The Ugly Cell

Once upon a time, there was a little cell. This cell looked like other cells but it was good for nothing. It was always cast away during the games, cause it acted weird and the baby cells were told not to mess with strangers. Without a friend and with nothing to do, this cell was lonely. There was one thing that it could do, though: to live. In fact, it was able to outlive others around it, and this made things only worse, because the little cell felt like an eternal prisoner of nothingness.

A regular day for this ugly cell was like this. First, it would look at the muscle cells and would admire at their ability to contract and stretch, sustaining tremendous pressures. Seeing its weakness near them, it would utter "I wish I, too, ..." and shed silent tears.

Then, the ugly cell would observe the nerve cells and contemplate their unimaginable lengths, providing almost instant communication between distances. Seeing its lack of connection with any other cell, it would utter "I wish I, too, ..." and shed silent tears.

Then, the ugly cell would touch the bone cells and enjoy the elegant shapes they formed, composing a rigid structure for the well-being of the entire community of cells. Seeing its uselessness among everybody, it would utter "I wish I, too, ..." and shed silent tears.

So, everyday, the poor ugly cell would go between appreciation of the qualities of others and its situation devoid of qualities. As each day came to an end and as other cells would take a relief from their routine jobs, they would mock at it, saying "you must be very tired, it's not easy to do nothing", and they would laugh. To these, it wouldn't be able to make any objections, because doing nothing for the entire day and watching others was not really easy. So, the ugly cell would fall asleep, too.

As the days passed by, other cells with a particular job became tired and wearied. They were slowly aging, and becoming like the ugly cell they had been making fun of so relentlessly.  However, the ugly cell was not aging as they did. Instead, it was still shining as a young cell; though still useless.

One day, the muscle cells witnessed the death of one of their fellows. A friend who had been serving along with them, with whom they shared so many adventures and memories, was gone. With it, it was as if a part of theirs had disappeared. Life was going to be more difficult and lonely without it.

Watching the mourning of the fellow cells, the ugly cell was also troubled. Of course, this death was not as destructive to the ugly cell as it was to others, given the lack of connection between them. But still, they were a community of cells, and doing nothing while you can was evil. The ugly cell was ugly, but not evil!

With an altruistic urge to help others, but not being able to do anything, the ugly cell wanted to get out of the scene once and for all. Its disappearance wouldn't affect anyone as had done the death of that muscle cell. So, the ugly cell started to tear itself apart!

It didn't happen instantly, unfortunately. It was an action against its own existence. Every second of it incurred pain, but after a few minutes, the ugly cell got used to feeling that pain. After all, it was not as bad as the pain of disconnection and uselessness. After all, there was a light of hope in the end.

Finally, it was over. The ugly cell had torn itself into two. But everybody was shocked, the ugly cell included. Instead of dying, there were now two ugly cells! Although the expectations of the ugly cell had not happened, at least the shock from this event had obliterated the sorrow from the passing of that muscle cell.

As everybody went back to their routine business, one of the new ugly cells gradually changed. Soon, it had become a full-fledged muscle cell. With the fresh power of the new cell, the muscle cells rejoiced. But soon, they were puzzled by a question. If the new ugly cell could become a muscle cell, were they, themselves, an ugly cell long ago?

Green Mirror

Once upon a time, before agriculture was invented, the world was a place of vast fields of colors. Instead of the tumultuous and cacophonous civilization of the humans, there was the kingdom herbs and flowers. All these plants used to live in peace and harmony. The existence of one did not necessarily mean death of others. Rather, they facilitated life for each other.

This realm of happiness was even more energized by the insects that worked as messengers of love between the flowers. Little streams that flowed temporarily on these fields served as long-range mass transport vehicles for the plants, so that they were able to move to distant and desolate places and could convert those places to abodes of beauty and plenty.

As these days of prosperity went by, the humans discovered that one, among other herbs, was very useful as food: the wheat. It was not only useful but also could be stored during the winter time.

