Prologue

City Named Life

There are many places in the city named Life where you can live and where you can hang out with your friends. When the time finally come for young people to leave father home, they move to Immaturity district. The old are saying in order to be a man, one must build a house, plant a tree and raise a child. But it is hard to mature in a modern city. The Palace Ball its residents enjoy socially and competitively helps young people to mature. It takes two to tango. Only a well-matched pair can create a dance the judges are looking for—the feelings embodied into dance movements unique in its own brilliance and beauty. A pair dancing as one whole will be awarded. The award is a plot in Maturity district, a gorgeous land where all families live together separated by own boundaries whilst each contributing to one indivisible whole. If you get the idea to cut corners to the Wonderland, you might find yourself in the Underland, the terrible place where monsters are sucking life energy out of people. The Happily Ever After or the Recipe for Disaster? The perfect match or the perfect clash?

The clock strikes twelve. Let the ball commence! On one side females dressed to impress pretend they came here to chat; on the other side males are nervously buzzing, sizing each other up. But not everyone is here to win awards, some are in business. Hiding their fangs sticking out of mouth under a ‘nice person mask, monsters blend seamlessly in the crowd waiting for a moment to strike. Here a guy set eyes on a nice girl. How we know who is the one? You have to listen to your heart. A short distance separates two shores, but it is the abyss every guy should jump across at least once in his life. All eyes are on him, rivals are waiting for his fall. If he is rejected, he would be falling into the abyss. The fall creates ripples propagating through the city named Life faster than light speed causing him to suffer the stigma of loser the rest of his life. The young man trusted his heart and boldly rushed through the dangerous zone, ’Shall we dance?’ She hesitates. With so many monsters around, it pays to be a little careful. Hidden within her hesitation lies the patience test. An impatient monster will take uncertainty for rejection and fly into a rage revealing himself while a real man never gives up. The young man took a challenge. He stands by her lady as a guard ready to protect, to care of, the best father for your children ever. If the guy is willing to be vulnerable and takes the risk of rejection without thinking twice, he is the one. ‘A match!’ said her heart and she is smitten.

Their hands found each other for never to be separated. With astonishing ease, he was spinning her triumphantly across the ballroom, her little feet barely touching the floor. His loving eyes never leave her lovely face and she is responding to the love in those eyes with excited laugh. They are dancing as though they have been dancing like that for all their lives, and they wish they would go on like that forever. But nothing lasts forever. Once of a sudden, an invisible so far door swings wide open inviting the new residents of Maturity in. The wonderful land is unlocking its bounties to give them as a reward to those who found each other among millions of others. Everything in Maturity is simple, for what life needs only—in good economy nothing is wasted. Human children grow slowly while life is long and full of temptations, but once mature you are always mature. The old are saying it takes a village to raise a child. Children watch and learn and when the time comes for them to leave father home, they will find their own road to this gorgeous land.

Meanwhile, in the ballroom, the atmosphere is heating up. The air is especially hot around the rich and beautiful. Fights break out here and there. Some beautiful girls see an opportunity. A dove-feathered raven is making swift calculations in mind. Building a house may take a life, yet she can get everything right now. Her only concern not to miscalculate and sell her beauty dearly. On the other side, the similar scene has been unfolding. The handsome and rich guys attract girls like light attracts moths. While the timid girls just try to make eye contact with the guy of her dreams, the more aggressive barge their way through the crowd to the most eligible bachelors of the city. Without preamble she asks him to go to the dance floor. If the guy succumbs the temptation to cut corners to Maturity, magic will never happen during their performance. Some guys come to the conclusion they have no talent for dancing at all and leave the Palace to find a fun somewhere else; some guys, however, appreciate initiative and the two leave the Palace together holding hands.

Many pairs are already whirling on the dance floor, the well-matched pairs and the ill-matched pairs. In the darkest corner, a dozen of adults dressed as teenagers huddle to each other as if they try not to occupy too much space in the world to which they do not belong. They are extremely shy; their eyes are begging every passer-by to take care of ‘a poor child’. Sometimes one of them succeeds, and the two leaves the Palace without giving Dance a chance. There is no need for that if a woman is looking for a marital status to climb a social ladder, or a man is looking for a free maid to keep his house clean.

