Code of Disjointed Letters: ( Doomsday Will Arise From the Past (10 page)

“I give you my prayer of protection,” Hıdır murmured.

I nodded my head in gratitude. “But what can I give you?” I murmured, embarrassed and with a shaky voice.

The cleric smiled. “Your gratitude is enough.”

The spotlights rose, as did the music, and the host announced that Fatin was eliminated. The rest of us were relieved and exhausted.

No one went to Fatin’s room as he was packing, but Fatin came to me. He placed his hand on my shoulder, and it felt like tarantula hairs touching my skin. Looking directly into my face with his bloodshot eyes, he spoke with a low wheezing that smelled of rotten eggs. “Idiot,” he said. ”Did you think I wouldn’t eliminate you? Did you believe your ridiculous ideas would save you?”

I was about to say something, when he pressed me against the wall and closed my mouth with his other hand. “Shut up! I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the one inside of you. You are only a piece of paper that I write the message on. You only deliver it.” As he was saying all this, his voice broke, accompanied by a shaky, wheezing sound. I suddenly felt nauseous and light-headed.

He moved closer to my ear. “You’re the only connection I have outside of the system; that’s why you still exist. If they are by my side, I can win. And if I win, all the rules change. Eternity will no longer be torture.”

Leaning against the wall with my eyes shut, I bent over and vomited. After wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I looked for him and through blurry vision saw him standing at the door.

Fatin looked at me straight, and his eyes glowed red in the dark. “I’ve learned that you do no harm. That’s why I’m leaving.”

He closed the door.

Mansur Al-Hallaj

The next day, I stayed in my room without talking to anyone and watched the faint light that leaked through my window. I had no strength or energy left. I had fought a long way, but now I felt helpless. I didn’t even have the strength to try to sleep. I went to my desk, took a piece of paper, and carelessly drew a picture of a cube and filled it with scratches. Then I hung the sketch on the wall and sat on the floor and focused my eyes on the figure. This was now my Kaaba, and I was Mansur al-Hallaj, the profound but persecuted Sufist. An honorable man, Mansur al-Hallaj, sat in front of the Kaaba for a month, lost himself, and fasted except for a piece of bread and a sip of water. His only prayer was to ask God to forgive the ones who’d tortured him. The last words he spoke were “
A-la-Haq”
(I’m God).

I closed my eyes and began my own meditation. Even though I hadn’t lost the contest, I had lost my self-confidence, and I realized that I existed only thanks to the help of others. I saw myself standing somewhere alone on a faraway plane of paper—a place where one could see without eyes nor feel without touch. Time stopped. Here in this dimension, there was no need for food, water, or even air. I was only an ego—far away from everything but close as well. It was as if I had taken a DVD of all my experience and was looking at it not from the inside but from the outside. Maybe everything
was
written.

I don’t know how much time had passed when I heard Ender’s voice.

“
Come on,” he said. “You can’t give up now. Don’t you remember the man screaming for war, even though he was left alone on the battlefield? What happened to that one more chance you demanded? Even one chance is enough for a fight.”

I heard him but couldn’t answer. I couldn’t remember what had happened, and I didn’t understand what the boy was talking about. Then, as my memory began to return, slowly and vaguely, I realized the indigo boy was holding my hand.

“I’ve thought for days since you closed yourself off,” he continued. “I’ve tried to evaluate the available data. Although I don’t know the reason, I believe in every way that you are our only chance. Remember the LED board example I gave? That each lamp wouldn’t know their own duty? Well, I think I have learned my duty, the reason for my existence. There are only hours left before this week’s challenge, and I will prevent you from being eliminated by withdrawing. It is the only thing I can do—but please, you must also do your part.” With that, Ender’s voice grew silent and I couldn’t feel his presence anymore.

Creating Something Together

In the morning, when I awoke, I felt incredibly tired and all my joints rebelled against my movements. My skin was dry and my bones protruded in my hands. When I saw my face, it wasn’t the same. I didn’t recognize myself. My two still-bright-blue eyes were the only features that resembled me.

I just barely noticed the instructions on the table.

Dear Competitors,

Our subject for this week’s contest is “Creating Something Together.” The remaining three competitors will create and present a brand new invention. The competitor with the weakest contribution to the project will be eliminated—this week, the public’s vote will count.

Good luck,

BBM Coordinator

Note: All the materials you will need for your invention will be provided to you.

I wondered if they were aware of the philosophical objections to what they proposed. Suddenly, the picture of the Kaaba I had hung on the wall caught my attention. Something had been written on it in a childish script:

If you’re reading this, I’ve managed to turn you back.

GOOD LUCK

I looked at the image of the Kaaba. A spot had been circled, and in it, in bold capital letters and underlined was a single word:
WATER
. After thinking of the boy and what he’d done, a sweet smile formed on my lips.

When I entered the lounge, the last two competitors were sitting quietly. When they saw me, a bittersweet joy swept over both of them. Unexpectedly, Feryal stood up, and hugged me. “We’re happy you’re back,” she said.

Hıdır came over as well and put his hand on my shoulder. “Welcome back, son. You scared us. When the boy said he would disqualify himself and give you a chance, we tried very hard to convince him otherwise, thinking that you would do the same. But, he had already decided. But yes, we’re glad you’re back.”

“Yes, and now we can end the competition properly,” Feryal added.