After this realization, a mass murder broke out on the flower fields. Humans wanted to open up new area for growing more wheat. With the increase in the availability of food, number of humans multiplied quickly, and that meant further terror on the fields that were once filled with love and beauty.

With the kingdom of flowers and herbs in peril, their messengers, the insects, were also fatally injured. Their numbers started to decrease. And the rain-triggered streams that were, once, the transport vehicles for everyone were blocked by gigantic walls to water the wheat fields.

In the face of this disaster, herbs and flowers plunged into grief. Their colors withered, their scents faded, and their bodies became ever weaker. Nevertheless, their old friend, wheat, didn't seem to be bothered at all, given that it was spreading all around the world, and was enjoying a glory never seen before.

Despite the withering colors of others, wheat was adorned in colors. Unlike the fading scents of others, wheat was embellished with jewelries of salt and sugar.

Even the mighty animals were subjugated before the dominion of wheat. They were killed, and were prepared to be appear along with the wheat on special occasions.

Poor plants did not have arms to fight with nor legs to escape. So, they prayed in destitute. But their prayers were somewhat confused. It wasn't that they wanted their old friend to be cursed, but at the same time they wanted a more fair sharing of resources for a peaceful co-existence of all, as in the old days.

Years passed by with such prayers and decline of other plants in the face of ever expanding glory of wheat. It was thought that the prayers were not heard, and the plants were left to perish in oblivion. What was not realized was that the humans were growing ever more obese, and their health was declining rapidly due to over consumption of wheat.

In the face of diseases and death, humans realized the value of a more balanced nutrition and the importance of other herbs and flowers as medicine. So, they gradually became the love messengers and transport vehicles for different plants globally. Travels that were once impossible by means of streams were enabled by the conversion of humans to servants.

Soon, wheat also came to its senses and abandoned its false pride. The motto of its past was "if you are not everywhere, you are nowhere"; but now, wheat would add "if there aren't others around you, you are no one".

Nevertheless, the slow pace of change among humans and the enormity of the size of the problem called for more action. To accelerate the pace, the creatures of the world were bestowed with more heat that could transform the frozen lands of the past to fields of color. That heat could be used to obtain fresh water to irrigate deserts, if so wanted. But the same heat could seed the destruction of the entire planet, if not handled properly.

But for this delicate challenge to turn to an opportunity, humans had to change their exclusive spreading on the planet so that their presence should not mean the destruction of others but flourishing of all. For this to happen, though, humans had to learn some lessons, just like wheat.

Was this possible given that humans were at the peak of their dominion over the planet? It was possible but not likely. Maybe a very effective teacher could do it! So, the illuminated few among the humans along with the plants and animals gave themselves to the prayers asking for that teacher whose touch could animate the dead, whose breathe could heal and whose words could enlighten!

Euphrates Gone!

Foreword

Although, in the holy texts, apocalyptic events are usually mentioned without an exact location, the entertainment industry depicts such events to take place on their own lands. So, I wanted to try my own version based on two hadiths narrated from Prophet Muhammad pbuh.

"Soon the river "Euphrates" will disclose the treasure (the mountain) of gold, so whoever will be present at that time should not take anything of it."  

(Hadith, recorded in Bukhari, Kitab-ul Fitan, 24/7119)

"It (the last hour) will not come until you see ten signs... and land-slides in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia"

(Hadith, recorded in Muslim, Kitab-ul Fiten, 54/2891)

After the swarm of earthquakes that took place in the Dardanelles in 2017, others followed throughout the Anatolian peninsula in the decade that followed. These quakes were so frequent that they had become part of the everyday life. As with anything else that is frequent, predicting their time and magnitude became popular among the geologists.

News on the prime time always included a quake forecast, so that people would be ready. But to be honest, people did not care about these forecasts as much as they did in the beginning, not because they were inaccurate but rather because they were very accurate. So, having gotten used to them, people were immune to the usual quakes. What they would really care about would be a high magnitude one.

