Short Play by Hamza Shumsy
(18 min read)
A geneticist hacks his son’s DNA to make something he calls extraordinary that proves catastrophic for his son as he gets blind in love not metaphorically but literally. The super guy is blindfolded with a cloth strap so that no one sees his swollen eyes.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Characters: 7
1- Darvil: A Geneticist
2- Natalia: Darvil’s Wife
3- Cooper: The Super Guy – Darvil & Natalia’s Son
4- Irene: Called Tangeriene – Girl with Tan complexion
5- Briant: Darvil’s Assistant
6- Dodie: Briant’s Wife
7- Baba G: A Saint
Total Scenes: 4
Scene # 1 – Conversation between Briant & Dodi at their home on the Planet
Scene # 2 – Conversation between Darvil & Briant at Laboratory on the Planet
Scene # 3 – Conversation between Darvil & Baba-G on planet Jupitaar
Scene # 4 – Conversation between Cooper & Natalia at their home on the Planet
Scene # 1
Briant (Darvil’s Assistant) & Dodi (Briant’s Wife)
(newly-wed couple at their home sitting in their TV lounge discussing the disease of Cooper who is the son of Darvil)
Briant: As you know my boss Darvil married Natalia because she had a rare ability to memorize everything she reads. He married her because of her abilities and had in his mind something he did not tell anyone. He was working on a secret project to hack DNA and he was the only one to have known that techniques that can alter the DNA of an infant to make that child a superhuman with rare abilities. He wanted to make his baby boy a superhero-like figure no one has ever seen before but his wife seemed to him to be a huge hindrance in his way, so he planned to imprison his wife once she was expecting a baby. He, during the days of insurgency within his province, imprisoned his wife by deceiving her and telling her that it is safe to go underground for her safety and his upcoming child. It was like a house arrest for her as Darvil told her that a curfew after the civil war is going on and he provided her a lot of books that contained knowledge about different sports, all the sports I must say, wisdom, natural sciences, and mind sciences to read but refrained her from reading any book that contained anything and everything related to religion, empathy, social sciences, and humanity. Once the child was born his intentions became clear to his wife Natalia that he wanted a superhuman-like boy. With all the knowledge passed to him through the bloodstream but empathy and its associated traits also got transferred to the boy. At this point, Darvil had to make sure to block access to the empathetic engine because he knew that the only constraint in the way to achieving excellence or being a failure is fragile human nature that is prone to feelings and emotions so by hacking into his son’s DNA he removed all pieces of code from this book of life that contained anything related to human emotions.
Cooper grew into a super guy with all the skills of a winner in every field of study and every sport he places his foot in. He is in the whole world becomes the best in football, marathon, race, Formula-1 racing, Olympics, swimming, aerobics, even in the fields of sciences, music, a field of education or any skill one can think of.
Dodie: So his wife is still in prison?
Briant: Yes, she does not know what disaster Darvil has created for their son, all she knows is that he got her into the prison and the staff at the prison is responsible for proving her food and necessities in a house that is jail like with no connection to the outer world. She has not seen Sunshine in 25 years.
Dodie: Why did Darvil do this to his son, was it to make his boy successful?
Briant: No, Cooper the Superguy does not feel the joy of winning but it is the Professor who feels the joy by telling and showing everyone “hey look at this award my son has won” every title his son earns and every competition he wins his father is the one who owns it. He feels proud of his invention (his son) who wins competitions instead of making him a useful citizen of the society. He hijacked his emotions, made him into a humanoid a robot-like human, and killed his curiosity. Cooper is not a curious person, he reads, remembers, researches, and publishes without any of his original creative contributions.
Dodie: Wait for a second, a human observes using his senses, he has the best senses, a human has a physical human body, he has the best-developed body to win any physical sports competition, a scientist researches, he can do the best research in the world, why did you say he is a robot, even robots today have neural networks and deep learning techniques embedded to them and they act and learn as a human act and learns.
Briant: A robot can have sensors, machinery, and processing engines better than a human, but a robot lacks feelings. The ultimate goal of a robot is to be more and more perfect and win, the ultimate goal of a human is to be more and more human and lose whenever needed for someone to win. We, humans, have built robots that read the emotions of a person but they cannot measure or sense the degree of pain a person is undergoing. Only species of one kind can understand the actual pain & feelings of members of their population.
Moreover, the nature of a person is composed of all the DNA (nature) of his ancestors and the way he/she is nurtured. If parents lived a violent life but the baby is brought up in a non-violent environment then he/she will evolve into a non-violent being and the generations to come will be non-violent. It is like you change yourself and you place a full stop to the inheritance continuity passed down to generations.
Dodie: Why did Darvil imprison his wife?
Briant: Natalia would not allow any alteration to her kid’s psychological or physiological system. Blessed with the rare ability to memorize everything she reads was a must-have for Darvil for she was a genius in academics but was not pretty enough to meet the professor’s standards.