Finding your match is not an easy task. Sometimes you spend your entire life looking for the one and it would not be a wasted life. In actual practice, Immaturity district is casually referred as Hope. Demographics vary: rich and poor, young and old, businessmen and employees, married and single, many have visited the Palace for many years—hope dies last, while others cannot take their eyes off the pompous and extravagant Depression area. A compact core is growing in the centre of Immaturity district. No one knows why this vibrant part of the city so bright and beautiful as anything on Earth was called that. Even old people do not remember the name origins. Some say it was a depression in the land before the builders had come here, others say nothing, only roll their eyes with meaning: their residents have secrets they hide behind closed doors. Despite of the gloom name, the downtown is bursting with activity. The night here is as bright as the day, the billboards bigger than anyone can imagine never stop rolling videos advertising the advantages of living in the Great Depression area. Excessiveness blinds. Buildings are all skyscrapers, just next to a high one yet another super high tempting you to buy a place with a cracking view, too; a stream of the latest car models is pushing past you tempting you to upgrade your car, too; gigantic shopping malls and high-rated restaurants never close their doors tempting you to keep on shopping and feasting, too. But the city cannot swallow so much and once in a while overproduction plunges its economy into depression. But like an immortal phoenix bird, the economy always rises from the ashes and become even stronger than before.

To become a resident of the exclusive Depression area, you must buy an i-product. Smart dealers cut with the saw the integrity of the natural product you can find only in the Palace and the i-marriage, i-love, i-sex, and i-life are being sold by retail. Each i-product is the illusion of the corresponding part of the natural product, but as any surrogate, it lacks the high quality of the natural product and comes with a price tag. Life energy, not money, is the dealer’s real currency. The payment plunges the buyer into depression that makes the i-product dangerously expensive, but demand is stable high.

I-married couples make up the majority of the population of the Great Depression Area. Once a pair leaves the City Hall where marriage certificates are issued, a beast shows its teeth—it is time to pay the bill. You can see such a couple walking down the street. Wife dominates the procession, her beaten into submission husband follows her as a foal running after its mother, their shy daughter (for some reason dominant women mostly give birth to girls) is bringing up the rear. The i-marriage is unrealistically strong and a model marriage. The Relationship Research Institute vigorously studies the ‘perfect couple’ to reveal the secret as to why husband never cheats and child always behaves. But ‘happy family’ keeps their secrets behind closed doors.

There is another i-married couple next door. No one has ever seen the spouses together. Husband is always away gambling, drinking or whatever else he is doing. He arrives home only when he needs to replenish his life energy and cash. Then quarrels and fights are shaking the house. After having some ‘family time’, the man is quick to leave. His frazzle wife is running off her feet to do everything in time and to be everywhere in time. Neighbours often see her running around after her out-of-control son.

Buyers of i-love surrogate are mostly women. A young girl is ecstatic when she enters the gates to the Depression holding hands with ‘a prince charming’. She marvels at her smartness that let her leave all her rivals far behind. While the princesses are sitting in the towers waiting for a prince on a white horse, she wasted no time. She is a modern woman and does not stand on ceremony. However, the Happily Ever After beautiful story soon turns to My Life with Monster terrible story. Having sucked her dry, the parasitic ‘prince charming’ eventually vanishes without a trace. Not entirely true. He could be easily traced down in Depression. You can see his leering grin again when he enters the gates holding hands with his next ‘girlfriend’. Meanwhile, his ex has joined the members of the Club of Breaking Hearts. She added her voice to the weeping chorus of the used, abused and emotionally raped. They post their stories in blogs to warn the potential victims, they visit psychotherapists to escape from depression, they appeal to the public seeking their support, they are doing tons of right things—the recovery is illusory and largely insignificant. A broken heart hurts, potential victims don’t listen. A few can resist the temptation to get a prince not being a princess herself.