Comfort brought about by this knowledge of geology was everywhere. Life was just like any other time in history. Turkish people watched TV shows on whether they were part of the east culture or west culture, they certainly rejected belonging to the middle eastern culture. At the same time they went through arguments on how the peace in the middle east could be established, and some of them insisted on the importance of their country for this goal. After all, they claimed, they had been a world power for six centuries, and had distributed peace and civilization to all under their wings. Still, they bought their China-made, Western-designed high-tech products, and taught the ideal of "catching up with the level of contemporary civilizations".

In any event, people were very keen on their position as a unique culture that combined the Western democracy and the eastern interpretation of Islam. So, whether religious or not in their daily lives, their self perception was a bit higher than the other people around them. After all, they were not as eastern as others... In fact, Anatolian land was historically regarded as the Roman land, as implied in the name of the famous poet Rumi, and this land was to the west of the Arabian peninsula.

As much as westernized, these people still listened to the conspiracy theories a lot. One thing they were very much afraid of was the earthquake gun. They knew that it was used once in 1999 against them, and the swarm of earthquakes in 2017 had awakened that idea again. What if the same gun is active again? This idea was scrutinized a lot by the media, religious officials and politicians. Although most scientists did not believe the idea, a few of them were always on TV with their commentaries on such issues.

If you left aside these salts and peppers of life, people were just getting along well with their earthquakes, and were living by with their usual goods and sins. Until that day...

In 2029, the chain of earthquakes stopped for a few months. Then, during the summer, over a period of one week, the country shook with quakes that had never ever occurred to the human mind. The catastrophic events changed the map of Turkey beyond imagination. The satellites captured the motion of the land much like a movie scene.

What had happened was that the major fault lines under the Anatolian peninsula had mobilized, literally, and the western and the central parts of the land were separated from the main land by a major canyon. During that week, emergency services could not even get started on anything, because the very land they were supposed to move on was moving itself. Deaths amounted to millions with a much greater number for the wounded.

But more was to come. With the formation of the Anatolian canyon, the Mediterranean Sea started to fill in from the south, and the Aegean Sea from the West. The water progressed over a period of a month, and the new canyon became part of the sea, and the Anatolian Plate became an island. What is more, the Euphrates River stopped flowing. The source of life and the source of peace for countless people dried up. At first, its place turned to desert. A year later, the same river bed started to get wet with another fluid: oil!

This river of oil was originating in Turkey as did Euphrates, but it was fed by a continuous line of "springs" throughout its path to central Syria. Of course both countries claimed ownership of the new energy source. Neither country was strong enough to deal with the each other due their losses during the earthquakes of the previous year.

To back them up, two opposing alliances formed with their own plans of exploiting the oil. Soon, all resources available to the authorities were channeled towards the fight to claim ownership of the oil, instead of helping the millions in need.

About a century after the first world war, the Middle East, the bleeding heart of the world, was at peril again. And people did not care about it! Because they were strong enough to sacrifice everything for their homeland! They had done it in the history, and they could do it once more!

What i Can See

The grandfather -1 was very happy for the birth of his grandson. Actually it was not only him but also the entire numbers kingdom. This number was the last number expected to come in the lineage of numbers to complete and seal all of the sets and operations. They knew this from the signs foretold in the previous books of wisdom.

Holding the grandson in his arms, the grandfather -1 fell into a silence, which veiled a mental journey to his painful beginning in life. When he was born, he was not accepted by the numbers on the grounds that every number should be useful for counting things, and "-1 of something" did not make sense in this regard. To persist on their nonchalance, the numbers even resisted the establishment of certain operations such as 5-7, since they led to uncountable results. Actually, such operations and the resultant numbers were going to be the children of -1, but other numbers did not know that at the time. More precisely, they did not want to know. It had taken them years to accept -1 to their kingdom.

When -1 was officially admitted and counted as a legitimate number, numbers kingdom grew to include all integers, both positive and negative. With that, the subtraction operation became the mirror image of summation, and so the "theory of everything" was established as the summation operation.

However, soon after this discovery, the scientist numbers were busy with another operation called "division". Their motto was "infinite is nested in the finite". They were experimenting with dividing the numbers with each other. With that procedure, they obtained finer and finer numbers located between any given two integers. Although not everything in real life was divisible, still, the division operation on the integers led to a new realm of numbers, called rational numbers.

