by Max Humana

 

The domain of reality contains universes without end, which layer on each other like pages in a multidimensional and infinitely long book. Within these universes, all potential outcomes are possible. The thread of every human life weaves a path through the fabric of the reality contained within each universe. The endlessly repeating near-mirror images of each life’s thread echo throughout the universes, following any of an infinitely varying multitude of patterns; shining like a star in some while lasting for only moments in others.

Even a small difference in circumstance can have a tremendous effect on the meaning and impact of a life.

First Act

The child had been terribly injured. The call-ahead had come in to the ER shortly before the ambulance arrived; no need for triage on this one, just get everything ready because we are coming in hot. When the injured boy arrived, he was unconscious and his breathing was shallow. Blood had soaked much of the bottom half of his shirt and part of the top of his faded and threadbare jeans.

The ER doc had known that she would need to act quickly to maximize the boy’s chances for survival. He had sustained three gunshot wounds to his abdomen, which fortunately seemed to have missed or grazed vital parts, or he would likely have been dead already. For what had to be the fiftieth time since she had begun work at the hospital, the surgeon thought a silent ‘thank you’ in the direction of whichever ambulance and EMT crew had again been able to bring a badly wounded person to her still alive, giving her at least a fighting chance to save a life or limb.

She and the ER staff worked quickly, assessing the entrance and exit wounds, rechecking vital signs, ensuring compression on the wounds, checking for other injuries and making sure the vital fluids from the blood and IV bags were still carrying life into the boy. His blood pressure was low, and he had been in shock when the EMT crew got to him, but they had expertly stabilized him and the doctor felt they had a good chance at a positive outcome.

The EMTs had cut into the boy’s clothing but had not removed it. The ER staff did this now, exposing more of the boy’s blood-crusted skin. It was painful to see such horrible injuries on such a young boy. His torso and limbs were very slender, though he was above average height for his age.

As she expertly inspected the wounds, assessing their size and scope with her eyes and hands, she asked what, beyond the obvious, had happened to the boy. One of the EMT crew said that he had been an innocent bystander near a drive-by shooting and had been hit by gunfire from a moving vehicle. He had been walking with his younger sister on the sidewalk near their apartment complex, evidently doing nothing more offensive or dangerous than heading to the corner store to buy some ice cream. The sister had not been very helpful or informative beyond that, as she had been scared out of her mind at the sights and sounds of the shooting and her brother bleeding on the concrete.

The doc then asked, “How old is he?” She heard Angela, one of the nursing staff, say “I’ll check”, then a few seconds later said “Eleven. He turns twelve in four months.”

The doc grimaced, shook her head slightly, then said “Alright, everybody, this young man is going to see his twelfth birthday. I want to be able to walk out of this room, go straight to his family, and tell them that they will be able to take him home in a couple of weeks. Got it?” She heard a responding “got it” from everyone in the room. It was their ‘focus phrase’, which ensured everyone heard and was mentally ready for the task at hand.

It took three hours, several fluid bags and two separate sets of X-rays to finish the job. The boy had actually been quite lucky, considering the circumstances, although he would certainly have died without immediate medical attention and surgical repair. The shots had formed a rough left to right line across his abdomen, as evidently the shooter had been going for a head shot on the intended target, and his head had been at the same height as the boy’s midsection. The doc had closed up no less than nine holes in the boy’s intestines, patched a grazing wound on a kidney, stitched up all of the entrance and exit wounds, ensured there had been no damage to his spine, bladder or other major internal organs or structures.

After finishing her work, and certifying with the ER staff that the boy was fully sewed up, bandaged up, his IV drip and meds were in place and he was stable, the doctor thanked her team for a job well done and went to wash up and speak to the family. The staff had told her who to look for.

She passed through the doors to the waiting room and looked briefly around, quickly finding who she was looking for. The mother and father were sitting very close together, and a young girl was sitting on the father’s lap. The girl was clinging to him and his arms were around her, comforting her.

The girl’s eyes seemed to have been trained on the doors to the ER for hours, waiting for someone to walk through them and deliver news which she desperately feared would destroy her world. The girl shifted her eyes and looked directly into the doctor’s eyes, and the doctor felt that the girl knew she was bringing news about the fate of her brother. To calm the girl and her parents, the doctor smiled broadly and continued to approach the family. They stood as she drew near, the father gently setting his daughter on her feet and placing a hand on her shoulder.

