by Mark Goode
© 2020, Mark Goode. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-7351820-2-5.
To purchase books or for more information, visit www.finalchaos.live
This book is a work of experimental fiction. It is specifically not intended to diagnose or treat any medical or psychological condition, which can be obtained by consulting with your health care provider. Any resemblance of the characters or stories in this book to real-life persons or events is purely coincidental. The story occurs in the future. There is a small amount of history which is real. The physical setting includes real places that could be substituted with any number of alternatives without materially effecting the story. These places have no other intended relationship whatsoever expressed or implied to the story which is fictional.
a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable professional assistance and friendship of Christina Palaia of Emerald Editorial Services. Not only for the professional editing but for the coaching and guidance throughout the process of writing this book. I would also like to thank longtime friend with an infectious enthusiasm, graphic designer Nikylla Celine for her fantastic artwork and encouragement. Finally, and most importantly thanks to my wife and beloved elkhounds for their unconditional love.
To thinking outside of the box
Contents
• Call 911 Now
• Chapter 1: Only Wanted to Play Music and Then…
• Chapter 2: She Could Smell You a Mile Away
• Chapter 3: Not So Basic Science
- The Chaos Bakery
- Apoptosis
- Neuroscience
- The Brain Lab
• Chapter 4: Grandmother Got Arrested
• Chapter 5: I Should Have Seen It Coming
• Chapter 6: Angela Starr, Child to Scientist
• Chapter 7: Grandmother’s Laboratory
• Chapter 8: Enter the Virus
• Chapter 9: Grand County, Colorado,
Big Thompson, and The Aquaterrians
• Chapter 10: Enter the Chloroplasts
• Chapter 11: Jack and Arnold’s Reunion
• Chapter 12: “Fractitious”
• Chapter 13: Revelation Day
• Chapter 14: Battlefield Interview
• Chapter 15: The Aftermath
• Chapter 16: All the Plants Died
and the Region Turned Brown
• Chapter 17: She Wrote Me a Letter
• Chapter 18: Angela Has a Stroke
• Chapter 19: The Trial
• Chapter 20: Nick’s Reset.com
EPILOGUE:
- Stress and the End of Life
- Behavioral Scripts
- Chaos and Computers
- The Emotion Chip: A Higher Level of Intimacy
AFTERWORD:
Closing Tips
- Prayer and Meditation
- Physical Activity
- Music
- The Human-Animal Bond
APPENDIX:
Odorless, Tasteless, Transparent, and Deadly
AGREEMENT:
Statement of Friendship and Caring
P r e f a c e
—
Suicide has reached epidemic proportions in our communities. Every time I hear that someone has taken their life, which happens all too often, I wonder what happened. Why did they do this? What were the circumstances? Could things have been different? Everyone is aghast. Even the medical providers are astounded that this is occurring in our communities. We have so much to be thankful for, how can there be so much chaos in paradise? There are suicide hotlines, mental health facilities, universities, churches, schools, recreation of all types, yet seemingly suicide rates are exceeded only by property taxes.
For most, it takes two incomes to pay the bills, childcare is as expensive as housing, parking fees can be compared to the cost of a nice dinner. Speed is measured by bandwidth. No one is talking to anyone, and suicide victims are particularly silent about the turmoil they endured.
Mental health problems are inconvenient. They don’t fit into our lives, culture, or medical system. They require lots of time, compassion, genuine and caring communication, and, importantly, long-term follow-up. I am not the first to suggest the need for a national conversation and personal discussions with our families, classmates, coworkers, and neighbors about this. I believe the more we talk about this societal issue, the more we could remove the stigma from mental health problems that normal people experience in the course of their lives, a stigma that may be preventing individuals from asking for help.
Suicide is a complex neuropsychological behavior. It is staged in a theater where biology, genetics, and the environment compete as leading actors in the drama of life.
Life is hard!
We are guaranteed to come across difficult circumstances and hard stops in our lives. We each stand in the crosshairs of transcendence and dissolution. We can and must help one another there.
Admittedly, this book raises more questions than it provides answers for. Thank you for indulging me in this “food for thought experiment.” In addition to the rhetorical questions I ask here, I hope that you will ask your own questions and discuss them with family, friends, and neighbors as part of a countrywide conversation that brings this topic out into the open. Ideally, by talking about suicide, we could expand and influence mental health care access, awareness, and funding and get more people the help they need and stop this epidemic.