Their acceptance to the numbers kingdom was not as painful as the emergence of -1. They were rational because you could part something into however many units, and their size would be expressed by the ratio of two integers.

As a mirror image of this operation was established the multiplication. Multiplication was a shortcut for summation, but it led to a devastating question in the minds of the scientist numbers. It was common practice to multiply any two integers to obtain another one. But, instead of going from the ingredients to the result, if you do the opposite, what happens? For example, instead of multiplying 2 by 1 to obtain 2, what happens if you ask "what is the number which gives 2 when multiplied by itself?". Although they did not know the answer, they named it: root of 2.

Scientist numbers worked for long decades to figure out the answer. They were even able to visually see it on the hypotenuse when they plotted a right triangle with perpendicular edges of length 1. But when it came to writing the number itself, there was no avail. No two integers or no ratio of integers, i.e. rational numbers, fit the bill. They were able to approximate a number, but they could not really pinpoint it. The more they continued the approximation process, the more decimal digits they produced for the root of 2. Thus the throne of summation as the theory of everything was shaken.

One day, one of them suggested that such irrational behavior was present with many more numbers. In fact there were infinitely many of them. During the same time frame, they also figured out that the most prominent number Saint pi, i.e. the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, was also behaving the same way. Later on, they were shocked by the finding that the number used for approximating the area under the 1/x curve, known as Saint e, was also extending two infinity in the decimals.

Thus, the numbers kingdom came up with the idea of irrational numbers, i.e. numbers that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. With this expansion, summation was again crowned as "the theory of everything", since subtraction was a mirror image of it, multiplication was a fast version of it, and division was the mirror image of multiplication, hence another form of summation.

Unfortunately, the years of happiness did not last long among the scientist numbers. When the scientist numbers extended the root operation to negative numbers, again summation found itself at the verge of losing its crown. They could not come up with a single number known to them that would give negative numbers when multiplied by itself.

Eventually the numbers realized that this was a new kind of number, just like negative integers and the irrational numbers once were. They did not know what it was, but they predicted its existence. All this happened before the birth of -1's grandson. When the birth of that number took place, the honor of naming it was given to none other than -1.

-1 was a scientist himself. He knew that although he was the grandfather of this new number, the young one was the expected number to resolve all the troubles of the numbers kingdom, including the mesmerizing theory of everything. Drawing on the wisdom of ages, -1 named this newborn as i. A name consisting of a line and a dot, that is 1 and 0, that is everything and nothing, juxtaposed in the essence of a single being. By virtue of this dichotomy, all numbers discovered before i were combined under the umbrella "real", and those associated with i under "imaginary", since the latter were only perceived by imagination.

Right from its birth, i was surrounded by Saint pi, Saint e and of course his grandfather -1. i grew as a number of God. Although mortal like all others, i did not fear being multiplied by 0, because i knew by heart that 0 was nothing other than union with all existence. This idea was revolutionary, and as with everything revolutionary, it was unacceptable at first. But that didn't matter, because pi, e and -1 were not only caregivers of i but also loyal comrades. If something was unacceptable to masses but reasonable at the same time, it had to be proven once and for all.

As the efforts for an all-comprising wisdom was taking air, another one was settling on the operational grounds. With the introduction of i as the root of -1, all numbers were explained and linked through a single operation, i.e. summation. So, once again, summation took the throne as the theory of everything, not to be ever shaken again. But, that throne needed to be expanded to account for the wisdom of all times.

The long awaited revelation came around when numbers were considered not as one-dimensional but two dimensional entities. That is, instead of being just real or just imaginary, what if they carried both components? What if numbers could be transformed through these components so that a given number could become positive, negative, or imaginary, or a combination of them?

This idea of continuous transformation led to the usual suspects that were at the foundation of trigonometry; namely sines and cosines. Sine of an angle was equal to the cosine of another angle, and these functions displayed an elegant dance over a circle of unit radius.