Dodie: Professor’s standards, what does it mean?
Briant: Every soul is a beautiful soul, this body is a covering nature has designed to protect the soul because it’s so fragile that no one can touch or see it. The professor with no soul in him, you know this is a phrasal expression meaning no empathy in him, is not able to see the beautiful soul every person on this planet earth has but instead focuses on the cosmetic beauty of this protective layer called body. He married Natalia only because he found her the most intellect and having an untethered soul which was not corrupted by the contaminations of this world’s greed. Natalia got a pure heart and nature bestowed her the intellect very few people on this planet have now. Darvil knew that she has plans to use all of her intellect to solve problems around her and in the whole world which would include her purest sincerity and her intellect to make people’s life easier and more beautiful and that she would make her child a good member of society.
Dodie: So you said that she could change the whole world single-handedly?
Briant Yes, a person can have an impact on the whole world and the worlds beyond this one. Darvil knew that in the bloodstream parents’ traits are going to be transferred to his child but he could not allow this transfer of his wife’s empathy part so he hacked into his baby’s DNA to remove the empathy factor to create a perfect kid that strong & intellect at its peak for this he completely removed the emotion factor from his own son’s psychological system.
A scientific study published around the year 2012 shows that there is a part of the brain that is known to be the center of human empathy and another part known to be the analytical engine that deals with analysis. It is said that a person cannot think empathy at the same time he/she is into analysis meaning if a person is in the process of thinking about winning by analyzing the situations to make him win, he/she loses the ability to be kind to other people at that moment. Moreover, he removed all the pain factors from his son’s system.
Dodie: Do you mean he does not experience pain, his body is immune to pain, right?
Briant: Not only his body is immune to pain physiologically and psychologically he cannot feel others’ pain or feelings or emotions, he never cried in his whole life since the very moment of his birth. He would not shed tears on the death of his father because he is unfamiliar with such kinds of emotions. These characteristics can also be developed in anyone by involving oneself in some worldly matters that he/she forgets the meaning & importance of relations, other’s feelings & pain.
Dodie: How can one do this to his child? And a wise person like Darvil.
Briant: Anyone who tries to seek perfection, a degree of perfection precisely I would say, seeks it after a huge hard work and effort, then he starts thinking of himself as a perfect being who cannot commit a mistake, and refuses to correct himself as he thinks that his every move is right and is meant for the betterment and refuses to take advice. It’s important to audit yourself and change yourself accordingly whenever & wherever required.
To maintain a healthy relationship and to live a happy life, we must maintain a balance between our worldly matters. Darvil and his wife are more knowledgeable than us and could live a happier life than us but the greed to achieve perfection in his kid led him not to accept the marvelous human nature of his wife for human nature keeps posing a threat of committing an error and he wanted error-free code for his kid, actually for himself. He wanted his son to be something he could not achieve and for this, he was ready to pay any cost.
Dodie: How didCooper develop an interest in Tangeriene?
Briant: Cooper the super guy started winning at an early age, he topped all the school exams, sports, and all other extracurricular activities but he lack emotions, while he was in the last year of his university degree he noticed a girl with tan skin complexion whose name is Irene and everyone calls her Tangeriene to make fun of her because of her Tan skin complexion. The cruel world we live in discriminates based on color, ethnicity, religion, and other factors. Cooper had no sympathy for this girl nor does he make fun of her because he lacks all positive, negative, or any other kind of feelings and emotions but the strange acts of kindnesses she used to spread all around her made him curious to know more about her as we today live in a world where she is among a few in the world who can divide their lunch into half to share anyone in need.
Dodie: What!!! Can she divide her hunger into half? How is it even possible?
Briant: Yes my dear she has this superpower of donating for the sake of goodness to others without posting on her social media handles and without the greed of getting famous.
Dodie: How many in the whole world can do this?
Briant: A very few people, we are living in 5021 my dear this is a rare skill these days especially the ability to lose because we have programmed ourselves to win all the time, we’ve set unrealistic and unnecessary goals and we push ourselves to achieve them at any cost.
Dodie: Where did she get this superpower?
Briant: She must have got these from her parents and the way they brought her up. In the coming days of the world, empathy is going to be a rare superpower for humans.
Dodie: Ah, that’s cool but her color is Tan. How did Cooper get blind?
Briant: Cooper curiously started watching Tangeriene doing good deeds and getting no credit for any good she does to others that made him more and more curious but as he has no friends and he does not make friends, he did not establish any relationship with her or send her paigham-e-nikah. Once he visited a dentist and upon his arrival at home a minor swelling in his eyes was noticed and gradually the swelling increased so that it covered both his eyes and he got blind. His eyes are now covered with a blindfolding cloth strap so that no one can see his eyes. We do not know yet how it did happen but in CCTV footage we found that Tangeriene visited the same dentist at the same time Cooper visited. We are looking into this matter and will soon find the reason for his blindness. Tomorrow we will have important information regarding this matter.