In the very core of the downtown, no women are already to be found. However, men living here are unbelievably handsome with pronounced feminine facial features. They are busy building an imitation of the city named Life and have already built their own Palace. What makes these men buy the expensive i-sex instead of competing for the natural product in the real Palace is the mystery scientists have been solving for decades without, they confess, noticeable progress. A typical buyer of i-life product is also man. Alcohol sellers and drug dealers do not need anyone’s life energy, only cash, but their product burns life energy as effectively as any other i-product does. Life surrogate fans want to know how it feels like to win awards in the Palace or fly up onto the summit of human achievement without leaving cosy atmosphere of bar or own home. In the bar, they meet with the beauties that have profitably invested their young years in a marriage with a rich and often much older man. Widowed, divorced, or still married, they spend nights here with a cigarette and a glass of whisky living through the illusion of Dance.

There is one i-product that is not like the others. I-death is not for sale, it can only be inherited from parents-dealers. A group of i-death owners is relatively small and all men. Each is quiet, aloof, and stays apart from others. What makes them special is that they are dead. It was not that they have lost interest in life which is common in the Depression. They were born dead which means they are empty, no more life energy left. Death is the only thing that sparks their interest, the only subject they can talk and think about. Each of them is chewing his own show through the sleepless nights—a series of individual deaths or a single massacre with the theatrical suicide in the final scene. He just has to decide whose fault it is, ‘It is always someone else’s fault, is not it?’, then his meaningless life will assume meaning and purpose.

Hundreds of pharmacies and psychotherapist offices have formed a tight ring around the Great Depression Area. They offer pills and psychological assistance to those who fell victim to a dealer. The pill is a synthetic ‘life energy’, and as any stimulant, it is short-lived and very addictive. Psychological assistance is mainly if not entirely limited to an advice discuss your problem with the dealer to find a solution together. So-called ‘dealers’ are offered a series of psychotherapy sessions during which a psychologist tries to unlock a forgotten psychological trauma taken place in patient’s childhood and psychopathic tendencies should vanish. However, the treatment has not proved to be effective and without knowing psychopath’s origin psychology remains pseudo-science. But the matter cannot wait. Integrity violation leads to the human evolution has gone on a reverse. Only if we find a correct sequence of events in the story of life a pattern will emerge. The pattern holds the answer to the question how the first human with psychopathic tendencies came about. Let the story begin!

Life Originates in the Stars

Life and Death

Death always hides its face under a mask. It has more masks than anyone could imagine. If you unmask Death to see its face, you will see nothing, just a black hole. This is what Death actually is, the Black Hole. It is not old and it is not cold because there is no time and no temperature in the Underworld; it is black because it kills light and everything that moves. Light that moves is Life. There is a possibility that first was the fantastic outburst of energy. It had left behind the primordial ocean of the chaotically moving ‘up-quarks’. The hyper-energetic Black Hole was consuming massless quarks voraciously, spitting out deadly radiation. ‘Matter’ that occupies space and possesses mass would be more difficult for Death to swallow. Welcome to the world made up entirely of energy.

Explosion means breaking through the wall. When an ‘up quark’ is beating against the wall, it loses its electron, a ‘down-quark’ result. You would say it ‘excites’ the wall. The low energy ‘down quarks’ joined the ‘up quarks’ in the ocean. The temperature of the energetic soup had dropped and as if obeying the signal, three quarks fused into one whole. The energetic Proton was already three times bigger than one quark, the two ‘up quarks’ and one ‘down quark’ that were held together with the gluon field. Uniformity was broken, the first step to generate a more improbable shape. Looking for a balance, the triplet begins to rotate. Hidden within the proton lies the triple code, the code of ‘rotation’.

The beginning of Life signalled the beginning of time. Death tried to grab the escaping Life and stop time. The tiny protons were spinning with all their power and might, but how to move forward if you are destined to rotate? Rapid expansion of space means breaking through the wall. When the proton is beating against the wall, it loses its ‘up’ piece and one electron escapes. The neutral Neutron was one ‘up quark’ and two ‘down quarks’ that were held together with gluon field. Proton and Neutron, one is energetic, one is non-energetic, different enough to attract each other. Hidden within the proton-n-neutron pair lies the double code, the code of movement ‘forward’ and towards each other, the code of longing for fusion, striving for being together, for being one whole, the eternal mission to accomplish.

