Chương 23: Janice Jennings Part 1
Humans are inherently flawed. It's is by our nature. We live, we sin, and then we die. That is the way of life. Life is a perpetual loop. Mistakes of the former are taught to the current generation so that they can be better than their predecessors.
Did you know a flea when put in a capped jar will try and jump out of the jar, only to hit it's head on the cap. That's the mistake, but like all other creatures, they learn from that mistake. They adapt. They only jump as high as the cap as to not hit the top. Once the cap is removed, you'd think they'd take that chance to jump right out, right? But no. They don't. They still only jump as high as where the cap would be.
Then they have offspring. A completely new genetically independent creature. It'd be reasonable to think that since the offspring is essentially a blank slate, they would be able to jump right out of the jar. But again, they don't. They jump only as high as the cap, just like their parent.
Now why is this? Well it's simple. It's basic biology. It's the same reason why animals evolve. There is a certain environment they live in. They must adapt to that environment, or die.
Death is an undesirable outcome, as much as an understatement that may seem, that is what it is. In nature, animals tend to avoid undesirable outcomes. For the flea, it is an undesirable outcome; hitting its head on the cap, so it adapts to only jump has high as the cap.
If the flea doesn't adapt to its environment, it will face pain. It's offspring, like other animals, learn most behaviors from their parents, and so they only jump as high as they do.
There is always a competition for survival in nature. There is always the threat of death. That threat is what motivates change. Now what if that threat was removed? There would be no need for change. Without death, any flaw would be rendered null. Flaw aren't flaws if they don't affect the parent object.
The very definition of a flaw is something that mars a substance or object. If you remove the marring, it's no longer a flaw.
Janice believes that with time, all human flaws can be solved by science, and all they'd need to do is to find a way to prevent death. There would be no reason to change. They'd become perfect.
This is the exact reason she began to study apostles. Apostles are immortal. All of them. They always come back no matter what happens. They can be disenabled for some time, but they always recrudesce.
Janice has been trying to figure out how apostles achieve this immortality. The problem is how fundamentally different they are from humans. Even organic apostles are so different.
All apostles use disintegrative reconstruction to revive themselves, but they have to return to the origin point. Humans don't have an origin point, so that couldn't be an option for them.
Angelic apostles aren't good for figuring out immortality either. They operate with a core. This core provides the energy for them, and it maintains their form. If that core is destroyed, they will go back to the origin point and revive again.
A core for humans is a fanciful idea, and wildly impractical. As has been established, an origin point is implausible. All it would take to reestablish that threat of death is to set the precedent that one could destroy the core of another like they would an apostle. They would still be imperfect.
Janice has long strived to figure out the key to immortality. There is so much she needed to figure out. She was already fifty-three years old. She only had so many years left. That threat of death was approaching. It was always in the back of her mind, and though she was not afraid of death, it's still an undesirable outcome.
When Janice was thirty-three, that was when the rift opened above the Atlantic Ocean. It was a spectacle. She saw images of it from her television at home. Even in the lab she worked in at the time always had a monitor with the latest news about the rift.
She remembered the image of it so well. It was a giant fissure in the sky. The rim of it glowed a lilac purple, but the mouth of the fissure was pitch-black. No light could escape the interior.
Janice would watch live broadcasts from right under the rift. Inexplicable hums could be heard like a chorus singing a hymn. It obfuscated Janice and all of her peers. A supernatural phenomenon was unfolding before them. It couldn't be audited with reason or logic. It was beyond what could be explained. It was a divine occurrence. Janice was never religious, and she still isn't, not in the traditional sense anyway. But she couldn't deny that powers illustrious than they could envision were pulling strings.
This became incontrovertible when all broadcasts under the rift were terminated. No one could see what happened. No one knew where all the people under it went.
They took satellite images from above the rift to try and see where the ships were. They weren't there.
It was at this point that everyone knew it was the beginning of the end.
Water levels began decreasing. Water mysteriously evaporated and returned to the atmosphere. All rivers, lakes, and oceans dried up. Not even glaciers or snow was safe. The only forms of water that was safe was water below the earth's crust, as well as water that was dispensed by fridges, water fountains, and of course water bottles.
As soon as the first apostles came to the shores of countries, Janice remembered mass panic. People stopped going to work. They raided stores and looted them for all their supplies.
It was chaos. For that first year it was utter anarchy. There were no rules. There were no laws. Just survival.
Then the H.S.A. appeared. Janice was brought to a Unit and she stayed there ever since. She was recruited into their research program to study apostles. That's how she ended up where she currently is.
She got so attached to her work that she could never give it up. No matter how horrible it got in the Unit, she never abandoned her job. It was the only thing she had left. It was her only purpose. She had no family to cling to. No children to verse her mistakes to.
She couldn't let it go. She just couldn't. If she did, her life would be worth nothing. Perhaps she should have let it go, but when Lucas showed up, it sparked that part of her that craved to fulfill her one and only purpose.
Lucas was the key. He held the answers she so desperately searched for. She would continue her researched even if it killed her.
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