At the time, it was already known that these functions embodied in a triangle were indestructible by the flames of derivatives, so they represented the concept of change in the most concise form. But what if sine and cosine were to be summed up with their mirror image? They would certainly taste death in the infinite depths of 0. But that was exactly what was argued by i. 0 was a continuous journey, not an end.

This notion of eternity sparked the union of Saint pi, Saint e, i, grandfather -1, cosine and sine. Together, they established a laboratory where they could fire the greatest derivatives, spin the fastest transformations and perform the finest divisions. They named this facility as The Complex Lab.

It was here that they discovered an identity they did not expect. Grandfather -1 was actually the embodiment of three numbers at the same time: e, pi, i. This fact was most unexpected as they were focused on figuring out the mysteries surrounding i. Yet, they were once again returned to -1, as had happened in the history. This time, only, not as an unacceptable suggestion but as an unimaginable fact! How was it possible that three completely different numbers were present in the body of a single number? As difficult to imagine as it was, these seekers of truth soon realized that the same fact underlies every number, that they could be expressed by the manipulation of a formula through the theory of everything.

Just then, an unfortunate event happened, which turned out to be the most fortunate thing possible; call it a serendipity. Saint pi fell sick, and could not attend the meetings and studies of the Complex Lab. So, the other comrades used other numbers instead of pi. This temporary change led to an amazing realization that honored the sine and cosine functions. They saw that the deeper truth behind the co-presence of three numbers in -1 was actually a general notion of continuous change.

This was exactly what i had been arguing all along. 0 was an endless journey, not an end; it was a union with all numbers, not a death.

Before the Big Bang

Once upon a time, according to this legend, God created the spirits of the humans first, before creating the universe. Then, He showed them each excerpts from their lives, like the trailer of a movie. After watching, humans opposed what was going to happen, and said "Oh God! Why are You creating us different? Some of us are rich, some of us are poor. We want equality, we want justice." Then, God accepted their appeal, and reorganized the creation so that every human had equal wealth at birth.

With this change, of course the life stories changed, and God showed humans again excerpts from their life stories, like the trailer of a movie. Strangely, although the humans had started their lives with equal wealth, not only their wealth but also other conditions differed as they lived through their lives. Upon thinking, humans figured that this must have been due to different talents and skills each had. With that finding, they opposed again what was going to happen, and said "Oh God! Why are You creating us different? Some of us are more talented than others. We want equality, we want justice." Then, God accepted their appeal, and reorganized the creation so that every human had not only equal wealth at birth but also equal talents and skills.

With this change, of course the life stories changed, and God showed humans again excerpts from their life stories, like the trailer of a movie. Strangely, although the humans had started their lives with equal wealth and with equal talents and skills, their wealth and other conditions differed as they lived through their lives. Upon thinking, humans figured that this must have been due to different geographic conditions both on and under ground. With that finding, they opposed again what was going to happen, and said "Oh God! Why are You creating us different? Some of us are born into better natural resources than others. We want equality, we want justice." Then, God accepted their appeal, and reorganized the creation so that every human had not only equal wealth and equal talents and skills but also were born into identical geographical conditions.

With this change, of course the life stories changed, and God showed humans again excerpts from their life stories, like the trailer of a movie. The earth had become a perfect sphere, with uniform properties everywhere. Strangely, although humans lived through identical stories with their identical wealth and talents and geographic conditions, each had a different emotional satisfaction from their experiences. Upon thinking, humans figured that this must have been due to different characters they had. With that finding, they opposed again what was going to happen, and said "Oh God! Why are You creating us different? Some of us are happier than others. We want equality, we want justice." Then God accepted their appeal, and reorganized the creation so that every human had not only equal wealth and equal talents and equal natural resources but also identical emotional state.

With this change, of course the life stories changed, and God showed humans again excerpts from their life stories, like the trailer of a movie. Humans could not understand anything from what they saw, because there was no change at all in anything. Since they all had the same mood, they unanimously shouted "we are bored. Oh God, did You create us so that we get depressed? We want change."

And came the big bang!