Scene # 2
Darvil (the Geneticist) & Briant (Darvil’s Assistant)
(Sitting in laboratory discussing about findings on Cooper’s blindness)
Briant: Sir, we have found the reason Cooper got blind, Cooper’s biological log revealed that he went to the dentist and as soon the dentist performed the x-ray of his tooth, the DNA got broken and there is a self-heal time of 30 min that is required for the DNA to repair itself. At the 28th minute, Cooper stepped out of the dentistry and within 5 seconds he saw Tangerine weeping with a bleeding cut on her arm. The emotion was so strong for Cooper to handle that it got translated into a chemical reaction and the DNA which was repairing itself got the code of emotion in place. He started weeping but tears could not come out of the tear duct and this blockage caused instant swelling as his brain had no experience in handling any kind of emotions. We know that internal bleeding is more dangerous than external bleeding the same way this internal weeping is proving to be fatal for him. Now there is a constant DNA mismatch error he is facing that could lead to his death if he is not healed.
Darvil: Maybe surgeons can operate on him?
Briant: Surgery is not an option you know that medicine, surgery, and auto-recovery system of the body are all effective on a normal person but you have altered him to make him a superhuman.
Darvil: Then we can teach him how to control this emotions thing.
Briant: For a child to learn the best age is till his/her teenage and during teenage itself is the golden period to carve his/her nature, now his DNA auto-check kind of protection algorithms will not allow you to alter it and if you will try to forcefully manipulate the code, there are 99% chances you will create a catastrophe that cannot be undone.
Darvil: But there is a 1% chance of success
Briant: Sir, do you think you are in a position to take that 99% risk.
Darvil: No, I can’t, not anymore but why is he attracted to a Tan-colored girl, he has the finest color tone?
Briant: Sir, it’s her heart he is attracted towards not the body. The DNA is a code, color is its output, he is not concerned with the output of the DNA i.e. skin color and other physical features, he is concerned with what he has in himself missing, the empathy, the love, the purity. As you know that a person is composed of 3 components, the Body (The Machine) Analytical portion of the Brain (the Intelligence Engine), and the empathetic Portion of the Brain (The Emotion Engine). He has got the best body & brain on the whole planet but he has got no heart (I mean feelings). The girl has got the finest of heart and the control she possesses over her brain and her body is kind that her brain cannot force her to accept all the calculations it performs for its benefit instead she wins over her brain and chooses to benefit others, she sacrifices her rest for others working in extreme weather extremely tired only to help others. While Cooper is an emotion-less genius or a super-body humanoid technically because theologically someone who does not possess the feelings and does not commit mistakes is not a human.
A human is someone who whenever commits a mistake, rectifies it, and corrects himself/herself and this is the beauty of human nature. Nature has its way of balancing and filling gaps. If you think you are perfect then you will only be lost because perfection is a hypothetical construct.
Darvil: Wait a minute, I’ve heard this somewhere earlier in my life.
Briant: Our brain is part of the universe, whatever we think is out of possibility because we may not have seen the whole universe with our own eyes or listened to it with our ears but a connection to the universe opens unseen doors of knowledge to us. With time our thoughts get rotten due to the materialism in the society and we start to alter our thoughts but from somewhere deep inside, we sometimes listen to the true voice telling us the right thing.
The Creator has created the universe with balance into it that heart, brain & body are in such a balance and you tried to play gods. You had blocked his empathetic portion routing all the bodily resources towards the brain & body. You hacked into your son’s DNA and the girl somehow got stuck and accidentally repaired his DNA. And you know this, a tiny change of a single letter resulted in something you would consider catastrophic as your 2 and a half decades of hard work to make your child a super-human gone in-vain by someone you consider a below-average human just because of her color tone.
A human without emotions is a machine, not even an animal. Maybe sometimes animals are more human than us, they just can’t communicate the way we can.
Darvil: You are wrong, he loved music, poetry, painting, aerobics, dance, and science he loved all of these and this is the reason he was able to excel in all these disciplines.
Briant: Sorry Sir, love is something you are not familiar with so you managed to stop him from thinking and knowing about love until now. He wrote beautiful pieces of literary works but that was nothing more than a collection of rhyming words, a handful of vocabulary, poetic structure, and arrangement of all these elements in a calculated way. He composed music, defining rhythm, melody, harmony, and structure everything using his highly genius mind but not a single bit of feeling was involved in his musical compositions. His paintings were not a result of any inspiration but a mere recall of the memory blended with some abstract portrayal of more memories. His dance moves are precisely following rhythms, whereas dance is like going into a space where there is no gravity. Science is what he is best known for unaware of the fact that the wisest scientist of the era, his father developed something in it he is unaware of.
