Chapter 41: The Making of Madness

[14th ICTMBS – International Congress on Translational Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.]

The auditorium was built to hold silence in eerie, yet, elegant manner.

Seven thousand seats rose in layered arcs beneath a vaulted ceiling of pale stone and dark steel.

Every row was occupied. Physicians in formal evening wear, research directors, delegation heads from national medical agencies.

Ambassadors seated in reserved blocks near the front. Their presence were marked by small flags and the attention of security details stationed at intervals along the aisles.

Pharmaceutical leadership, Presidents of MNCs. A room where a single sentence could redirect funding across continents.

Overhead lights had been lowered, only the stage held full illuminating white light. Along the perimeter, additional security stood without movement.

At the centre of the stage, a long black podium stood. Behind it, a massive curved screen remained dark.

Conversations across the hall had already begun to thin.

A woman stepped into the light on the podium. She wore a dark, long, one-piece gown. She wore no jewelry except a single thin bracelet.

Her blonde hair flowed down to her calves. When she reached the podium, last threads of conversation died without being asked.

She looked out across the seven thousand faces.

"Distinguished delegates, honored researchers, physicians, and representatives of the world’s leading medical institutions..." she said in a voice of scale and intimacy.

"Welcome to the fourteenth International Congress on Translational Medicine and Biomedical Sciences." She said.

Applause moved through the hall in a single wave. She waited until the silence settled completely.

"Tonight we have the privilege of hearing from a scientist whose work has already changed the lives of millions."

"At just twenty-two, he became the youngest nuclear-neuroscientist to receive the internal Medical Sciences Laureate."

"His research contributed to treatments for diseases once considered incurable. His work has produced methods capable of halting cancer progression and, restoring damaged tissue after remission."

The applause this time was sharper.

"He was orphaned before he could walk," the anchor continued, "and raised by a man many of you have cited in your own work without ever meeting him. Doctor Simeon Grahm Baram, chief architect of major nuclear programs."

"Doctor Barak once told me, that raising this man taught him more about energy conversion than forty years in a reactor ever did."

A wave of warm laughter moved through the hall.

"Yet, tonight. This man has not come to us to discuss what has already been cured," her voice dropped.

"He comes to tell us that diseases, weaknesses, and the limits of human body are not laws of nature. They are just unsolved problems. And he believes...No. He has already begun to prove that they can be solved."

The screen behind her lit for the first time, a single line of white text displayed on it.

{A World Without Suffering.}

"Ladies and gentlemen, delegates, honored guests." She stepped back from the podium extending one hand toward the wings.

"Doctor Zavian Grahm Barak."

The applause erupted throughout the hall. He walked out into the light unhurriedly.

There were no notes in his hand, no tablet or any device. He reached the podium wearing an oud brown suite over a black shirt.

He let the applause run its course without rushing, and waited until the silence came back on its own.

Zavian placed his hand on the mic on his collar, covering it, and looked at the lady who had just anchored his introduction.

"That was magnificent," he said in a low voice.

"Credits go where they’re due, Doctor," the anchor smiled.

Zavian nodded with raised brows, and looked back at the audience.

"Every one of you has spent your career treating the body as a fixed system with limitations," Zavian began as the silence settled.

"A heart that pumps at a certain rate, muscles that tear past a certain load, a brain that runs on a certain metabolic budget it can never exceed no matter how much you ask of it."

"I am no longer interested in accepting those ceilings as permanent."

Behind him, the screen shifted. A wireframe rendered a small hand tennis ball sized orb made of dark metal and glass.

"Eighteen months ago, I began testing whether binding energy in the same principal that keeps every atom in your body from simply falling apart, could be redirected to push a living system past its natural operating limits. Not repair it...but exceed it."

He looked out at the room with the expression that dripped of desperate hunger for something he’d found worth risking everything for.

"By every law we currently teach, what I’m about to show you shouldn’t be possible. I’m not asking you to accept a new treatment tonight. I’m asking you to accept that something we’d call supernatural, if a stranger described to us, might simply be physics we haven’t been willing to use yet," he said.

A murmured moved through the auditorium.

"I want to be precise about what I’m showing you tonight. Because PRECISION is the only thing that separates this from noise." He held up one hand.

"Every result I’m about to present comes from guinea rats. Not primates or humans. I am not standing here tonight claiming this works on us. I’m standing here because eighteen months of rat trials have shown results consistent and repeatable enough, that I believe the theory has earned the right to be taken seriously rather than dismissed."

A section of stage floor opened behind him the moment those words came out of his mouth.

Two technicians wheeled out a narrow steel table with a transparent glass enclosure sitting on top of it.

Inside, a small white guinea rat moved sluggishly across the bedding.

Several thin tubes entered through the rear of the enclosure and connected to a compact device mounted beside it.

Zavian walked toward it.

"This is one of my subjects," he said, and rested on hand against the glass with a smile.

"Healthy to continue testing, weak enough to demonstrate the difference," he said.

A technician placed a small piece of food against the inside of the enclosure, and the rat noticed it. Its head lifted and it slowly crossed the bedding toward the glass.

It pressed its nose against the food, and scratched the glass barrier, trying to get it.

The rat tried and kept trying helplessly across the surface of glass before it stumbled backward and sat.

A quiet murmur passed through the auditorium, and Zavian glanced at the audience.

"This is its present physical limit," he said, and turned toward the machine mounted beside glass.

The compact reactor sat inside a dark metal housing, scarcely larger than a human forearm.

He placed two fingers against its surface.

"Now we’ll change that," the lights on the device turned on. A low vibration passed through the stage. The tubes connected to the rat’s head and along the length of its spine began to glow faintly beneath the translucent casing.

The rat froze.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then its breathing changed. Its back arched.

The rat’s head snapped toward the piece of food.

It moved violently. A sharp crack echoed through the auditorium as the rat hit the toughened glass of its enclosure. A crack appeared on it.

The rat stumbled backward, stood again, and charged.

*Crack*

A fracture ran across the glass.

The reaction in auditorium changed immediately.

People had stopped whispering.

They were watching the rat struck again. The reinforced panel fractured further.

A physician in the front row rose halfway from his seat before realizing anything.

"Same animal," Zavian gestured at the rat, and looked at the audience.

"Same mass, same skeleton, same muscular structure."

The rat struck the panel again and it broke. The enclosure shook violently as the rat stumbled through the fractured opening and dropped onto the steel table.

Several security officers moved at once but Zavian raised his hand and they stopped without a question.

The rat remained crouched, steam like heat escaped between its fur as the reactor shut down, and it ate its piece of food calmly.

"With an increase of three thousand and twelve percent in neurological activity, subject was able to produce approximately four thousand times its previous peak muscular output. Even more in desperate need," he said.

The audience had gone completely silent.

"I just made its existing system operate beyond its limits and see what it could achieve," Zavian smiled.

A hand rose from the audience.

"Please," Zavian said.

"Doctor, what is the duration that this specific state can stay active for?" A man stood up.

"Twenty-seven minutes in continuous state," Zavian said.

"And after that?"

"Muscle damage exceeds the body’s capacity for repair, neural activity crosses the safe metabolic threshold, radiation exposure accumulates beyond what biological tissue can tolerate."

"And I’m here to prove exactly this. The limitation isn’t the energy, it’s the body!"

He spread his arms with a bright smile.

"There is no reason for us to stop here!"