Energetic Proton had his mission accomplished. The trouble was the neutral Neutron was in a deep sleep. How to wake up the Sleeping Beauty? There was no time to find the answer. Time disappears when you are teetering on the edge of the abyss. Everything Proton could give to Neutron was his energy and nothing more, but it appeared to be enough. Proton approached the sleeping beauty and touched her with his energetic filed. This simple act caused amazing transformation. The two immediately fused into one whole. In place of Proton and Neutron was ‘a baby’.

Atomic Nucleus—for such was the baby’s name—was Proton and Neutron that were held together with the nucleus force. But the parental particles did not die; they just were reborn in a new body. It was time of synthesis of nuclei known as time of nucleosynthesis. Space was the energetic soup again, only the particles became bigger, the whole ocean of the chaotically moving atomic nuclei and electrons. Atomic nuclei consumed electrons greedily, holding them on their orbits. It might have taken a hundred thousand years until all electrons were trapped in orbits around nuclei, but it was only a moment. Time was ticking with the same speed, only the presence or absence of the life-giving events created the illusion of its acceleration or deceleration. With an electron on its orbit, Atomic Nucleus was Atom complete. The atoms began to join into gas clouds that scattered light like fog. Light is Life. The first ‘matter’ had no fixed shape but atoms organised in a higher order than the disembodied gas could have a shape and the matter would shine. The whole shining world could be built from the tiny seeds of Life and Death should give Life a way.

Only space vast enough allowed this grandiose event to occur. One region of the cloud became denser and hotter than others. The uniformity is broken, the first step to generating a more improbable state. Looking for a balance the cloud begins to rotate, central part of the cloud rotates faster than periphery, the wind of exceptionally strong force is spiralling inward towards centre of exceedingly low pressure transforming the cloud into a massive whirlpool a thousand miles wide. It is an energy barrier the two protons needed to overcome so they could get close enough to collide. Squeezed inside the rotating central part, the protons fused releasing tremendous amount of heat. In place of a cloud of gas, a new star quietly shines.

More and more stars lit up in the sky, a whole generation of small and large stars. At the beginning, a star grew chaotically, synthesising only hydrogen, the atoms themselves, from abundance of atomic nuclei. The light elements were synthesised by burning hydrogen, the element helium result, then progressively burning helium, carbon, oxygen and silicon. The most abundant elements the stars synthetised had ‘even’ number of protons; only after the elements had learned to swallow a proton the elements with ‘odd’ number of protons could have been synthesised. Lighter elements fused becoming heavier elements. Looking for a balance, the star developed steady rotation around its axis without an external force.

But the huge plasma ball created another problem for itself instead. The gravitational force was pulling heavier elements to the centre, leaving the lighter elements near the surface. A compact core was growing in the centre of the star. It created a force opposite to gravitational force and on the surface the light elements started casting away. As nucleosynthesis no longer occurred in the white core, the star had to rely on its thermal store of energy for all heat and light. The escaping light elements created a nimble round the aging star, the core radiated only cold ultra-violet light causing the nimble to glow. Over time this gradually radiate away and the white star become a cold black star—a death of the star. It might be a death of the star but not death of atoms. The dying star left its seeds behind contributing to the grander concept—parents thrust their lives into new generation. The seeds tend to disintegrate and travel through space while a parent tends to keep its integrity and just gradually decay after having its mission accomplished. Death of the star is just a part of the endless cycle of Life.

Plasma matter was the food for the black hole and sometimes you could capture the black hole while it was feeding. It was tearing the plasma apart as it pulled the star towards itself. The shreds of the ripped star were sliding down into the hole until nothing left creating the ripples that propagated through the entire space faster than light speed. A hard piece would be more difficult for Death to swallow. Elements radiated by stars escaped into interstellar medium. Planted into fertile ‘soil’ in which the concentration of elements was high enough a little seed of life had sprouted. The ‘molecule’ was a heavier element with a lighter element on its orbit that were held together with a chemical bond. The tamed atoms tied into a molecule in form of dust or ice could create only weak but sticky electrostatic energy. The sticky dust powder and iced bunnies coagulated becoming dust grains and iced grains, each grain was composed of even thin crystals. Size of the grain was anywhere near the size of the plasma ball, but on the other side, it was hard and completely cold. A hard, cold object could get stuck in the black throat, ‘I will get this Death chock on me!’

