The Gods Never Die

THE GODS NEVER DIE

I was watching the people gathering in church. They were walking slowly, out of respect for the sacred. Obviously, many knew each other, greeting discreetly, simply nodding or waving, then sitting quietly on the wooden benches.

In the middle of the large hall, there was a black coffin decorated with a golden pattern. The lid was closed, and next to it, leaning on a wreath of red flowers, was a framed picture of yours truly. Oh, I forgot to tell you, and I should probably have started with that. It was my funeral ceremony. And the coffin was closed because it was empty. They couldn't retrieve my body.

The priest ran his hand two or three times through his gray hair, put on his glasses meticulously, and began to speak. While I paid little attention to him, I heard him uttering words like "tragic loss", "so young", "the future ahead" from time to time. He read the funeral service with a deep and measured voice. I must admit, it was quite impressive. When he finished, he invited those in the audience to say a few words.

The first to get up and come forward was Meagan. I hadn't seen her in a long time, and I immediately noticed she had become a respectable woman. Maybe it was the years? Maybe it was her black dress? Anyway, she was looking great.

"I first met Bjorg seventeen years ago," she began. I will never forget that day. I was coming home and the elevator was on the ground floor, door still open. Inside, a mother with her child. The woman held the door for me. "Hello, Meagan. I'm Bjorg. But you can call me Rod, like everyone else." Believe me, she continued, chuckling slightly, my mouth went dry. A child I had never seen before knew my name. I controlled myself and smiled, I think, maybe it was just a grimace. "Nice to meet you, Rod. But how do you know my name? ”

Meagan paused to wipe away a tear.

"Elementary, dear Watson," Rod said. You didn't press any button after entering the elevator. So you’re going to the fourteenth floor, just like us. There are four apartments on each floor. One is where we live, one is empty, and the third one is occupied by the Mendez. On Saturday, when I was playing with your cat, who was with them over the weekend, Mrs. Mendez told me, "His name is Indy and he belongs to Meagan, the student who lives next door and is now out of town."

Little Sherlock Holmes' reasoning really made sense. I stroked his head lightly and asked him how old he was. "Nine," I received the answer. I expected him to be at least twelve. "He's very tall for his age," Bjorg's mother told me, as if she was reading my mind.

"Bjorg was one of the first children I worked with, back then. I had to choose a topic for my bachelor's degree, and that's when I first thought about the subject of gifted children. Bjorg influenced my career from the first minute we’ve met."

Meagan had been more than a neighbor to me. If I don't take my mother into account, she had the biggest influence in my life. For three years she conducted a study on the mechanisms of learning and memorization in children with high IQ and I had been part of that group. She let us find a method that suited us, and then asked us how we made the associations, or what reasoning method we used. More than half of her doctoral dissertation was based on my way of thinking. My mother was very satisfied to have Meagan staying with me, because everyone had something to gain: my mother didn't have to pay a babysitter, Meagan worked with her most important "subject", and I ... well, I had fallen in love with her. She still considered me a prepubescent child, so she was a bit careless many times when she sat cross-legged or was leaning forward.

"After finishing my studies, I went to Flagstaff and in recent years I have only spoken to him occasionally, for the holidays. I wish I had had the opportunity to see him at least once before... before he..."

She didn't finish her sentence. She couldn't, her tears welling up. She went to sit back in her chair, sighing. Almost immediately, Professor Christopher Dykes stood up to speak. After discreetly arranging the knot of his black silk tie just before coming in front of the gathering, he straightened his voice and smoothed his thick mustache with an automatic gesture. He grabbed the edges of the podium with both hands, looked up for a few seconds, blinked rapidly, and inhaled deeply before speaking, like he was preparing to dive into the pool.

