Science fiction. The last tribe

 

Science fiction. The last tribe

She was choking, her eyes were popping out, her face had turned cherry red, and her hands were spread outwards. She was the last one of their kind left on this planet and it was likely that she was witnessing her last moments. And they did not seem very pleasant.

She was experiencing a very unpleasant and painful end, and there were almost 200 of us looking at her, and I was one of them. Just looking at her to prove that we all suffered from the paucity of our already corrupt conscience and that we also felt no shame in having evolved into pitiless beings. 

Pitiless and snobbish!

She had been lying in this condition for nearly 30 minutes now, and she was witnessing, 200 emotionless beings, who in return were witnessing a being dying unattended because we felt no emotional cohesion with her. None at all.  

An absolute and explicit display of how low can a civilisation stoop for the sake of a belief that makes its subjects believe that they are the most superior race. So superior that if they touch the one who is in need of help, and dying; would render them abject and debased.

I too was equally guilty as were the rest of the people standing there. Because each one of us was fastened to the purpose that sheep mentality served for each one of us. When you are a victim of sheep mentality, it may seem that an individual is following the crowd. But if you look at it in a broader sense, isn’t everyone in the crowd an individual first and then part of the crowd. Crowds are formed only when someone follows someone else, and that someone follows someone else, and this combination of one following another leads to the formation of the crowd.

It initially gets formed based on covalent bonding- One tied to another. But when the size of the crowd grows larger, all those individuals who are following someone, now tend to think that they are collectively following the one in the front who they assume knows the right direction that leads to the right way. Little do they realise that the one they are following, is actually following all of them, only that he/she happens to be walking in the front does not mean he/she is leading. Because when you are part of the crowd, it does not matter where you are placed in that crowd, you somehow accept the ideological and objective makeup of the crowd as a whole.

And at this moment I was present in the crowd, where they were completely insensitive towards the one who was dying and needed help. But none of them felt the emotional impulse to help her, because their ideological makeup was similar. And their ideology dictated if you consider yourself to be of superior race, never touch or come close to someone of lower status. 

So, does it not go to prove that it is not the ones occupying the front line or leading positions in the crowd, who lead the crowd. The crowd moves as an ideological unit, that is united in its emotions, beliefs, feelings and objectives as well.

But, I felt the need to be a renegade, a black sheep, who wanted to isolate himself from this sheep mentality. Not that it was forcing me to experience a surrogate personality, but purely due to the fact that the other sheep in the crowd were beginning to influence my personality as well, and I feared that I might develop into a real sheep. A sheep that does not give a damn about anything, except one thing, keep on grazing and then keep on masticating. And then one day, just like this poor being dying on the road, die and bleat for one last time. 

Oh my God, that would be a worthless and wretched existence! 

Just living to graze and gaze, nothing else. And then one day die with just one self consolation, “I believed I belonged to the superior race, and I was so devotedly involved in this race, that I ignored someone who needed my help, and if I had helped, she might have lived. But my race and my superiority ought to prevail!”

I am so mechanical in my thoughts and my feelings are so stiff that I let people die on the streets, without paying any heed. Because I belong to the sheep mentality. I am superior and right now I have only two preoccupations: graze and gaze. And I did not want to be this person!

So, I forced my way through the crowd, until I reached the place where I was very close to the girl who was lying there in a terrible condition and needed help. I went closer to her, and the people in the crowd looked at me as if I were an outcast. And when I bent to touch her and feel her pulse, they no longer looked at me. Instead they looked into the eyes of the person who they believed they had been following. 

But most of the times the sum total of such crowds is an odd number, and the moment the one who does not find his/her partner to look upto. This person begins to disrupt the crowd and finally the crowd disintegrates. Because now each one of them will discuss this in the quiet of their rooms, where the curtains are drawn. 

So I was safe!

I wondered how I could help this poor girl. She needed some immediate medical attention. But she belonged to the species that shared our genome, except for a few gene pairings that made them different from us. so, I was left helpless and I could not take her back to her community as well. Because she was the only one left. The last surviving one of the tribe we call, Vazahee.

In this moment where I had broken off from the crowd from which I drew my courage and logical parities. I was left stranded in the moment like a person driving on a highway that led somewhere, but where exactly, I did not know. So, I decided to take her home with me and see what I could do.

She was human after all, only that she differed from our species a bit. Just a little bit, and that little bit made them subject to our atrocities and our ignoble acts. 

