Noah
. ‘The industry is changing; they are finally seeing the beauty of Abrahamic faith and its meaningful tales,’ Hast thought.

“By the way, on something more serious,” Mark said suddenly interrupted Hast’s thoughts. “Last night on the news, Russia declared that they are missing one of their portable nuclear bags and the USA is now accusing Russia of selling the nuclear weapon on the black market to the terrorists. Have you read about it?”

“Oh. God that is scary,” Hast said. “Do you think it’s related to the Antichrist?”

“I don’t know. I was asking you,” Mark said. “Does the Antichrist want to destroy the world according to the prophecies?”

“Well, the Antichrist wants to control the world but…,” Hast paused briefly then suddenly he remembered. “Oh my God, the second major prophecy. The third world war is near!”

“Are you saying the holy§cript predicts the third world war?” Mark asked.

“One of the major signs of the end-days is the increase in the number of wars, but the Antichrist will only appear after the final one, which is unfortunately according to the scripture the most horrific one.”

“So you are saying that the Antichrist is not personally responsible for initiating the war?” Mark wondered.

“Well, the prophecy is unclear about that. It just says that the Antichrist appears right after the last major world war,” Hast said.