Pulled into the whirlpool created by the nearest star, the grains formed a disk around the star. They were smashing into one another forming larger and larger conglomerations, the rocks. Some escaped the gravitational hold of the star to become the travelling through space asteroids and comets. The rest grew big enough for their gravity to shape them into a proper sphere. It was the beginning of the solid shape. Slowly the spherical objects began to find their orbits to settle at a comfortable distance from a central sun. The world once made up entirely of energy gradually solidified. The huge stone balls were moving orderly around a central star—a round dance of small and large planets around an energetic sun. The sun moved them, the sun heated them, and overall provided energy for the system to go.

Space was increasingly filled with the sun-planet systems. The dense regions pulled in more and more systems through gravity forming a galaxy. Every galaxy looked as flat as a plate from a distance. They were moving in space and occasionally passed right through each other. Their gases and dust were mixing triggering the burst of new stars that sparkled on the sky as magnificent stardust. Then the galaxies peacefully parted their ways dragging a tail of stars in a memory of the past event. But sometimes the encounter had ended with cannibalism. A bigger galaxy teared a smaller galaxy apart and swallowed it.

With time, a hot yellow sun in the centre of the galaxy cools down. It grows to more than four hundred times its original size and glows redder. The red rays are not as hot and bright as the burning rays of the yellow sun and generously share their warmth with everyone who is freezing. But a dense core is growing inside the cool sun. It absorbs light and warmth of the red star causing death of the giant in the central galaxy. Supernova is the most explosive and the brightest event in space. For a few days, the explosion is beaming as brightly as the whole galaxy scattering around the remains of the red star and its planets. One region of the rapidly expending dust cloud is getting denser and hotter than others, a cosmic wind of exceptionally strong force is spiralling inward towards centre forming a spiral nebula, the cradle of new stars. Atoms tend to travel through space in search of the fertile soil to give birth to a new star that one day will scatter atoms around as well. Heavy grains tend to join each other; a nearest giant grabs the grains and rotated by the giant, the ice and dust get stuck together forming a new planet, a production site of new dust grains and ice grains.

Space was spectacular, the dark fabric studded with billions of shining stars. The small and large black holes piercing its fine fabric still destroyed space from inside but Life triumphed. Millions of galaxies had already been moving in a chaotic order around a central galaxy. The more galaxies the greater the gravitational pull. Drawing the galaxies together, the gravity was forming clusters and superclusters of galaxies, the whole Universe rotating around a central point. At the supercluster scale, the galaxies were arranged into sheets and filaments separated with patches of voids like a colossal body of some giant.

Different elements had been synthesised in its enormous belly, the youngest and the heaviest elements had been born in interstellar medium during supernova cataclysmic explosion; the oldest and the lightest element was Hydrogen, the proton itself; known as heavy Hydrogen, the Deuterium was a golden pair—one proton and one neutron residing in the atomic nucleus; the first element was followed by the second element which was Helium that held two protons in its nucleus; protons had added up assigning each successive element a higher atomic number—third, fourth, fifth…ninety-second was Uranium, the youngest and the heaviest instantly disintegrating in a flurry of radioactivity. Numbers had appeared, an uninterrupted sequence of even and odd digits: 1 2 3 4 5…, each number had a unique mathematical property while its atomic number gave every element a unique physical property. If you arrange all elements in ascending order of their atomic numbers, the Periodic Table will emerge. The ‘gas’, ‘plasma’ and ‘solid’ physical properties describe the solidification of energy, a message to those who would be able to read the language of physical properties: ‘In space Life and Death are locked in merciless struggle.’

The energy of atoms is ‘active’ and the atoms had created a shining world that moves after all, but the hyperactive energy blocks its way and absorbs Life energy. The two opposing forces create density; the critical density is effectively a threshold, and Life hangs on the balance. Smart matter would be more difficult for Death to swallow, ‘If I cannot outgrow the Death, then I will outsmart it.’ However, knowing mathematics is not enough to be smart. Knowing alphabet and speaking language are required to complete education.