The idea of writing this book arose out of my interest and readings about chaos combined with other interests, computers, artificial intelligence, and the brain. I noticed I could not escape the all-too-frequent reports of yet another suicide; the epidemic actually better described as a pandemic. I started thinking of the possible connections. Chaos certainly seems a good description of the circumstances surrounding suicide. This powerful little word has many deep, profound meanings and a universality: everybody holds in their minds an image of what chaos is.
Children negotiating the trials of adolescence, young adults trying to gain a grip on life and establish themselves in their careers and families, middle-aged people trying to solidify their futures, elderly persons coping with retirement, physical decline, and aging. Our servicemen and servicewomen training to protect us, and veterans reentering society, and the collective whole that is dealing with life experiences and lessons such as illness, trauma, addiction, consequences of bad decisions, divorce, unemployment, and societal realities such as violence, homelessness, terrorism, and armed conflict need help finding a pathway out of chaos.
The concept of chaos so perfectly describes the interplay of the human condition with the worldly condition. You can envision the turmoil and anguish of a brain out of sync, struggling to keep it together in the midst of adversity, whether it be an organic medical condition such as dementia, schizophrenia, or depression or an extreme psychological situational or cultural stress such as divorce, bankruptcy, or death of a spouse, child, friend, or even a stranger. Imagine the unbelievable pain, anger, confusion, and disorder erupting in a brain projecting an outward appearance of normalcy yet spinning out of control to the extent that the executive network deems pulling its own plug the only option.
Indeed, this five-letter word – chaos – is an excellent descriptor of these phenomena, among others.
Many great minds, including physicists’, astronomers’, mathematicians’, economists’, meteorologists’, and biologists’, have encountered chaos in a multitude of scenarios. Chaotic the adjective is commonly used and understood. However, chaos the noun was regarded as an aberration or noise in the real science of Newton’s clockwork unive
rse, and it has only recently come under investigation.
Inarguably, one of the great revolutionary minds of our times was Albert Einstein. The world has marveled at his genius. As a theoretical physicist, Einstein performed experiments in the most sophisticated supercomputer laboratory known: his mind. These famous thought experiments showed us how to think about topics not readily investigated in the laboratory. What better way to get a handle on that which is not graspable? Yet, the posthumous study of his brain did not reveal any anatomical basis for his brilliance.
I am attracted to the methodology of thought experiments as a framework from which to launch our minds and ponder the complexity of suicide. I hope this gives us the platform and the poetic license to do so in the absence of hard science and factual data. To that end, I submit this story, a combination of fiction, some science, some history, and a lot of imagination.
The primary story is that of brilliant savant scientist Angela Starr and her fictional discoveries about the regulation of life cycles in plants. The drama unfolds in the future on a planet struggling with limited resources and environmental change. Chaos flourishes at every level as societal, environmental, and biological circumstances align and erupt in the World Water Wars.
Angela’s story is rife with conflict and tension and controversy: the degraded environment and global warming, the mismanagement of water amid societal growth, the power-hungry government and oppression of freethinking citizens. The people’s struggle between the innate forces of self-destruction and self-preservation.
Our thought experiment ponders the existence of an innate neurobiological behavior script, rooted in cellular biology. Vulnerable brains by virtue of training and circumstance and activation by the development of chaos in the brain may enact self-destruction. The fictional story attempts to depict the intersection of these variables in a special time and place under the influence of the first-ever behavioral toxin, chloroplast DNA.
I apologize in advance for offending anyone, particularly those who may have been touched by suicide. I wish I could say that there is potential for healing in the book; however, that would be presumptuous. What I can say is that it will be controversial. I hope to stimulate discussion possibly leading to better understanding of suicide – not necessarily from these written words but by the hard work you do thinking about and discussing the topic with one another.
We don’t have to be the victims of suicide, not our own or others’. We can hope to grow more knowledgeable about this chaotic state and our ability to cope with the loss of those who could not escape it.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge and rally support for the real heroes in this battle: the therapists and all those involved across multiple disciplines who are dedicated to providing mental health care to real people. I salute and thank you.
Attention. Read This.
Call 911 Now
If you are thinking about harming yourself or someone else, get help now! You can prevent and avoid this unnecessary loss of life.
There is no need for you to suffer a permanent result of a temporary feeling. In the course of our lives, we all have failures, we all make bad choices, and we all will encounter circumstances we can’t control. You may think there is no way out of your situation, but there is!
A lot of people care about you and want to help you, even if they don’t know you. Call 911 now.
Just think: If you were physically sick, you would seek a doctor. If you were in danger, you would run or take shelter. If your brain is in turmoil and you are experiencing chaos in your life, you can seek help, too — help is available. What you are feeling now is often temporary, and with a little help, you can weather the chaos storm, “reset your brain,” and save yourself.
