Story of an Atom in the Universe of Atoms

Chapter-1

Hey there!

My name is Anupriya but you can call me Anu. I am a girl, living in Chennai, India..

I am 19 years old, living a seemingly happy life. 

My interests have never been in any single thing for more than a month and I am an avid procrastinator.

I started my vocal music education when I was 5 years old and guess what? It lasted for 3 years as I discontinued it due to lack of interest and spontaneity. Then came dance, which lasted for 2-3 years? Nah, It was just 1 week.

When I was 8 years old, my father bought the first computer in our family. I spent a lot of time with it, more than any of my friends. I explored the internet with a 1 GB data limit per month. I enjoyed developing operating systems on Powerpoint, making music using softwares and learning how to code.

Then I moved to high school where things were not so good. I found the academic system rigid and felt like I was running out of air to breathe. As grades progressed, it worsened.

I got two of the best friends of my life when I was in Grade 11. 

I have always admired the philosophy, “No matter what life throws at you, we adapt and become the best of it”. So when my parents wanted me to become a doctor, I imagined myself to be the best doctor ever. Me and my two friends worked really hard with this goal in mind, studied extensively, exhausting our health to become what we aspired for.

Then came the day one of my friends passed the exam. We both were very happy for her but disappointed that we couldn’t make it through. So we both decided to reappear next year and then came the day when this friend got in too. 

Now, with just myself left, I was too embarrassed to ask my Dad for another year. So I decided to go with the flow and joined an engineering college. My engineering entrance results were relatively good, so yeah I joined here. Today is the first day of college and I am sitting in the middle of a lecture thinking about the ‘unwanted’ - procrastinating.

“Roll No: 2022CS103, Get up!”, a voice yelled.

I had a look at the surroundings to see who the unlucky sapien was, but no one seemed to stand up.

“Roll No: 2022CS103, Get up!”, a voice yelled again.

Who is it? Oh, wait! Did I check my ID card? Oh My Universe! It's me.

She gets up quickly.

“So what-u took-u you so lang (long) to stand up?”

“I am sorry, sir. I was not aware of my roll number.”

“Fine!”, says the professor and extends. “So, tell me the greatness of this prestigious university”

“Sure, sir.” 

I told him the essentials, things one could say about a very good institution like advanced infrastructure, healthy environment for students and professors, experienced faculties and so on.

“Very guud! Very, very guud!”, he said, with that heavy Indian accent of his. “So, you must be a very bright-uh student. You catched my points correctly.” 

So, the classes got over and it was time for me to go home.

My seniors in the college bus have the worst music tastes ever. There are only 5 things I hate and this topped the list. They could have chosen to listen to songs that were actually good, instead they listen to what’s trending.

My stop arrived and I got home. I went to my Dad’s room to ask if he had bought the laptop I had been waiting for such a long time. But no, he hadn’t. 

Chapter-2

Surprise! My father is actually getting a new laptop for me.

He just arrived with a new bag! I happily grabbed the bag from his hand and went inside to my room.

What I discovered was utterly shocking. The laptop is at least 5 years old. It looks dusty, bulky, wobbly and nothing like I imagined (sleek, modern, Ryzen 7).

I was disappointed. I booted it up, took 1 minute to get to the login screen. It was a good thing that it ran Windows 7, not 98 or ME.

I explored the laptop’s specifications, it was not upto the mark.

First thing this requires is…Internet!

I was searching for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Hah! Got it!

She opens it

There were 2 websites bookmarked already, Bing and videodatabase.web3.

I understand Bing, what is videodatabase.web3 ?

She opens videodatabase.web3 

Wow! This is just YouTube but having an old-school look? Oh yeah! Here we have my favorite vlogger Magat and woah, he accidentally uploaded a video that was supposed to be uploaded tomorrow.

“Hey guys, Myself Magat! Aur Aaaj (Transalation: Now today) we are going to visit Madurai . It is a 3 hours trip from my place…”  Magat continues.  

“Why is there an unmute button in a video player?” says Anu

She clicks it

She said, “You are the worst vlogger ever”. A shocked Magat asked,  “Who is that? Who is speaking via my phone? Did I get hacked?”

Anu gets nervous and after a close panic attack, switches off her laptop immediately, goes to her bed and lies down in shock. As she felt her consciousness ebbing away, all she could wonder was about what had just happened. 