Their species was 100 times more intelligent than ours, everything that we have on this planet is because of their scientific achievements. But unfortunately, nature had offered them a weakness, which actually was a trait only Gods possess. They were 100 times more emotional and sensitive compared to us, and we took advantage of this trait and made them our slaves. Although their intelligence warned them, somehow their emotions always made them allow us one more chance, a chance where they believed we too would become equally loving and caring. But we had failed, they had not, it was us who had lost the only chance to know the secrets that only Gods in the 7th realm know. 

And they were so kind they shared every knowledge with us, until we learned a way to use it against them.

Today, my race believes we are equally intelligent, but the actual fact is that we are not. With their species extinct, we have not witnessed any breakthrough development in science and technology in the last 2 decades. We are only trying to improve on the technology we inherited from them.

It was 10 years ago when we had developed a super intelligent system that was supposed to think like the human mind and then in advanced stages, think better than the intelligent people from the Vazahee tribe.

But the system began developing signs of intelligence degradation. It happens, when you feed a colossal amount of data into a super intelligent machine, where at a point it begins to believe it knows the end of everything. But in reality it is the end of finite data that we wrongly assume is infinite. There is nothing more infinite than human imagination. And if we can couple this human imagination with super intelligent thinking machines following the right checks and measures, only then we will be able to think like the Gods in the 7th realm. Until that happens, we will only be investing in something that I call, “evolutionary suicide.”

And this is very logical.

Because the super thinking machine or the super processor developed by us was thinking based on data that had been fed to it, and as our species got dependent on it, we even lost our organic ability to think. Therefore we got caught in the firing range of all misfortunes. On one end, our super intelligent system could no longer think beyond the data that was being fed to it or had been fed into it. And on the other hand, our brains were now less agile and slipped into a sort of latency mode. Because the human brain is like a battery, it needs to be charged regularly in order to generate the power, the power called: Thinking power. And the best way, rather the only way to charge the neurons of the brain, is by offering your brain opportunities to think, imagine, be creative; and yes, of course keep learning, until the body that hosts it, dies one day. Because that is what it has been designed for by Evolution. Otherwise, it would have left us where chimps began thinking and concluded imagining!

And here I was someone with no thinking power, trying to help someone who had taught us to think. Because I believe I am slightly more intelligent than chimps. And this made me feel sad. And I felt I was swimming in the pool of thoughts where I was struggling against the waves of intelligence and I was unable to keep myself afloat. But I had to stay afloat, because if the waves swept me away and I drowned in this pool, the girl would die. I was her only chance, her only hope.

I looked at her. Her skin was unusually red, but it was like ours. However, I did not understand why her eyes were popping out and she was choking. I was trying hard, really hard, but my under-charged thinking battery was not generating enough power that would help me to think in the right direction. I knew I was missing something. But what, what was it?

Everything on the planet was how it had always been like. Air quality was the same too. But something was not right. What though, was my dilemma right now!

By now she had realised that I wanted to help her, and this was motivating her to help herself out of this situation by making every possible effort to guide me or instruct me. Because diagnosing her condition was beyond my reasoning.

While I was examining her face, her head, her chest, her hands, her mouth; she lifted her hand. She was trying very hard to point to something. But as it stood right between her face and her chest, her hand dropped back to the ground.

Ah it was frustrating, more than for her, it was totally frustrating for me.

Then I lifted her hand, placed it between her face and chest and waited for her to direct it further. I was trying something my underpowered mind felt would help her augment her effort, so that she could finally lead it to the exact spot in shifts.

I waited for her to gain some strength and she moved it closer to her nose ridge. It fell off again. And I repositioned it exactly near the nose ridge. And waited till she gained her strength. And finally she pointed her finger at the region located above her left eye. To be precise the spot between her left eye and left temple. That region on her forehead is where she pointed!

I felt it, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. I felt mine too and it felt exactly like hers. So, once again I became the victim of my poor and out of practice mind. I wanted to scream because she was dying and desperately trying to tell me something!

Then, she somehow pointed to the ceramic mug that I had received from someone sometime ago. And it had these words inscribed on it.

“All emotions matter!”

But what did this mean? What had emotions to do with her condition. I was again missing something. Something minute but very important.

What could it be?

It felt like a brain game. What, did I just say, “Brain game!”

Wow! So I could help her talk without her having to speak the words. I kept saying words while trying to observe the expressions in her face. Observing whether it meant Yes or a No.

So, here is my complete list of vocabulary that I used, and there too I realised my vocabulary was poorer than her species. Very poor.

Facial muscle contraction

No reaction

Nasal cavity

No reaction

Nose ridge blockage

No reaction

Forehead pain due to concussions

No reaction

Brain

When I said brain, her face lit up a bit. So I knew it had something to do with her brain. And I used all my IQ to think what lies between the left temple and ridge of the nose. Out of all the people in the world, a person who had never studied biology was trying to think what lies between the nose ridge and the left temple. 