"Bjorg is gone, and I still can't believe it. I expect him to show up at any moment. I’d see him entering the room, with that smile of his that no one could wipe off of his face. The lady before me evoked her first meeting with Bjorg and how memorable it was. In my case, it was the same. He was sixteen when he came into my office for the preliminary interview for admission to the accelerated learning program for high school students. "What's your story?" I asked him. "I want to finish college in the next two and a half years," he said. Without hesitation, he continued, “The law says that state education is free for anyone under the age of nineteen. It would be cool to get my Arizona State University degree without taking a penny out of my pocket, wouldn’t it?” He did not say it arrogantly, but with confidence. I was in a hurry that day, I had a board meeting, so I took out a pile of papers with physics and math problems, put them on the table, and told him I'd be back in two hours. I asked him to solve as many problems as possible during this time. When I returned, Bjorg was relaxing in his chair, the papers were neatly arranged at the edge of the desk, and he had just a single sheet of paper in front of him, with a few notes that looked more like scribbles. "Are you kidding me?" I snapped. I had expected him to have solved at least two or three problems, some of them not being that difficult, after all. I will never forget what happened next. He looked at me in dismay, not understanding my behavior. I grabbed the sheet in front of him and managed to utter "Is that all you did for two hours?". Then he lowered his shoulders, smiled, and reached for the stack next to him. "No, that's what I did for two hours. That - and he pointed to the sheet I was holding - was to clarify with…” He browsed through the sheets a bit, pulled out two, and handed them to me. "...these. They were a bit challenging, indeed. " Bjorg had actually gone through all the problems, I think they were more than thirty, in just two hours. I stayed with him for another hour, checking them one by one. He explained to me the approach to solving each one of them. Believe me folks, some were problems for the second or third year of college, and the two problems that had "challenged" him had been solved by only a few of my students in the fifteen years I had been teaching applied math.

I have to make a little comment here. Dykes is a guy whose intellect is borderline genius, but he has a major flaw that I understood only much later, after I had already started working on the "Deep Sun" project. As a professor, he had a lot of charm and his teaching style was simple and very intuitive. But he didn't trust people at all. He considered himself a guy above everybody else, and any idea or theory that he didn’t validate was "subject to debate" at best. This thinking contaminated me too, leading me to believe that only I could be right in my area of expertise. And I took this so far that I came to believe that no one on Earth could understand the physics behind what I was doing. The fact that I had become like a hermit in my den and I worked diligently on something that only I could understand was not very useful when I wanted to implement the project. For me, everything was crystal clear, and the one hundred and fifty million dollars needed for the pilot project was to bring tenfold profit to an investor. I would have been satisfied with a symbolic percentage; recognition was a thousand times more important to me. That's it, I'm a guy with a big ego, I must admit that.

It's just that the truth hit me hard in the back of my head after I couldn’t find anyone in the real economy to invest in my project for two years. To them, I was just a terrible child, with a bold idea in mind. Without the support of the scientific community, they didn't even want to talk at me. I can't blame them for that. How could the financial director of a corporation approve a budget of such magnitude just because a young man in his twenties guarantees that he did all the calculations himself correctly.

Through the stained glass windows of the church, an intense light beam came suddenly from the sun that could be seen now through a crack in the ceiling of clouds. The light fell on a man I had surprisingly not noticed earlier. He was sitting somewhere in the back, on the side, in a darker area of the church. His hair had the same blond-reddish color as mine. Although seated, he was half a head taller than the others. I had never seen him before, not even in pictures, but I knew immediately that he was my father. My biological father, not the man who had married my mother when I was four.

It's a delicate subject and normally I would never discuss about this. My coming into this world is the result of a summer adventure of my parents. When I was eighteen, my mother finally decided to answer the question I had asked her all my childhood: Who is my father? She told me that Jötunn had come to America that summer through a Work & Travel program. They met at the company where my mother was an intern and fell in love at first sight. After he returned to Norway, my mother discovered she was pregnant. The phone number Jötunn had given her turned out to belong to a travel agency, where no one worked under that name. The emails she sent were returned with an ‘undeliverable’ error message. However, she decided to keep the baby (thank you, Mom!) realizing that there was something special about Jötunn. She described him as the kind of man who would catch everyone's attention, with a gentle look and a warm voice, but in the same time tough as a rock, and bright as a diamond. The instinct told her that a child of such a man could be a first-class offspring, and here I am!