I thanked them both and sat down to join in their chat. “This week’s competition is really interesting. They want the remaining three of us to invent something. They must be wondering what will come from three such different disciplines.”

“
I know one thing that won’t happen—we can’t create food.” Dr. Özel smiled.

Hidir smiled as well and looked deep in thought. I decided to follow Ender’s advice and move the conversation to my work.

“While we think, would you be open to going over my work?” I asked. “Maybe we will discover something new about the code using all of our disciplines. Maybe we can show the audience a different perspective and all that it offers,” I continued.

“That will be very challenging, young man,” Hidir said. “After all the billions of people and accumulation of years, discovering something new will be very difficult.”

“But we need to try. We owe it to Ender to try. Let me suggest a topic, and then we can see where the conversation takes us.”

“You mean brainstorming,” Dr. Özel said.

I nodded my head.

The scientist and the cleric looked at each other as if they were surprised and a little excited.

“Go on,” Hidir urged. “What is the topic?”

“Water,” I said, starting the conversation. “Water is a magnificent structure that gives life to all living things; it is indispensable as well as mysterious, and something we neglect since we always have it. After all, we only notice it when we are in need of it.”

After a moment of silence, Feryal took on her typical posture as lecturer. “A good start. Let me add to that. Under normal conditions water is fluid. But at a full one hundred degrees, it changes its form, suddenly becoming steam—a form that has nothing to do with the previous one.”

“What is your point, professor?” Hidir asked.

“If you were a fish whose entire life was spent in water,” she explained, “you would bet that water didn’t have any other characteristics and, since you would never be able to see it, you would think that such a thing as steam was impossible.”

Hidir and I nodded, pleased at her explanation.

“Now think about it the other way,” she continued. “At zero degrees, the same fluid—warm, odorless, and transparent—becomes a crystal structure with an actual volume and solid form that has lost its transparency. It is as if a magical wand had touched it!

“Now let’s once again imagine ourselves as beings in a body of water that has never dipped down to zero or risen as high as one hundred degrees. No matter how broad-minded we were, no matter how we used our minds to question the past or the future, no matter how we combined our talents and knowledge as living beings, it would never, ever cross our minds that the water we knew could form such a structure, thus we wouldn’t predict steam,” she explained.

Hidir jumped in then. “Yes, I think I understand your meaning. You are saying that when someone who had experienced steam tried to tell those beings in the water about it, they might listen to him, but their brains would prevent them from believing it because they would have never experienced it before. Likewise, if another creature who’d experienced water in its solid form told them about ice, they again would be skeptical.”

“Exactly,” Feryal said, clasping her hands together. “But those three forms of water currently exist in our world. The whole story of life relates to their existence, and our minds allow us to create related metaphors. Still, if someone came from another dimension or universe and said there was another form of water, we, with our inexperienced states and weak minds, would remain skeptical.

“Currently, the universe we observe and perceive, and the laws governing it are like the fluid form of water. However, time and various phenomena could turn the universe into something governed by laws and characteristics that we don’t yet know. However, unlike transformations of water, this transition may occur suddenly when the appropriate conditions are provided. But, as we have never seen it, we cannot predict what it is or experiment with it. At this point, we come up against a brick wall.”

There was a long silence after that as Feryal sat back in her chair and Hidir and I pondered her argument. I finally decided to add something.

“If I went to a man who lived a thousand years ago with a CD in my hand and said, ‘All the knowledge you need is written and recorded here,’ the man would not believe me. No matter how hard I tried to explain it to him, I wouldn’t be able to. I would struggle and finally give up. So I would probably say, ‘When the right time comes, you’ll understand.’ What I mean is that, for certain conditions to happen, we need to evolve and the infrastructure of our brain needs to develop so that we can notice and understand something.”

“That’s true,” Feryal said, leaning forward again. “If we go back to the example of water, note that all the substances in the universe are formed by the same particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, the bottom quark, the top quark, et cetera. These particles form the same atoms but different molecules. To repeat a frequently given example, in World War I, chlorine gas was used, and it was so harmful and fatal that it is now forbidden. And sodium on its own is a completely flammable substance. But when these two volatile elements are combined, they turn into table salt. The chlorine inside is the same toxic chlorine that kills human beings and animals, but it becomes salt with sodium.”

“Water is the same,” she continued. “Two unrelated flammable and caustic gases are combined together and form our source of life. Water is the same on the summit of the mountains in Nepal as it is in a dewdrop on the grass in Istanbul. It presents the same characteristics everywhere. It’s not important where the main components forming it were before or what kind of function they had—they are now water.”

“There is a Japanese researcher who even claims that water has a memory. He claims it remembers all previous situations and events and carries that data everywhere within it—just like our DNA,” she added.

Hıdır joined the conversation again. “As you know, human beings are 75 percent water. I have seen it myself how water relieves people by absorbing the energy and serenity inside during a prayer or invocation. It does so especially when the Qur’an is read by a human voice. As you said, Feryal, water has a memory, and a given drop of water may have passed through the gills of a fish in the sea, the fog on top of a high mountain, and the smoke of a factory chimney. Indeed, that drop embeds everything it sees and experiences into its memories forever.”

Suddenly, the picture on my wall and Ender’s note came back to my mind.

“I have a question,” I said, turning to Hidir. “Water itself, as you say, is special, but can it be even more special when it is holy water?” I asked. “Like the holy water in Christianity: water with spiritual aspects—like the water in the Kaaba!”