The GOD Box by Melissa Horan Read Free Book Online Page B

give guest lectures on cloning and the creation of sustainable life.
    Gabe learned more about Jonathan from reading biographies then he did working with him, in all honesty. Reading biographies, interviews, and dissertations taught him that Jonathan had long wondered about the sustainability of life and if it was worth it if there were unhappy memories. He had researched how to transform memories in the cloning process, which would encourage positive responses toward others and influence the satisfaction they felt with their life. Jonathan worked for years with memory. True, he came up with the fail safe process for cloning, and even speeding it up, but that seemed to mean little to him unless he could change memory with it.
    Jonathan would never tell all the research to Gabe himself, because he was too busy with his formulas. Therefore, by his own in-depth research, Gabe uncovered the long process Jonathan had been through. Basically, Jonathan thought there had to be a drug that could instil happiness in the mind in a more successful way than anti-depressants. He started work with chemicals in the brain, beginning with dopamine as a base and administering them in small quantities. It had worked but wasn’t lasting – the brain couldn’t conform to it. That was when he started working with memory; with the plug that it would help veterans overcome post-traumatic stress by altering their memories.
    The withdrawals from that drug put people in psych wards. Jonathan was inconsolable when the results came back. When that lab report reached the public they went wild with accusations about ethics and wanting to create new laws to monitor this use of medicine.
    That was when Jonathan started becoming uncontrollable and angry , apparently. Gabe never knew him to be otherwise. His breakdown had happened a few months before they met. For a few months they worked together… or, Jonathan tried to teach him, and would sometimes listen to ideas that weren’t his own.
    Their collaborative theories and Jonathan’s cloaked propositions were presented in a conference in Montana where Gabe was still teaching. A professor came up to them afterward and instead of suggesting something about God as they anticipated and as others had done before, he merely mentioned an analogy called The Promised Land as it relates to the human experience in general. He said that the creator of the Promised Land understands the end from the beginning and leads the people through the wilderness until they find it. This sparked the idea for what became their culminating project. Yes, Gabe realized the religious context of the idea, but that was far from the point.
    Luckily , the next few months were bearable because Jonathan’s inner hulk was subdued by the prospects of this next project. They were preparing people to start the world over again… or the Adam and Eves. He vied to have his memory altering research re-instituted. That was not an option. So he tried to come up with other ways of conditioning the subjects to have them maintain the tolerance of the twenty-second century, but rid of the world’s self-destructive social and economic habits.
    Unfortunately , however, they had little control over the project. The same man who suggested the analogy got them in contact with some private agency who’d been working on the same idea for a while. They had already recruited for the world’s most renowned religious leaders, politicians, psychologists, and philosophers to discuss how to prepare the next world for success. They were under strict secrecy, unable to leave the premises until the project was underway.
    That was a joke .  How did they ever imagine so many people from different backgrounds could agree? To be so politically correct was to be indecisive.
    …
    Gabe abruptly severed the memories in order to appease the situation he was now in and started to explain soberly while he massaged his fingers to his head.
    “Look. You need to come to terms