The Visionary Physicist
Pakistan, August 14, 2047: Dr. Tabish Ghaznavi, a brilliant physicist from the Pakistani province of upper Sindh, claimed to have discovered a technology that would finally let man travel to that edge of the universe where he believed God lived. Even though the universe had numerous edges, Dr. Tabish was sure that here was where God dwelled.
A Nation’s Lost Faith
Ghaznavi was perturbed by the way many in this country had lost all concept of God. In fact, the believers in a God now mostly included androids and certain versions of the many super-computers that had been helping the humans in the running of the country.
Mechanical Believers
Most Pakistanis saw these mechanical believers and their few human sympathizers with suspicion. They knew well the tragic history their elders had inherited of the many religious wars that were waged by their ancestors between the 7th century CE and the early 21st Century CE – before religion was abolished along with capitalism in 2031.
Rise of Astro-Marxism
For more than 20 years, Pakistan was operating as a republic based on what became to be known as Astro-Marxism – a political ideology emerging in China and constructed by scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and environmentalists.
Collapse and Reconstruction
Astro-Marxism in Pakistan had arrived during the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 2025 after a failed take-over attempt by the United Pakistan Jihad Council during a vicious civil war. The reconstruction of the country was undertaken by Astro-Marxists with the help of a secularized army, technocrats, and bureaucrats. Over a million lives were lost in the war.
Achievements of the New Republic
With the arrival of the new republic and ideology, a majority of diseases had been eradicated or effective cures found, population growth regulated, economic balance and near-equality achieved, use of petroleum products banned, and solar energy harnessed because oil had rapidly vanished from the deep grounds of Arabia during the last great religious wars and civil upheavals in that area between 2020 and 2027.
Paradox of Equality
No classes existed among the humans in the Astro-Marxist republic. No religion. No conflict. However, ironically, the old class system continued to be applied over the androids and the super-computers.
Emerging Threat from Androids
This was done because it was the androids and the super-computers who had ended up believing in a God and in his residential corner at the edge of the universe. This irked the humans. The Astro-Marxists. If they loosened or abolished the ancient social and economic class system that they had enforced upon the android population, then surely, the humans believed, the androids will evolve into becoming ideological threats.
Government’s Pilgrimage Scheme
The humans also feared that the androids’ emerging beliefs were bringing with them patterns of irrational emotions within the machines’ hot-wire make-up. The humans thought that these might give birth to another set of wars: Between rational, advanced humans and the powerful but gradually short-circuiting machines looking for a God and wanting to re-impose an old belief system and worship in the new republic.
The Journey Begins
Thus arrived the government’s new pilgrimage scheme: An announcement that it wanted to patch things up with the disaffected machine population by providing means and ways for them to travel to that edge of the universe where Dr. Tabish believed God resided. So off went the androids in 16 Pakoflot spaceships through hyperspace, wormholes and at great speed towards that cosmic edge, looking for God.
Arrival at the Cosmic Edge
In three years they were there, within and inside a place of gaseous blues, static reds, and smoky whites. At the center of the place hung a cold, gray shell of a dead sun. On it, the androids were convinced God resided. And on it, they landed, reading and chanting the various words that they carried with them and considered divine: Pieces of crumbling old pages containing literature banned and forgotten for a very long time but collected, preserved, and revered by the androids.
Sacred Artifacts
They carried with them battered pages from various ancient holy books, plus Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations and 20th Century brochures of petroleum and software corporations, of what were once called shopping malls, of health and car and weapon manuals, and rags called ‘fashion magazines.’ All these the androids imagined were reflections of a simpler, more prosperous and God-fearing past.
Tragic Revelation
For hours they roamed in a large shining procession on the barren plains of the dead sun looking and calling out for God, while behind them, one by one, their spaceships exploded, turning into heaps of burning metal and plastic. The ships had been programmed by the government to explode almost precisely after 3.2 years each so the androids won’t be able to return.
Discovery of Project Eden
Anguished but still determined, the androids walked ahead, calling and chanting, until they came upon a body in an astronaut suit. What, they thought, was an astronaut doing wandering around a place where dear Dr. Tabish believed God resided?
The Old Robotic Monkey
When they took off the astronaut’s helmet, they discovered with horror that the body, now turned into a rickety skeleton, was not of a human being but of a chimpanzee. They then proceeded to undo the rest of the suit. The body of the chimp was of metal. It was an android. A rusty tag hung around the chimp’s metallic neck. It read: “The Cosmology Dept. of the Astro-Marxist Republic of Pakistan.” And right underneath it the following was inscribed: “Project Eden. Specimen 001.”
