Ravens and Demigods

In a dingy room sat a disheveled man wearing a tattered lab coat that might once have been white. His scraggly eye length hair and rough face, speckled with a mosaic of blood, dirt, and something else black and foul, were illuminated by the faint blue light of a cell phone screen. His rattled, reddened, hazy blue eyes stared into the camera. He took a trembling breath. Then a startling thing happened, he spoke, not in the deranged incoherent ramblings of a lunatic, but rather with the diction and prowess of a highly educated man. There was, however, a hint of the most familiar form of madness there too: anxiety. The man spoke with a sort of foreboding and rushed undertone, one that inspired a the dreadful sensation of listening to the rapid tick-tick-ticking of a watch burning away the seconds that separate you from who you will become, the tick-tick-ticking between the last spark of the fuse and the explosion, the pause between one heart beat and the next while you wait for the last.

“My name is Dr. Victor Nicholas Frost and I don’t have much time. When I’m inevitably caught, my name will be vilified, my ideals misconstrued, my story disgustingly perverted. I need to set the record straight, here and now. I’m no monster, my goals were nothing but benevolent, I swear it, I swear it! They were done for your benefit, for the benefit of your children, for the benefit of all of humanity! Not hoarded for the few or sold to the highest bidder, no, I did it for you, for all of you. And my actions! They do not warrant such hostility! Perhaps some of my decisions were reprehensible. Certainly they ought not to be applauded,but they deserve to be understood in the context of my situation. Maybe I deserve reproach, but I don't deserve to be persecuted and hung like a witch!”

He paused, taking a shaky breath of the dusty air and a stale drink from his canteen. He looked at his phone’s battery and the time, neither were favorable for a monologue full of verbosity and dramatic finesse. He was all but certain that within the next hour he would be caught by the Iustitia ‘Justice Officers’ and would have to beg them to be so merciful as to merely execute him. No, no, he would have to maintain brevity, lest a bullet substitute a period and leave loose ends. That also meant he’d be forced to leave innumerable details out; he couldn’t tell the full truth, but he also couldn’t blatantly lie. He didn’t want to lie. He was in the vast abyss, the deepest depths of a mine, watching his only candle as it burned low and longed to flicker out. You’re being melodramatic The ever critical voice of reason, Dr. Frost, stated internally. Be succinct.

“Imagine the people who I could save from cancer in a single year alone. A number so large it would make Denver and Seattle seem small. Can any of us even comprehend a number that large? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just the sick who would recover. We as a species would become smarter, stronger, healthier, happier. No more primitive compulsions and outdated survival mechanisms. No more predispositions for addiction or illness, no more monsters lurking in our genes. No more callous cruelty, no more violence, no more animalistic behaviour. We would finally shed our evolutionary chains. We would become demigods. If Prometheus had to chain another in his place, would you sanctimoniously turn your nose at him while you warm your hands by the fire he stole on your behalf? We admire self-sacrifice. We even expect it. We deem it among the greatest virtues. Yet my crime is acting as if people were noble and self-sacrificing?”

He was certain he was in the right, but suspected only history would accept that. He didn’t have half the time needed to justify a fourth of his actions. If you can manage to get this recording out to the world, you could live on in the shadows, waiting at the bottom of a rabbit hole for someone in the future with a mind like yours to unearth and exonerate. If you want to survive in anything other than infamy, you must appeal to the visceral, plant seeds deep into their psyche, and let rational justification sprout from it later. Persuasion requires emotion. He hated what he was thinking, it went against his core beliefs, but rationality was never enough to persuade people to be rational. Common sense morality follows convenience and expedience to justify things as they are. Change the way things are first, justify it later.

These thoughts zipped through his mind in an instant before he spoke to the camera once more, “Most of you have never heard the name Dr. Victor Nicholas Frost, and very few of you knew it before my trial and execution, which will surely happen in the days following this recording. I am sure the Funem will try to blame me for murder or treason or some other atrocity, but in reality they’re killing me not because of my research, but because I refused to use my gifts for their vile games. You haven’t heard of my clandestine work. I sought to decipher DNA’s language of A’s and T’s, G’s and C’s, I sought to change the very essence of creation, to follow Prometheus and steal a primordial power monopolized by gods. If we knew how to harness all its potential, the forms of life would be ours to shape. The work is slow, it's hard, but you would be amazed by how much I’ve already discovered. I hope you’ll see the magnificent results of what I have started. I hope you’ll get to see the paralyzed walk, the blind see, the old grow young. I hope you’ll be the last generation that battles cancer and disease; I hope you will be the last generation that’s enslaved by our ancestors and the primitive traits they needed to survive the stone age. I hope you’ll be the last generation to struggle so fiercely with addiction, depression, terror, misery. I hope you’ll see the conclusion of the human condition, and the rise of the demigod. I hope you’ll see my breakthrough. I hope you’ll see true freedom.”

He paused for a breath and decided what to say next. He briefly reflected on what chain of events led him to such a dismal place. He tried to identify where his path firmly turned to the road he now walked. If he had known where it would lead him, would he still have done it? Yes, Dr. Frost thought, I would. I would do it a hundred times over, for to not do it would be infinitely worse. It would have been wrong of me to not do what I have done. I sought to prevent millions of deaths, billions of hours of suffering. What price is too great to pay to end that? How could you possibly sit by and let them writhe in agony? You could look a dozen people in the eye and thank them for their sacrifice, but life isn’t long enough to meet face to face with millions and millions of people and inform them that you’re not going to help them. That you could end their pain if you wanted to, but it was too much work. The lives you’ve taken can be named in a day. The lives you’re going to save couldn’t be listed if you spent every minute of every day for the rest of your life trying. It is my burden, my obligation, to persevere. Finish what you started, Victor. He was snapped back to reality by the sound of a large vehicle pulling up outside, the sound of boots hitting gravel, and of men shouting.

Fuck. They’re here. Some god he was, trapped like a rat in a cellar. He had one last trick, one single hope his entire future rested upon. If he had made a single mistake in planning or execution, he may be inadvertently taking his own life in the next few moments. Or worse, he’d take no lives and be captured by those Iustitia bastards. He heard the door open, and the sound of a pot being knocked over. He began counting, five… four… he begged cruel fate to let this work. He could beg and pray to everyone from Allah to Zeus, but nothing would intervene now, everything rested on his past self’s shoulders and there was absolutely nothing he could do now but wait and hope. He could hear them searching for him. Three… Two… they were making an incredible ruckus, it would only be a matter of seconds before they had brushed aside the rug covering the trap door that led to this cellar. This cellar would be his crypt. One… he braced, covered his ears, and nothing happened. It didn’t work… “Mother f-” he barely had time to begin his curse when the very earth quaked with a magnificent BOOM.