The next morning, she opened the laptop and checked the website again. What she saw was surreal and she wished it was a bad dream but no, it was all real.

She checks the other videos. There were videos from the past, from the future, basically all the videos ever produced by mankind unlimited to time. To add more heat, there was an unmute button.

All she could realize was, she had the ability to manipulate events both in the past and future. 

She got an idea. What if we could turn this ability to become a life-saving hero?

Chapter-3

Here starts Anu’s new journey! She disguises herself as “LEGAN”, which was a play on the word “ANGEL”. 

She sees the news filled with fatal accidents, deaths, robbery and other crimes everyday. 

With the help of the Vlogger community in her city, she manipulates their Vlogs in a way that they help to stop the nearest crimes. While the vlogs were being filmed, a demonic voice creeped in through the smartphone’s speakers. The voice gave instructions on the whereabouts and type of crime, informing the police or stopping possible accidents by stopping certain vehicles and more.

She took an oath that she would never again see videos about the future uploaded so that she would not end up knowing the unknown parts of her life. 

Months passed by, she succeeded in decreasing crime and accident rates in the city. People started to believe in gods and supernatural powers firmly.

And then there came a Ding Dong. 

Anu asked her mother to open the door. Standing there was her favorite Vlogger Magat! Anu panicked and was thinking how on earth he had figured out that she was LEGAN. 

Magat didn’t know who Anu was but had come there to inform the unfortunate. He said that Anu’s father was no more. The family was in shock. On further enquiry, Magat revealed that he was found dead on an isolated road.

Anu’s mom started crying out aloud, but Anu didn't. She knew that she could fix this, so she opened her laptop and searched for videos containing her father. But she simply couldn’t find any. No matter what she tried, she was not able to find what had really happened to her father. 

Anu got frustrated, sitting at her desk for 20 hours straight, not knowing what to do to save her father’s life. 

Now here comes the question. Will she do the one thing she took an oath to not to do?

Chapter-4

All the people - kids, old people, people of all races, people of all religions, communities gathered around a mysterious spherical building. Suddenly a reverse shockwave towards the building implodes, killing all the people in the event.

But who detonated the bomb?

Who killed 20 billion innocent lives? 

After 50 years, the Homo-Intels are still investigating the case. The small fraction of humans who survived the catastrophe believe that the Homo-Intels were the one who orchestrated this genocide.

But who are the Homo-Intels?

In the future, the human species will be divided into two - the traditional Homo-Sapiens and a new species called Homo-Intels.

Homo-Intels have an average IQ of 212 but their average lifespan is only 22 years. Their bones are brittle, requiring an exoskeleton for movement. They have lost their ability to chew food and can only partially digest the food. They depend on a great deal of help from machines for basic day-to-day survival. They have also lost their ability to produce offsprings naturally. Their offsprings are produced in bio-factories instead and their population is fewer than 1 billion.

A special group in Homo-Intels are busy building an emulation software using their advanced super-quantum-computers to collect all data points throughout the history which range from data on the quantum realms to universal ones. During this process, they come up with a breakthrough. A way to send information from one timeline to another using electromagnetic waves from an atom that has remained in the same nuclear state throughout its history.

Homo-Intels have a website called “videodatabase.web3” which consist of all the videos ever produced by Homo-Sapiens and Homo-Intels throughout history. Now all they have to do is to somehow manipulate the electromagnetic waves sent from one timeline to another.

Scientists of the Homo-Intels figure out a way to feed in data in E.M. wave signals and convert itself as radio waves, which were used by humans for the internet in its early days, during output.

But why do Homo-Intels do this? The simulation machine they built can also predict the future events with an accuracy of 60-70%. Due to the absence of resources and inability to get beyond the solar system, the machine predicts that all life forms in this system will, unfortunately, come to an end.

On further analysis of the data points throughout history, they find that one significant event increased the chances of life on Earth and space-settlements got extinct sooner. That was the mega genocide event caused by the implosion. Homo-Intels now seek to reverse this particular episode because their simulation tells them that the probability of getting outside the solar system for life to thrive longer is more if this event did not happen in the first place. 