The doctor introduced herself and confirmed that they were indeed the boy’s family, then quickly said “Your son is stable, and is doing just fine. He is going to be OK. I was the ER surgeon on the team that patched him up. I think you may have heard that he had three gunshot wounds to his abdomen, but we got him taken care of before there was any permanent damage, and after a few weeks of recovery, he will be just fine.”

The boy’s mother burst into tears, relieved that her son would be coming back to her alive. His father felt the wrenching constriction in his stomach and lungs, which had been there since he heard what had happened and which had become almost paralyzing when he saw the doctor coming toward them, relax. He was able to partially breathe again.

The little girl suddenly moved away from her father and hugged the doctor’s legs, very quickly and very hard. Her parents belatedly tried to stop her but the surprised doctor said, “No, no, that’s okay!” and hugged the girl back. The girl lifted her face to the doctor and said quietly but clearly “Thank you for saving my brother. I love him so much.”

The doctor felt a rush of emotion and sympathy for the young girl, and was moved almost to tears herself. She took a second to calm down and said “I am sure he loves you just as much, and he will be able to tell you that when he wakes up. Don’t you worry about him; he will be as good as new before his birthday.”

The parents thanked the doctor repeatedly, unashamed by the tears in their eyes. The father asked “When can we see him?” The doctor told him it would not be much longer and they could go back and see him, but that he would not be awake for a few hours.

The mother said, “Doctor, what was your name again?”

“Sarobi.  Aliya Sarobi.”

Second Act

She had grown up wanting to be, of all things, a politician. Not because of the images on television of the ingratiatingly and permanently smiling suited figures with their hair frozen into perfect and immobile position. Not because of the crowds and the clapping adoration they seemed to draw. And not because of any desire to get rich.

She wanted to be a politician because she had read in grade school about people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, and she knew that getting into politics meant you could actually do things that changed a lot of people’s lives in a positive way. The founding of her new homeland of America was a story of amazing success, and the achievement of freedom from unfair laws and rules, and from (to her) ‘bad people’.

She often daydreamed of how the Founding Fathers had helped set a path for a country in which people were expected to have rights and freedoms that many other people in the world did not and probably would not ever have. She thought of Lincoln and how important he had been to the push to end slavery. She thought of how the world had changed, even in the last fifty years. It had changed enough for a woman to serve as the Prime Minister of England and for a black man to be elected president of the United States. These last two were highly encouraging to her personally.

She was sure her country of birth would likely never achieve anything near this success, at least in her lifetime. She was sad about that, but she had long since decided that America was a place where anybody, even her, could make a difference, particularly as an elected public official in high office. But to get there, and to make change that would benefit everybody, you had to get elected.

Unfortunately, however, by the time she entered high school, she had concluded that being a female Muslim in an immigrant family living below the Mason-Dixon line had pretty much removed any shot she might have had at winning an election for any sort of office with real influence. She had come to realize that someone with her background, ethnicity, gender and religion would stand a very poor (i.e., nonexistent) chance of getting elected. Even getting a committee together, raising funds, all of the things one needed to do to even enter the process were beyond her in her home state. She had considered moving to a bigger city after college, perhaps even in the South, where the greater number of people with different backgrounds might give her more of a chance at her dream, but she had decided this was not in the realm of the feasible.

She had also realized, after studying American politics and many politicians, that the endeavor might not be for her after all. She could definitely imagine herself doing the work of the people, by the people and for the people. What she could not imagine doing, though, was being immersed in the suffocating presence of opportunism, deceit, divisiveness and plain mean spiritedness of it all, from campaigning to the election to the near-immediate restart of the campaign and fundraising process for the next election.

She felt there were many other ways to do good things for other people that did not involve kissing babies, kissing asses, making and then breaking campaign promises and spending most of her valuable taxpayer-paid time arguing with grown men and women over how each of them wanted to bend the Constitution and other laws of the land to fit their particular religious or personal opinions. In her mind, the founders had been pretty damn clear, pretty damn simple, and pretty damn smart. It ashamed her to see how such great vision and such great promise had been hijacked by so many unelected and elected voices who were so obviously unfit for the job of leading others and setting policy.

One evening, near the end of her sophomore year in high school, while spending a rare evening channel-surfing the mass of static and noise on cable television at a friend’s house instead of reading books or keeping up on social media, she chanced upon something which caught her eye. It seemed to be an edible tidbit in the seemingly endless and distasteful parade of so-called ‘reality’ shows. 