Atoms were capable of more than just compressing energy into stone. In right conditions, they could breathe life into stone. Space was progressively filled with hot plasma balls and cold iced balls to maintain the temperature at a required setting. Every dying star tried to throw its remnants as far as it possibly could to give its seeds the best start in life. Many different planets had been already rotating in the Universe. Some had terrains, seas and atmosphere, some made it to the rainy phase, but the rains were so toxic that they could kill a giant, leave alone a fragile new life. There must have been diamond planets somewhere, also ill-suited a new-born. Only iron planets had the right environment as they cooled, the plates tectonic and strong magnetic field, but no one had the right position on the cosmic map.

In the depth of the Universe’s enormous body was Milky Way galaxy, on the third orbit of one of its numerous suns, secret and secure, was revolving an iron egg wrapped into silicate magma. And that was it. Not too close to the hot plasma ball (liquids just evaporate) and not too far away (liquids just freeze), its position on the cosmic map was just right. Then the planet cooled down, the ‘eggshell’ sealed the boiling magma inside and the formation of the planet Earth was complete. A larger planet gave the young Earth a glancing blow breaking a chunk of its crust off and the planet tilted. Its satellite Moon gave the planet seasons.

A period of time on the Earth’s clock is eon, a billion years give or take on a geological timescale. The Hadean Eon marked the beginning of the Era of Mineralisation. Atoms continued their persistent push towards highly ordered organisation. The pressure and temperature inside the planet reached their peaks and structural rearrangement of atomic chaos into more ordered structures had begun. The most efficient arrangement of atoms-spheres is cube, the most efficient structure of packing cubes together is polyhedron, a violent chemical reaction accompanied by the release of a huge amounts of gases. The planet was bloating like a balloon tied with a thread, and eventually the bomb exploded. The eggshell cracked and magma burst through the crack out establishing constant delivery of the processed silicate melt from the planet’s depth to its surface.

Exposed to the sun heat, the rich in magnesium and iron silicate melt solidified; miles, miles, and miles of granite and basalt, the rocks inimitable in hardness and massiveness. Minerals came in array of multi-coloured polyhedrons shining on the sun on the chipped stones. Reddish feldspar, clear quartz and their mixes were abundant, but sometimes a beautiful gemstone was growing out of a humble rock, or even a clear water diamond, the hardest mineral on Earth. Magma packed with metals solidified into metal-bearing rocks; in some metal rich areas the landscape was made up entirely of metals ores. Year after year, for millions of years the rocks had been built up transforming a flat tectonic plate into the rugged landscape.

Death felt home in the paved by stones desert wrapped into hot clouds of carbon dioxide. But water is life. The planet was an enormous ice burner where the ice grains melted and steam made its way through the cracks in the crust out and into the sky. Water infiltering through the clouds absorbed carbon dioxide establishing constant delivery of carbonic acids from the sky to the surface. It had rained for millions of years until all dust grains and ice grains had been converted into nutritious soup. The pink ocean lay motionlessly under the yellow sky. Only several cratons, the fractions of the crust, jutted out from under the water here and there.

Life Arose as Two Halves of One Whole

Archean Eon. Very hot. The water is so hot that its surface is simmering, it is so acidic that it dissolves metal ores into the slurry of atoms and ions, a perfect pot of chemical soup warmed by the magma heat. The planet covered by liquid is not like space woven of energetic fabric. On the planet, the world of energies is the world of chemistry, a sun-planet system is a molecule—atoms revolving around a central atom-, gravity is a chemical bond holding atoms of the molecule together, chemical energy is an electron on its outer orbit.

The pot of nutritious soup called the Archean Ocean was teeming with chemical life. ‘The rich’ with a lone pair of electrons on their outer orbits are under constant attacks of ‘the poor’ with an empty pocket. Here a poor non-metal gets too close to the electron-rich hydrogen, or to the metal and, oops…the rich has been ‘ionised’. A bond has formed. Now the poor is an electron-rich ion while the rich is an electron-poor ion, their union is an ionic compound