After finishing college, I felt the need to go to Norway to search for him. Some strange things happened that summer, the significance of which I fully understood much later. I had a DNA test to find out my ancestry. 74% Scandinavian, a few percent of other European populations and 6.25% unknown. I contacted the company that performed those tests to ask for clarification, and all they could tell me was that those DNA sequences did not correspond to any population sample in their database. They were very curious to find out more about me. They also tested my mother for free, but her DNA did not show anything unusual.

I did some detective work, starting with the archive of the company where my mother worked back then, in order to obtain the information on the visa application for my father. At the US embassy in Oslo I was lucky to find a lady who helped me, telling me that her father had also left home for cigarettes when she was little and returned after twenty years. Eventually, putting together all the data I could gather, I arrived to the far North, close to the Arctic circle. If I hadn't been so preoccupied with my mission, I could have enjoyed the fjords. I had planned to return someday as a tourist, but I didn't have the opportunity after that. There, I came across an old priest in a fishermen village who told me a story that was hard to digest, about the so-called jötunns - the fire giants that emerged from the primordial chaos and who, unlike the gods, were destructive in nature.

Jötunn looked straight at me. No, it wasn’t just a feeling. No one could have known I was there, but he was staring where I was. As if reading my thoughts, he put two fingers to his right temple in a salute motion. That was really weird. Professor Dykes had meanwhile finished speaking, and the desk in the middle of the room was now empty. I turned my attention back to Jötunn. Another man was now occupying his seat. He looked different, with slightly gray hair, shorter, and very deep wrinkles. Moreover, he was looking everywhere else, but at the video camera in the ceiling. This was beyond my comprehension. There had to be an explanation, and now I couldn't think of anything.

"Dear friends, my name is Thomas Furr and I was a colleague of Bjorg's. I like to think I was his best friend. I was there with him in his last moments. As the distinguished Professor Dykes said, it is impossible for me to believe that Bjorg has crossed the great threshold. The saddest thing is that he didn't have the patience. Ten minutes. That's it. If he only waited ten more minutes. Although he died so young, he left us an overwhelming legacy. Most of you do not know this, so let me tell you in a few words why I think that we, those who have known him, can consider ourselves privileged.”

Thomas, for God’s sake. An extraordinary boy. He was right, he was my best friend. That's because he was the only one. Other than him, I had no friends. I've been surrounded by a lot of friendly people, that's true. But none to talk to on the phone at two o’clock in the morning, with whom I can share my thoughts, ideas, or fears. Until I met Thomas. Without him, "The Deep Sun" would not have existed beyond a bulky binder and two gigabytes on a memory stick.

Thomas created a crowdfunding project. In just fourteen months, he raised the needed one hundred and fifty million dollars. The contribution he was asking for was twenty dollars, symbolically represented by five cups of coffee. "Five cappuccinos means Earth's chance" was his message, accompanied by suggestive graphics. To be honest, at the beginning it seemed like a childish approach. However, just a little over a month later, he was already checking in the first million dollars. With this money he financed the production and launch in just six months a virtual reality video game, "Deep Down Sun". In order to save the planet, the player had to build a nuclear fusion reactor that would provide enough clean energy for the whole mankind. "Deep Down Sun" has counted nearly eighteen million downloads. Thomas managed to mobilize the gamers’ communities around the world, which he summoned to make donations to building "The Real One". "For you, it's just a game. For your children, it's their only chance - Click here to make a donation". There is even a memorial wall in the perimeter where the reactor is located, on which are written the names of all the six million eight hundred and eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-four donors from all over the world.

