Save the Last Bullet for God (17 page)

“Who the hell are you?” I yelled. My
collapsed shoulder was aching now. I had lost, and now I needed to
minimize the damage. Resolving to fight another day, I ran out of
the room immediately.

I’m Hizir

I’m Hizir al-Khidir, and I have been
observing mankind for a long time. The human—the most strange,
unpredictable, and surprising creature in all the universe, as far
as I have observed—has always given me hope. For thousands of
years, I have observed as this community looks for its light. As
such, I like to help humans and show them the right path. It is
something like what a teacher feels while helping a child. To me, a
human is like a young child. If I can nurture them and the child
grows up, I have raised a human being.

But here was a man who was scattering his
thoughts in a strange new way, but it would be a lie if I said such
distinct thoughts had not existed before in history. Such
inferences, whether right or wrong, hurt only if they are not kept
secret.

But, when these thoughts and their
conclusions are incorrect and affect the lives of others,
intervention is needed. Of course, there is another possibility: if
everything he said was right and was transmitted to other people,
then everyone and everything could be rebuilt.

The poor boy was lying on his bed
semiconscious and covered in blood. His weak moans echoed slightly
off of the walls in the dark. It wasn’t the right time.

Murmuring a prayer, I touched his head, and,
with each light touch, his broken nose, fractured skull, internal
hemorrhaging, and, finally, the wounds on his face, slowly
disappeared.

To wipe his memory, I touched his head
once more, sealing the neuronal synaptic connection in his
hippocampus. I could hear the sound of the morning
azan
from far away. By the time I
left, only the memory of a faint menthol smell would remain in the
room.

I’m Oktay

When I awoke in the morning, the sun
had already risen and the hour was late. After a two-minute
indulgence, I stood up and felt a slight headache and some stiff
muscles. I went to the bathroom and noticed that an area on my
chest was sore. I slipped off my undershirt and saw an oddly shaped
bruise.
Where did that come from?
Had I bumped into something when I was asleep? I went through
my memory of the night before, but I couldn’t associate the bruise
with anything. There was no pain. I felt good.

When I returned to my room, I found a
document with this week’s task:

This week, each competitor is going to
produce something using his own knowledge and experience. Each
contestant will present what he has produced in the next round of
competition. If your creation is accepted by the others, then you
will remain in the competition; if not, you will be eliminated.

Good luck.

BBM Competition Coordinator

What do they mean?
I thought.
What does it mean to
produce something?
Such a subjective definition—it
could be anything from lyrics to a drawing or some kind of
mathematical formula. Did they want us to create something that
would be demanded and sold? In order to sell someone what you have
made or produced, the person has to want it desperately and be
ready to pay any price. I would need to produce something that
someone would desperately want. But, this left me at the mercy of
the desire and taste of another human.
Maybe I could poison someone and wait for him or her to buy
the antidote
, I thought, laughing.

When I went into the lounge, everyone was
there. They all looked sleep deprived as they sat yawning and
chatting quietly. Greeting them, I sank into the armchair beside
them. “So, what do you think about this week’s competition?” I
asked.

“Dr. Özel can explain more scientifically,
but I think this will be an opportunity to realize why we live and
what we can bring to society,” said Hıdır.

I liked him. Although we didn’t chat a lot,
my sense of his warmth and confidence strengthened my opinion of
him as time went on.

“A correct analysis, indeed,” Dr. Özel
agreed. “But in the end, if you want your creation to be bought for
certain, you have to oblige the buyer. It is based on real need. A
war economy, for example, requires increasingly superior weapon
systems and the weapons needed to shield against them. This
mentality relates to most things. Think of computers. Although no
one at first needs an antivirus software program, if you spread
viruses on the internet, there will be a demand for antivirus
programs.”

“By that logic, if you let people suffer
from hunger, they’ll buy food from you,” Fatin jumped in,
smiling.

“You have only barely perceived the
subject,” I snapped at Fatin. He had begun to bother me after his
smoke trick from the night before. He looked me over at length,
like he had something on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t say
anything.

Feryal’s sweet voice took away the tension.
“Once upon a time, I wrote an article on a similar issue and had
the opportunity to study this in depth. If we look around us at the
experiences of domesticated creatures, we can understand this issue
better.” She again spoke to us as if we were her students. “In
fact, everything that survives pays a tribute or a bribe. Cows
survive and continue their bloodline by continuously producing
milk. In order to ensure their breed’s survival and not become one
of the animal species that we have destroyed, they, ironically,
offer their milk and meat. Cows and chickens and other such animals
escape extinction and the cruelty of nature by behaving this
way.”

Feryal leaned in as she continued. “We don’t
let a wolf wander around the city, and we don’t make an effort to
breed it on a farm so that it can continue to have offspring. This
is because it doesn’t pay us a bribe and thus, like many others, it
is either destroyed or pushed away from our living areas. If horses
didn’t offer their strength and their ability to carry us, and if
they weren’t submissive enough to be tamed, do you think man would
let them live on and take care of them? Would they even be able to
continue their bloodline?”

I looked over at Ender, who was nodding as
he listened to Feryal’s argument.

“That’s interesting,” Ender said. “I had
never looked at it that way until you said that. You are saying
everything has to pay a price to exist, even human communities.
That’s what you mean, right?”

“Naturally. Driving incompatible stereotypes
out of the community is also an indicator of this phenomenon,”
Feryal explained. “Throughout human history we have tried to limit
the possibility of breeding for people who are of no use or who can
hurt us. We put them in jail or give them the death penalty. And
who doesn’t want to get married to a smart, beautiful, and
hardworking person and make children? But this means that we are
somehow trying to prevent the continuation of others’ bloodlines by
not marrying the opposite kind of people.”