He excelled in not only extracurricular but topped in diverse fields of study. The only thing he did not study is anything and everything connected to nature. A beautiful heart is one connected to nature. To love is human nature, to make errors, embrace failures, accept mistakes then correct them is the beauty of human nature he is unaware of because he is made perfect by you. He has been hacked to make him into something perfect I must say. Now he has become incurable because of a kind girl.
Darvil: But a small feeling did this all?
Briant: It’s not how small but how powerful, a drop of venom can kill a person in a matter of seconds, and a little bit of feeling can ignite the chemical reaction that may prove deadlier than venom.
Darvil: Don’t we have any strong medicine for this.
Briant: No medicine can cure what emotions can. Emotions and commitment are way more powerful than medicine, you do know the placebo effect don’t you? One cannot be a Mr. America just by putting whey protein into his belly, he has to work out a lot and only motivation can make him do so not proteins.
Darvil: You tell me how to fix this problem.
Briant: I don’t know Sir.
Darvil: You must know some solution, you are the assistant. What do we do now?
Briant: I know someone on the JUPITAAR who can help.
Scene # 3
Darvil & Baba G
(discussing about the cure for Cooper)
Darvil: Baba jee, I have come from the Planet …
Baba G: (starts talking) so it was your second marriage, right?
Darvil: How do you know?
Baba G: After finding the one you perceived as perfect and being wasted, perfection found you
and you wasted her.
Darvil: (In tears) Baba jee you’ve changed a lot I couldn’t recognize you.
Baba G: Our bodies evolve but our souls are as pure as billions of years ago.
Darvil: I am in big trouble once again, my child … (starts weeping)
Baba G: Irene is the cure.
Darvil: You mean Tangeriene, a girl with a tan complexion is the only cure for my boy?
Baba G: Yes the girl with a pure heart and a tan complexion, you could have been his cure but your greed created the chaos for you kid.
Darvil: I devoted my life to my boy and a girl, now he badly needs her.
Baba G: He cares for you a lot, just what you took out of him is what the girl gave him back, the empathy and the purest love for nature.
Darvil: I made him strong, now a Tan girl made him that weak.
Baba G: You made him ill and the girl came as a cure, accept the reality my dear, you took a piece out of your child, the Tan girl proved to be the first one to fill that gap, your child has been trained to win, now the girl is the only one who can tell him how to lose, as he will start to learn the art of winning by losing something for others, his system will get automatically repaired and his eyes will start to cure but it will take some time. Time is the best cure to heal the damages but the company of loved ones proves to be catalytic in healing rapidly and magically when the wound is a gift from the loved ones, it takes a little longer to heal. I hope you understand.
Darvil: I am his father, I am of importance to him, not a stranger girl.
Baba G: You proved to be a stranger to your kid my dear. The only cure for your child is to get married to Irene you call the Tan Girl.
Darvil: I would invite the whole city
Baba G: The boy has been blindfolded, he can’t see the whole fun going around, what is the need to do all this, if you want to show off, see the disaster you already have created as a result. One thing more he will not fully recover until he gets to see his mother whom you have imprisoned.
Scene # 4
Cooper & Natalia
(Mother & son both sitting on a couch talking)
Cooper: Mom, how could you forgive father for he ruined your life.
Natalia: My boy, he did not ruin my life, he ruined my dream.
Cooper: What dream?
Natalia: I was living my dream, not life, with all the scientific evidence like psychological analysis
of your father’s nature, I knew what I could not change and should have been ready to bear the consequences of what I was not prepared for. I would summarize it as calculated risk taken, calculation went wrong
Cooper: What calculation mom?
Natalia: With all the senses and common sense we have got, to some extent we can time travel, can see what’s coming, can predict, calculate and analyze upcoming events, we can analyze what probably could get wrong in a relationship or any matter or human interaction. We intentionally blindfold ourselves because we don’t want to see what is evident.
Sometimes we have an interpretation before we have a dream but we keep our eyes closed to see ourselves because sometimes we like to experience planned suffering.
Cooper: Maybe it was written in fate.
Natalia: Fate is of two kinds, definite and indefinite, one we cannot change but the other part can be conditioned by our acts.
Cooper: Mom, don’t you have any regret?
Natalia: None my dear boy, it’s Part of the Life, Part of the Dream, I had to pay the cost of the dream and the cost was way too much, your father turned good but at the cost of my life’s golden period which cannot be bought back but again no regrets.
Cooper: So shall we not dream?
Natalia: No, dream big but always make a balance between dream and reality.
Cooper: I think father did unfairly.
Natalia: No worries Beta everything is fair in Love & Dream.
Cooper: What beta, am I a beta version to perform tests on?
Natalia: Uhunnn, like father like son.
———————— THE END ————————-