Do not become a victim of a temporary situation and go down a path of self-destruction!
Wake up! You may not even realized the peril you are facing. No one can see this danger, which is invisible, transparent, odorless, tasteless but poised to take your life.
Do not fool yourself. you will be missed!
Your family and friends would suffer the permanent consequences of your self-destruction, agonizing over your death forever. If you have no family or you feel you have no friends, remember you are loved by God. If you are not interested or don’t believe in God, then remember you are an integral part of the universe. Everything is connected; the stars and planets will know and experience your absence.
Finally, I, the author of this book, will mourn your loss.
If you read no further than this call for help and are rescued from the chaos of life, we will have succeeded in pulling together as humanity and liberating one of us from a misery that will pass.
If you choose to read this book, I hope you find it interesting. The purpose is to ignite a conversation about suicide so that we may all rise up together against this enemy, this epidemic, this curse that robs people of life and never stops hurting those left behind.
You may not like this book, but even a negative review adds to the conversation. Please tell others about it. Take it to your book clubs for discussion. Break the silence. Talk to your family, children, and friends about this difficult, terrible topic.
Importantly, make a promise to give help and your consent and promise to receive it. Support the mental health community in any way you can. Volunteer, open your heart and wallet, write letters to your legislators and join the conversation.
Chapter 1
I Only Wanted to Play
Music and Then…
It is said that those who ignore history do so at their own peril. We speak of being present in the moment, of being socially responsible and aware.
Our lifetimes can potentially span a century, but on a universal scale the duration of a human life might be compared to the first femtoseconds of the Big Bang. Our brains give us the gift of consciousness, which allows us to comprehend a universe that stretches infinitely forward and backward in time. Most of us, however, are unaware of the challenges members of our families faced beyond one or two generations back, and we’d be hard-pressed to discuss world history in the same time frame.
I’m lucky in that my close ancestors’ life stories are very well known to me. You see, my grandparents revolutionized the world. The story I am about to tell you not only involves the genealogy of my family but also, to the best of my knowledge, gives an accounting of their extraordinary lives during the World Water Wars.
My early ambition was to be a rock star. I spent days in the studio making sounds, learning about music and recording. Music resonates within me, and I became fascinated with what is going on in the brain while listening and playing. Although supportive — he built a studio for me — Dad said I would need an education to finance my passion. So, I tried business but then switched to computer science. With electronics and computing skills, making the leap to neuroscience was inevitable.
My name is Nicholas Jennings, and I am CEO of Reset.com, where we reset brains. We use a number of techniques to probe and study the brain and to resynchronize its myriad complex networks to restore health for our clients. With the EEG, or brain wave test, we record clients’ brain waves from outside the head using many scalp electrodes. Sometimes we must place wires or electrodes deep into a brain to both record and stimulate various areas. Such deep brain stimulators are now in clinical use for patients with a number of disorders.
The most common tools we use yield anatomical information about brain structure, such as malformations, blood vessels, tumors, abscesses, trauma, and bleeding. These are computed tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Functional MRI (fMRI) and positron emission (PET) scans allow us to study metabolism. We also use magnetic tools to attempt to affect brain function by applying magnetic fields from outside the head.
We are a family business, started by my father, Carl Jennings, who you might know as the first Psyc
hologist General of our nation. The roots of Reset.com, however, extend back to my grandparents, Jack and Angela Jennings. Grandmother was a preeminent scientist, one of the most distinguished the world has ever known, and Grandpa, although a lawyer by education, changed how the world views and treats mental health conditions, particularly suicide.
You need to hear this story! It will change you, as it did me, and the way you think about our bodies, our brains, our consciousness, and our interactions in the world. My grandfather, Jack Jennings, related most of this story to me, and my father, Carl, filled in the details of the more proximate past. This is the story of their lives and our family during the World Water Wars.
Back then, it was no secret that Grandmother was building and using advanced quantum computers for her research. Major advances in computing were routinely being achieved with quantum bits, units of information that could have more states than the one or zero of the classic binary machines – like a brain cell, Grandmother reasoned, which could possess a myriad of states. Grandmother’s computer designs, however, also incorporated a DNA coprocessor that could “give a computer a personality,” she said.
According to my father, Grandmother used this capability to imprint her own and my aunt Elsa’s individuality, and to some extent their consciousnesses, into a computer.
I have reason to believe that Grandmother and Aunt Elsa live on in a computer she designed and built, which is connected to the mainframe at Reset.com. I know they are in there because the software is autonomous.