The End is Near

Chapter 8

July 12th 2045 - Shio experiments

Shio stared hard at the machine it had taken such effort and energy to build. From the moment he and Laila had agreed that it needed to be destroyed, he had thought of nothing else. His research was at a standstill.

He had overshot his goal and had no idea what he should now do. He was like a parent who, having hoped that his recalcitrant child would somehow give up the drugs and the violence, turns on the television to find the world acknowledging the same child as a saint. It was too shocking to process, so he sits and stares wordlessly at the television. Like Shio sits now, staring at the thing he created and which he does not know how to deal with.

It came from him, was moulded by his hands, yet he does not understand how it came to be. Yet here the analogy will have to end. For the parent could have no need of destroying such a child.

His mind turns away from such thoughts and returns yet again to the need to destroy his creation. So much power in the hands of one man...

There was no doubt that he could not just hand it over. He knew what the government would use this for. He was not enough of an idealist to believe in the purity of the intention of the creator. All creators had some responsibility for their creations.

Maybe that was why Christians found it so easy to believe that their Lord had sent his son to save them from their sins. The Creator taking responsibility for his creation...

He picked up the controls, intent on destroying it in such a way that even reverse-engineering of the process would be impossible.

As he had told Laila, the design should not have done this. There was some error in the way he had wired its internal symmetry system...a crossed wire or the wrong alloy....even he would not be able to re-create it using the design sheets. Yet that didn't mean he couldn't take it apart carefully and figure out exactly what he had done to go this far off course.

He turned away from the innocuous appearing device and strolled over to another work-table. His hands lingered on an object the size of an old desk-jet printer. This was one of his earlier creations. It increased the range and accuracy of the readings of thought patterns.

Had he built his newest device this size, he might have moved mountains when he flipped the switch. Then again, on another scale maybe he would not have made the same errors...

He sighed, knowing he couldn't do it just yet. Something told him to wait.

"Oh well," he thought, "I'll do it tomorrow for sure..."

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