Fatin became agitated at this. “So, you’re
admitting that you people are part of an order based on a
relationship of interest and benefit, only masked with morality.
You crush one another or even cause one another’s extinction with
the rules you set. Because you invented the rifle, you think you
have the privilege of killing and exploiting the communities that
still use arrows and spears. Afterward, you offer them a few tokens
or claim a holy mission. America did this. They carried out
genocide on the native people of an entire continent, only leaving
a handful to live on reservations. You are calling this ‘natural
selection.’ Maybe this is why the concept and format of this
competition seems natural and nice to you. You find it natural and
exciting to cause another’s extinction, and you think I am the evil
one.”

“You don’t need to persuade us by dragging
us into a fight,” Hıdır said calmly. “It is only a matter of
perspective and interpretation. Sometimes we shouldn’t question
what we don’t understand.”

“Sometimes, I think of this world as my
personal hell and you as the demons punishing me,” Fatin retorted.
Then he stood up and walked toward his room. The sound of a
slamming door punctuated his departure.

“He has begun to act like a teenage boy,” I
said, trying to ease the silence.

Dr. Feryal Özel, still engaged with her
ideas, turned to Ender. “If I share with you some of my ideas,
could you give me an answer after thinking them over?”

Ender smiled at her and nodded silently.

Feryal continued. “Here is the first piece
of data: Human DNA is repeated in each cell in almost the same
manner. In other words, every cell, from those in the hair to those
in the intestine, has the same basic DNA coding. The second piece
of data: only five to ten percent of the data in DNA is in use. The
function and purpose of the other data is unknown. Now comes the
question: Do you think that a fish leaves millions of eggs to
create thousands of offspring as an evolutionary strategy to
increase the numbers of its descendants?”

Ender looked off in the distance. He
seemed to be making calculations. “Actually, you’re indirectly
asking me if there is a purpose for our existence. Continuing the
bloodline is the expansion of the
why
question, isn’t it?”

“You’re near my point, yes,” Feryal
answered.

Ender thought again to himself, then turned
to her. “I’d like to begin explaining in the way that I hate the
most—in other words, with a question,” he said. “If you had all the
power to send a message that would last a very long time, even
eternally, what would you do?”

This question excited me and prompted
me to jump in. “While working on the Qur’anic code, I thought about
this issue a lot,” I said. “In fact, I may have even addressed this
question precisely. If a message is written in nature by using
universal constraints, like the code I suggested, it will be there
as long as the universe exists. Take a number like
Pi
, which continues until eternity.
If we encode a message in such an ocean of information, the message
can go to the Andromeda galaxy or to any edge of the universe and
it will stay the same: stable. So the information remains as long
as the universe exists.”

“I would try a different approach,” Feryal
said. “I would write the message in the place where time doesn’t
function: on the border of extinction, such as the entrance to a
black hole, to guarantee that the message and information stay
there as long as time and the universe allow.”

Ender considered our comments thoughtfully.
“These are good statements,” he said, “but they still don’t cover
all eventualities. The universe is in a loop, and as such, if it
assumes a form in which the same rules don’t apply, your message
will vanish.”

A period of silence followed until the boy
spoke again. “If the message can be written inside of a complex
structure that is able to exist, overcome and adapt to every
situation, we can have a dynamic means of message transmission. I
posit that there can be a possibility of carrying a secret message
in our very DNA which allows us to go beyond time and our universe.
As you know, life does anything it can to survive.”

“Whoa! Even I hadn’t thought about it that
way,” Feryal said.

“So what would the message be? If the reason
of our presence is that message, what is it?” I asked.

Ender laughed at that. “How can I answer
that question? I can only make inferences about these dimensions,
and I am only one person with one mind. How can an electron that
transmits only a portion of a small electrical signal in a
telephone conversation know the entirety of that conversation?
Assume, for example, that you are a tiny LED light on a dashboard,
occasionally flashing. You will neither know the whole image nor
which part of the message you support.”

The conversation had tired us all out at
that point. Hidir and Feryal got up to head to their rooms while I
remained thinking about what Ender had just described. As I was
about to go back to my room, Ender followed closely. “You may not
be aware of it,” he said quietly, “but you have been badly beaten.
Take care of yourself. Don’t let the things you know but don’t
remember prevent you from protecting yourself.”

I laughed. “If she hadn’t left, I would
think Gizem was talking to me now. Did she put you up to this?” I
said.

Ender smiled at my joke, then grew more
serious. “Just pay attention to Fatin,” he said before he went to
his room.

I didn’t know what Ender was referring to,
so, in my room, I dismissed his warning and tried to think of a
strategy for the competition. The easiest idea was to poison Fatin
and sell him the antidote, but I knew that couldn’t go beyond a
thought.

The next afternoon, it was again my turn to
be interviewed by the host. So I sat again in front of the cameras
and talked about my thoughts on the competition and about Gizem’s
elimination. As my mind was occupied with the next challenge, I
didn’t insist on talking as much about my book and the code. When
asked about the other competitors, I avoided the subject by giving
wishy-washy answers. I expertly navigated questions intended to
trap me, such as what had happened to my lip. By the time the
hourglass was empty, I had grown bored and I slipped out of the
room.

When I went into the lounge, Ender and
Hidir, the cleric, were there. Hidir was talking while sketching
something on a paper, and the boy was cheerfully listening to him.
The cleric seemed like he was talking to his grandchild.

“The Qur’an is the greatest miracle and was
always directed to him. When our Prophet was asked to show a
miracle, he always showed it. People always wanted more, and they
studied this holy book for centuries. They still do. In the
process, one of the discoveries that has been made about the book
is the repetition of words.”