And here I was desperately trying to save someone who was suffering from something that had to do something, with the mysterious something in her brain, somewhere between her nose ridge and temple. Oh my God, it was driving me crazy. Or was I crazy already. I did not know.

I did like books, but a book on the brain, not at all! I told you already, we had got so dependent on artificial intelligence, that we had stopped using our brains, so I owned a lot of books, except all those books that feed the curiosity of the real brain. And it was either her bad luck or mine that we were experiencing an internet outage due to heavy sand storms.

But wait. Hey hold on.

I did own an encyclopedia when I was  a kid and it did define parts of the brain. But I did not know where I had kept it. It was 10 years ago when I had left it somewhere. Where was it, where?

Ah, yes. In the garage over a shelf, inside the trunk where I had stashed my old books that I treated as junk.

I ran as fast as I could, I opened the trunk and there it was waiting for me. My first aid for the under-charged brain.

I opened the page where it offered details on the brain. And there it was.

Mirror Neuron System ( MNS ) The region in the brain that makes us feel. the centre of feelings.

And the encyclopedia had activated some dormant part of my brain. Because it instantly lit up in a strange way and prompted me to think that their species has an evolutionary trait that makes them 100 times more emotional than us. And it was due to this trait we had exploited them like savages. 

So, it was possible that their MNS region could be bigger than ours. But there was a problem, I was not a brain specialist and I did not own a scanner. Moreover, even if it were bigger, it did not mean anything in the current situation.

So, I once again sought help from her. Because she surely was 100 times more intelligent than me. And I said,

“Mirror Neuron System ( MNS )”

Somehow, this time she nodded her head and she smiled faintly. And I was certain with my next question she would forget smiling. I was sure about it, but I had no choice left. And I chose to be shameless.

“But what about Mirror Neuron System ( MNS )?”

At this moment she pointed to my smartphone. I held it in my hand and from her eyes and face it seemed she wanted me to open it. Open meaning; unscrew the damn thing, and expose the motherboard and the chips present on the board.

I brought my screw driver and began opening it. After a few minutes I unassembled it. And I began lifting its unassembled parts one by one to wait for her reaction.

And once again I followed the same routine. The vocabulary thing, you remember.

Screen

No reaction.

Keypad

No reaction

Camera 

No reaction

RAM

No reaction

Mother board

Yes, a positive reaction. But what on the motherboard? Again I was in a situation where I was trying to locate her favourite sand grain in the desert of sand. God have mercy on me, please!

I pointed at each part on the motherboard with the tip of the screw driver, and the moment I said, “Chip!”

She smiled. Really, yes she smiled. I thought she would never smile again. But she smiled. 

Perhaps she was smiling at the fact that a stupid like me was trying so hard to look intelligent.

Then, I stopped my pranks and I no longer treated the situation lightly. Because she pointed her index finger at Mirror Neuron System ( MNS ).

And with eyes indicated this:

“Chip in Mirror Neuron System ( MNS )”

I did not want to know who had done it or why. I did not know what could lead a human to do something like this. I only cared about one thing, what could I do with my not so well charged brain to help her? Because if the chip had been inserted in her Mirror Neuron System ( MNS ) it could only be removed with a surgical procedure and that too only by an expert. Because if by mistake I happen to sever the wrong nerve, then she may not forget smiling, she may forget everything, and who knows what else.

She knew what I was thinking and where I was stuck now. But she did not seem worried. It appeared she knew a way to control or deactivate the chip. But how would she explain that was beyond the capacity of the mind game technique I was using. As such I had exhausted my entire vocabulary. My poor little brain can only store so little!

As her hand was lying on the carpet of my floor where all these parts spread almost next to her chest. She dragged her hand and then rested her finger on the speaker.

Speakers amplify sound. I knew this. But what else was she pointing to. Speakers use magnets and magnets generate magnetic waves, and chips also work based on waves or pulses.

But, but, too many buts you see. 

My little and tiny brain that can barely remember a few words, began thinking as hard as it could, to the extent that I thought the poor thing might implode today. And I would not even know.

And there it was after a tremendous thinking exercise. I realised that you need a higher frequency wave in order to kill or cause disruption in the existing bandwidth of the wave.

Again my garage and childhood adventures came to rescue. Childhood, you see, is amazing, because you learn raw science in raw ways, not via synthetic ways. 