"The technology Bjorg thought would change the face of the world," Thomas continued. I'm not saying big words, I'm just telling the truth. And Bjorg, practically all by himself, created a source of energy from scratch without any impact on the atmosphere, without toxic residues and, above all, extremely safe. I would also like to share with you my last minutes with him, in fact, his last minutes. I want to be sure that when Bjorg's biography will be written, these things will be recorded correctly for the generations to come. On the fateful day, everything was ready. We were about thirty people in a bunker and no one else in a five mile radius in the desert. We didn't know what could happen. If the reactor exploded, everything would be wiped out in an instant. The chief engineer activated the command to launch the fusion reaction and ... nothing. A minute, maybe two, passed, and the gauges were still at zero. Bjorg started frantically to check some parameters, after which he slapped his forehead and said in a very serious tone: "Dammit ... I forgot to divide by two!" He looked at us amused, after which he burst out laughing. He laughed for a while, then took his backpack and went out. No one had the courage to say anything. We were all in dismay. One of the operators shouted something, pointing through the hopper window towards the outdoor installation. Bjorg walked briskly to the edge of the evacuation well. You should know that the exhaust well is very deep, it is about eight hundred feet. Once there, he stopped right at the edge of the abyss. He stood like that for a while, motionless. Then he turned to us, waved goodbye, and threw himself into the void. I don't think he accepted the idea of failure. All his life, all his hopes were in that project and now he had failed, and that made him have a momentary lapse of reason that pushed him to this mindless act. We rushed outside, hoping that what I had seen was not true. I reached the edge of the well and looked down. Nothing but the deep black. Then I felt a warm breeze that I initially thought was the hot desert wind. But no, the warm air came from below. I looked in disbelief at the well and saw a dim light, something like the flame of a lighter. I was lucky, I have to admit. The guy next to me, one of the engineers at the reactor, had the presence of spirit to pull me aside. "My God, it has started! Quick, everyone back in the bunker!” he shouted. Not sure I understood what was going on, I ran to the shelter though. A jet of superheated air was already blowing from the exhaust well. The few operators who remained inside were working hard on adjusting the equipment. The fusion reaction had started indeed. It stabilized after twenty-four hours, as Bjorg had predicted.”

Thomas recounted things truthfully as they had happened. Or, better said, as he saw them happening. However, his recollection is not entirely in line with the actual reality. But it doesn’t matter. If the posterity will keep his version of what happened then, it's OK with me. It's really a poetic destiny, isn't it? What Thomas couldn't have known was that the reactor would have never started on its own. My equations made it clear that a series of conditions were needed that could in no way occur spontaneously. Those to whom I showed the project, years ago, also pointed that out. There was a need for an external intervention of a kind not found in any textbook on physics or nuclear engineering. Maybe in a mythology book, preferably Norse. That's why I had to do it personally. I jumped up and opened the little parachute I had in my backpack and, after a relatively short fall, I reached the bottom of the reactor. I sat down, next to the warm core, clenched my fists and propped them against each other. I started to press them hard, rotating them slowly at the same time. This continuum, which is the space-time fabric, began to tear at the points of contact between my knuckles. To be honest, I had seen this gesture on a drawing in a museum in Norway. The label with explanations only said "Mural depicting the god of fire." I slipped my two index fingers into the rupture that had formed, widening it little by little. When it was big enough, I went through it, stepping into the primordial chaos, and I went beyond this state of matter, which you see and feel. I then turned into billions of nanometric Bjorgs, and each of us grabbed two hydrogen atoms, put them in the cupped palms, and pressed them hard against each other. The helium atoms we formed this way started the chain fusion reaction, igniting the Sun from the deep.

I thus gave the world the cleanest energy possible. I have fulfilled my purpose. The only thing I'm sorry about is that I can't go back to the human form, because the law of conservation of energy doesn't let me. But I did not die, and this is the most important thing, even if I will spend the rest of eternity in the form of a multicomplex energy entity running through circuits carrying electricity.