A Crisis of Divine
Page 1
A Crisis of Divine
He sighed and shook his head.
“Gentlemen”, his quiet voice, raspy with age, carried around the room. “It is a sad
day for humanity when in order to save the world, we have to take the greatest mind we
have ever known and dumb it down.”
His words were met with silence but all agreed, no single human mind should hold
all the secrets of the Universe. No single mind ever could. Nevertheless, she existed, a small
child no more than 8 years of age. Already she described the universe in childish but simple
terms. She made it sound simple, the vast and complex cosmos. To curb such a mind was
inhuman, even criminal except they had the backing for such an action, the authorities in
question sanctioning the radical and drastic move. The child’s life would not be terminated.
Could not be terminated. No authority in the world would condone such an action as that,
but the mind of the child still needed to be contained, restrained. Perhaps one day, some
day, the restraints could be lifted, its power harnessed, but for the present, either the
child’s mind burned with its incredible ability or the world did.
The slight clearing of a throat distracted the old man from his reverie and he
frowned with suspicion at the young reporter, feeling sure that the noise had been a
deliberate interruption.
“I’m sorry but what exactly do you mean by either her mind burned or the world
did?” the journalist asked, his tone far from apologetic. The disruption annoyed the old
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man. It broke his train of thought, his free flowing narration. Now he would have to listen to
the young lad, pay attention to him.
“The burning? Ah yes, the burning”, he muttered in reply. “You see, the child was
capable of intense kinetic energy, so intense that it was strong enough to pull on solar
flares, draw them closer to the planet, disrupting everything.”
“Everything?” the younger man interrupted again.
“Solar flares affect everything electrical”, the old man answered, getting snippy.
“Too many flares can heat up the atmosphere, the very air that we breathe. It disrupts the
magnetic poles, affecting our natural force field that would normally protect us from the
impact of these flares. Not to mention the impact on the migration patterns for various
animals and birds.”
“Heat up the atmosphere? So is that the actual cause of global warming?” came the
next question. The old man resigned himself to this disruptive format.
“It may have contributed”, he answered brusquely in minor defiance of the
interruptions. Silence reigned for a moment before being replaced by rustling pages as the
young lad reviewed his notes.
“So you had to contain her mind, but wasn’t that mind the source of so many
developments. Why would you shut that source down?” The intelligence of the question
took the old man a little by surprise.
“It wasn’t a decision we took lightly”, he snapped back, “but you’re correct, because
of her we, humanity, took great technological leaps forward.”
“But how did you contain it?”
“Electrical implants in her brain.”
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“Electrical…? Wouldn’t her kinetic energy field have disrupted the implants, seeing
as they were electrical?” Again, the cleverness of the question threw him somewhat.
“They had to be activated simultaneously, create a containment field.”
“And this technology came from where?”
The old man hesitated.
“From her.” he answered, sounding curt and sharp.
“She voluntarily gave you the mechanism to effectively shut her down?” The
question was harsher than the old man was expecting, almost personal.
“She was too young to know better.”
He fell back into the past again, this time arriving at the day of her graduation,
double honours, with her doctorates. Amazing achievement considering her age and despite
the implants restricting her mind, she had retained some of her intellectual abilities, enough
to have been considered a modest genius. Science and especially astronomy held the
greatest fascination for her and where she made the greatest discoveries. Secrets of the
Universe unfolded under her delicate hands, discovering new particles, new sub-atoms,
while developing others that would enhance life, all life. The stars themselves shone as she
carefully unfolded the secrets they had kept hidden for eons, unfurling the mysteries of
their creation. A new age of Enlightenment was emerging, a new Renaissance.
“And again you tried to stop her, did you?” This time the knock back to the present
was rougher, the tone accusatory, and the old man thought he detected venom in the
timbre.
“Not stop, exactly”, he replied defensively, wondering at the tone and direction this
interview seemed to be taking.
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“Then what was it?”
“We noticed the same phenomena with the solar flares. The danger was more than
apparent”, the old man replied using righteous indignation to fuel his sense of authority
over this jumped up news hack.