I had once developed a mini dynamo with thousands of copper wire windings on the main axis. And to develop a magnetic effect I needed two of them and an electric current that would charge them. But I had to place her head between the magnetic field, and watch her facial expressions and accordingly increase or decrease the magnetic field. When I was a kid I had used the speedometer of the car to check the intensity of the magnetic field. 

I rushed, pulled it out, I began unwinding the copper wire; and trust me my hands were tired. Because I had to turn them 1000 times, and then rewind the copper wire on two separate axis. Wooofhhh not easy. But she was watching and smiling. So, I was acting a bit clumsy on purpose just to keep her smiling. I had not inherited this emotional skill from anyone but somehow I felt humans should possess it naturally. Without it a human would be nothing but a sheep. But I am sure, even sheep fall in love. But let us forget about the sheep part right now and move ahead. There is someone fighting a battle between life and death, so we better attend to her now.

The magnet was ready, the power stabiliser was in place, I slowly dragged her and placed her head between this magnet. I said my prayers, I plugged my stupid gadget into the main power supply board and stabilised the current to the lowest level possible. And looked at her face, she was still in pain. I increased the voltage, she was still suffering, I increased it a bit more, she showed no sign of relief, I increased it a little more, she smiled a little, I increased it a little more, her facial muscles relaxed. I was about to increase it further when she said,

“ You are the craziest and most loving person I have ever met. Increase it to the highest point. Only then the chip will get destroyed.”

I obliged, once again clumsily. 

And there she was. Normal and smiling, the chip was still there but now its ability to receive or discharge signal had been disrupted.

And this is what the intelligent girl had to add further,

“Mirror Neuron System ( MNS ) region of the brain controls emotions. And it is emotions that lead to anxiety. And too much anxiety leads to neural alterations that can choke one's throat, and contract one's facial muscles involuntarily. And via this chip that your people had embedded in me, they had crippled me, because they wanted me to join the rest of my Vazahee tribe. The chip generated waves that stimulated neurons via this region that led to extreme peaks of anxiety, causing concussions or strain in facial muscles.

But you are an amazing and a very clumsy person. Someone who is rare and indispensable! Because I think you emote like us. So you have every chance to be like us- You can think 100 times faster than anybody else.”

Then she held my hand, and placed it on her face. But, I did not know what to do with my own hand that was now resting on her face. So I let it be there, because it was not a bad feeling at all. So, I think sometimes being dumb and stupid is good, just like in this case. My own hand, not knowing what to do next or where to get flung next. So I let it be there. Until she placed her own hand on it and directed it wherever she pleased.

Since that day she has been holding my hand and directing me to become like her. She has not been out of this house for more than a decade now, because the people with sheep mentality are still seeking her everywhere. But she does not exist anywhere, except in my house and in my heart.

That night when I had carried her to my house and she had recovered. I had dug out the remains of a freshly buried female from her tribe, who had died in similar conditions, and in the last moments it had gotten so extreme that all her muscles had torn apart. To such an extent that you could not recognise the person.

I had sealed her grave and then dug a fresh grave with the following epitaph:

“The last of the Vazahee tribe!”

So I live happily, though secretly with her. But I love her and she loves a fool like me, who at times can be clumsy too. We both have developed a beacon that would be identified by her species who still live on the planet where they had actually migrated from. The planet that lies in the 6th realm of the universe.

And when that happens, we will not go away, but together we will fly away. Because two people who believe in the same feelings and emotions, never go away, they only fly away.

To know what became of us when we flew away, and was life easy on that planet, please do read the science fiction novel titled: They Loved in 2075.

This science fiction is written for all those people who believe that if someone is 100 times more emotional than others. He/she does not deserve to be exploited, instead this person should be respected. Then this scifi novel is for you. An exciting science fiction romance novel, They Loved in 2075.

By the way the beacon is ready and we are bound to fly away soon, I will catch up with you along with her, in 2075. Ah no! To be exact, In the sci-fi novel that is titled, They Loved in 2075!

Haa haaa. We all got to be a bit clumsy when someone wants to bring us to our knees. But we refuse to, because lions and lionesses walk, and it is cursed serpents who crawl on their bellies!

( Cursed? Yes! Please do not forget who lured Adam and Eve to consume the forbidden fruit. )

You know the rest, because all of us have faced such situations at least once; and a few of us many times.

You too fly away and fly well, but always towards somebody and something! 

Ps. A tribute to the instinct of lions and lionesses. An instinct that you are born with, because it cannot be acquired by any means. No matter how hard one tries. You either have it or you don't. But few accept it and few don't. It is only the select few who get to meet real lions and lionesses. In the scifi novel, They Loved in 2075, I met my lioness, what about you? Read it to know!