There lives a secret society among Homo-Intels who call themselves True. Their goal is to increase the survivability of “Homo-Intels”, believing other species as “inferiors”. They regard Homo-Sapiens as inferior, barbarian and dumb. They believe that by ruling Humans, they assert dominance which contributes to better ecological balance, peace and stability. Examples of pseudo-intellectual acts of Humans are industrialisation without realizing environmental damage, letting animals go extinct, mass deforestation, wasting vast amounts of water resources, petroleum, food, basically everything they did was unbalanced. “Humans succeed in one thing they immediately realize and fail in many things they later realize.”

Members of True believe in following the mother of their species. They are not a totally secret society. They earlier tried to conquer the Homo-Sapiens but they were unsuccessful because of the huge population of the Homo Sapiens. 

Thus they detonated a bomb to decrease human population significantly to finally match the level they could tolerate. What the True didn’t realize was that they essentially made the same mistake as humans. They succeeded in one thing that is decreasing the population of humans, but they failed in many. Planet Earth became uninhabitable except for a few lives that thrived in harsh conditions.

The humans who managed to survive the implosion blamed the Government of Homo-Intels for the act. Terrorism increased, the humans became terrorists to the Homo-Intels. Due to this, Homo-Intels had to take the survivors as permanent prisoners like monkeys kept in a zoo.

On realizing the government’s plan, True was frustrated. They didn’t like the plan of re-writing history again. So they hacked the super-quantum-computer that was supposed to have the ability to access videos in history and alter them using electromagnetic waves as a means of communicating.

Chapter-5

True is now planning to execute the plan they had been forging. The plan was to contact the mother of their species using their tech for convincing the Government of Homo-Intels to consider listening to the views of True. While the machine was still in the prototype stage, they executed the connection thus, giving access to their mother, Anupriya.

Yes, Anupriya was the mother of the species of “Homo-Intels”. After her father’s death, she became aggressive in productivity. She wanted to be the child her father had wanted her to be. An amazing prodigy. She worked hard extensively to prove herself. Studied 16 hours per day, became the university topper, founded a start-up, juggled between being an entrepreneur, multiple businesses’ CEO, from a millionaire to a billionaire and at last a trillionaire.

She single handedly propelled the Indian economy to become the largest super-power on Earth. She was considered to be a legend. But she also introduced bad work habits. Working 16 hrs per day for 6 days a week, dopamine shots, instant sleep shots, quality sleep pills, taste-generators which substituted actual food’s good taste with pills of similar concentrated taste were all introduced into her workers’ lives. She taught her employees to give less importance to selfish emotional decisions, telling them to give utmost importance to rational decisions only. She even created an AI that helped make decisions for humans. Her selection of humans was meticulous.

She created a new society which consisted of people only approved by her. She isolated this particular society to increase the accumulation of smart people for more generations to come. As world governments started to pressurize and criticize her work standards, she decided to start her own country to stay free of all the pressures and demerits of being controlled by a superior authority (Government). She buys an island and declares that her Government should be led by her. As decades passed, the technology evolved exponentially like never before. A particular community of humans were very fond of her and others were extremely critical. Before her death, she designed a constitution that was malleable and insisted people to follow the ideas of her book in history.

After her death, her ideas never died. It went on. This isolated community worked all day with numerous pills, minimal physical activity, daily doses of antidepressants even for kids and more. These conditions essentially contributed to the future condition of Homo-Intels.

CHAPTER-6

BLACK . This is what my mind is filled with at the moment. What am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to do the things that I just now saw in the series of videos about me, Homo Intels, True, the future society and basically, the end of all lives because it is all supposed to happen this way? Or should I try to escape my own future and thus, form a paradox. I don’t know how I am supposed to think about all this. Did my future self make the decisions I am about to make because of free-will? Or did she make those just because it had to happen the way it had to? What if this is where it all starts? All I have are only questions. “What should be done??”

“Whenever someone tried to win a war before it starts, they end up being the cause of it”

Either of my decisions is me trying to win a war that is going to happen among posterity. Am I going to stop it? Or end up being the cause of it?

………………………….

There is a meeting held among the members of True who have successfully executed their mission ‘Contact Mother’. 

“Do you think it was successful, leader?”, one member asks. “All we have to do now is wait, compeer.”

A phone ringssssss. 

One of the members picks up the phone. After a short while, she hands over the phone to their leader. The leader speaks into the phone, “Yes, General Goyer here.” 

“I am Anu”, came the reply. 

The End

Story of an Atom in the Universe of Atoms

A.N.U.

Conceptualised by Sukanth

Written by Sukanth K and Naveena Merin Vinny