“That just happened to coincide with the naturally occurring 11-year cycle of the
sun,” the young man stated. “No co-incidence then? No possibility that the reverse could be
true, that solar flares actually enhanced her own ability rather than being the product of
her?” The old man grew more incensed as the interview progressed, furious that his
scientific expertise and judgement seemed to be sustaining the brunt of an unsolicited, and
in his view unwarranted, attack. Nevertheless, the young man was correct. Her brilliance
had shone all the brighter at the zenith of the solar cycle.
“Then explain to me how by reinforcing the neural inhibitors in her brain that we
stopped the rogue tsunami and the mega-X strength flares from the sun”, the old man
retorted and sat back, confident in his own analysis and judgement.
“Co-incidence. You only managed to increase the power of the inhibitors at a time
when the cycle was already starting to ebb.” Fury flashed across the old man’s face.
“Not true”, the old man replied, almost savagely, in his own defence.
“Wasn’t it because she opened eyes to the flaws of the world that she was perceived
as a threat, and you just had to shut her down?”
“Well really!” The old man was now truly infuriated and started to rise from the chair
but the cold eyes of the younger man stopped him.
“The inhibitors didn’t work that time, did they?” Reluctantly the old man had to
shake his head, confirming the answer.
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“No. Within weeks they seemed to have burned out and before you attempt to find
me guilty of any further of your perceived wrongdoings, there was a corresponding
explosion in solar flares.”
“Perceived wrongdoing? Obviously, our perceptions differ greatly in this regard.”
“This regard? My only concern was preventing global catastrophe.”
“Isn’t that just your perception?”
“It was the educated opinion of the entire scientific community involved with her.”
“Not the actions of ass-covering bureaucrats too afraid to step onto the evolutionary
path, to embrace the gift humanity had been given for growth and development, the
capacity for a more powerful conscious thought?”
“Humanity was not ready for it.”
“Admit it professor, you weren’t ready for it, so you shackled divinity and allowed
caveman science to continue to reign.”
“Divinity?” The word seemed to shock the old man. “You think her divine, a god?”
“It’s the word you yourself used in your initial papers” was the reply.
“I believe what I actually said was ‘god-like qualities’,” he corrected defiantly feeling
a sense of victory over the minor inaccuracy.
“No room in science for divinity then?”
“Divinity is only the science we have yet to discover.”
“And yet you chose not to discover the secrets of the Universe, you chose to keep
your precious science hidden, you chose to keep it divine”. This time the old man stood,
staring down this insolent pup who had the audacity to speak to him, a man of his learning
and letters, but the younger man stood also and seemed to tower menacingly over him. The
stare from dark, hard, seemingly emotionless eyes began to chill his aged bones. The air
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hung heavy with unasked questions and the silence grew more oppressive as the seconds
ticked by before the younger man spoke again, his voice low and controlled.
“Because of your own fear and inability to grow and move forward, you in turn
destroyed creativity and with it the essence of Spirit. You were afraid you’d be left behind,
be seen for the dinosaurs that you really are, and feared that you would be held
accountable for your own inadequacies, for your own lack of vision and faith. You feared
losing control, so you held on tighter and tighter, strangling the very reason for existence to
within a drop of its universal essence. You prohibited progress because you could not
control it, or worst, could not keep up with it. You lacked the comprehension to understand,
the ability to learn, and somewhere along the ruthless path you took to get here, you lost
the ability to care, you lost your humanity.” The old man seemed to cower before him.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“I am the future” was the answer. “I am all that She was. I am what is to come.”
“I don’t understand”, the old man was violently trembling.
“I am a product of Her, I am her child.”
“Impossible”, the fear turned to defiance.
“Why? Because you sought to stop that too, sought to destroy the life she could
bring.”
“She was a dangerous power enough, just her alone. Any more like her could have
torn the planet apart.”
“But it didn’t. It hasn’t. We have seen to that.”
“We?”