This particular offering evidently seemed to require more than 10 percent of one’s brain to understand, and seemed to have at least a grain of actual reality to it, even after a bit of scripting and re-enactment. The show was about people coming to hospital emergency rooms and, in many cases, being healed or even having their lives saved by the medical staff. She herself had been extremely fortunate to have been able to avoid hospitals and medical attention almost completely, beyond periodic bouts of the flu and the normal checkups and immunizations. And also that really bad sunburn she had endured during the summer before her freshman year of high school when she had spent far too long at the local pool without sunscreen, trying unsuccessfully to catch the eye of a certain David Holloway.

She became hooked on this particular program, and ended up watching it whenever it came on, or caught recordings or special showings of it on weekends. The stories of the people saved by the medical staff impressed and moved her, once she waded through the overhead nonsense the producers felt had to be in the show to gain and keep their audience.

She was moved so strongly that she decided to look into the medical field in depth. It soon became a passion for her, although she did not get much encouragement or “guidance” from the guidance counselors at her high school. For some reason, some students received much more help than others. She suspected she knew why, but only discussed this with some close friends. So she did most of the research on her own.

She read, surfed, watched, studied, researched, and eventually decided to dedicate herself to the practice of medicine. She had always liked helping others, and felt she had truly found a way to leverage her skills and abilities into a way to help those most in need. So the medical field it would be. She discovered that the local hospital took volunteers, and following a quick interview and some good referrals from her science and math teachers, was taken on for weekend duty.

Although she was very nervous on her first day on the ‘job’, she felt like this was her starting point to the future she wanted to have, so she listened, watched and thought about everything that happened. She quickly made a name for herself with her positive presence and lack of hesitation to do the dirty and smelly jobs along with the more pleasant ones like rocking babies. A year later, she was able to take a part-time paid position at the hospital. It did not pay much, and she was only part-time, but it was another step closer to her new dream. She made sure to keep her grades as high as possible, too, as she had found out that the better colleges and programs were extremely competitive, and those students whose families didn’t have much money had to be top-notch both in person and on paper to receive financial aid.

As her family was not well-to-do; actually they were particularly not well-to-do, she knew had to ensure she could impress college application screeners with grades, test scores, reputation and recommendations, extracurriculars like volunteering, and a great positive interview. She knew she could ace both the tests she took in her classes and the standardized tests, as schoolwork for her always seemed to be far easier for her than for her peers, even with the advanced classes she was taking and the extra reading she did on her own.

Being from a meager and unprivileged background, she didn’t harbor ‘pie in the sky’ dreams like attending Harvard Medical School, but was committed to getting into medical school and having a full-fledged practice one day. Late in her first year of volunteer work, she had decided she would be a pediatrician. Of all the people who came into the hospital, she felt the worst about the children. It was one thing to see a sick or injured adult, but to see a child in pain was hard for her. She wanted to hug and comfort and heal every one of them herself.

That motivation to help children in pain and need drove her for the next decade, as she finished high school with honors, finished college a year early, graduated from medical school at the top of her class, and was selected for a highly competitive residency program. She strongly sought out and was able to secure a position at a prominent children’s hospital. Eventually, once she had put in the time and was able to get away for a while, she was able to finally serve with the organization she had heard about years before while in medical school – Doctors Without Borders.

It was during the occasional volunteer expeditions with this organization and fellow like-minded healers from across the world, that she felt extreme pride and satisfaction. Over time, she ended up volunteering and helping people in parts of the world which made the worst ghettos in the United States look like suburban neighborhoods. In these areas, many people lived close to the edge between life and death, and a few, or even one person could positively impact hundreds, if not thousands of people. In her most optimistic moments, she felt she was contributing to changing the course of a culture or a population to a better and more positive one, moving a small step toward the ideals contained in America’s founding vision.

One of her favorite things to do, in the infrequent times when she had not only free time but also the ability to easily connect to the world wide web, was post to her personal blog. Her most recent entry concluded with a typically good-natured and positive turn of phrase.

“Well, another “Doctor S” post is now officially in the books. I hope anyone who is following this in real time or close to it will check their news feeds and see what kind of an impact the humanitarian agencies are doing over here. I don’t want to even think about what would be happening here if all these great volunteers were not doing amazing things every day. I want to thank everyone who reads these posts for their time and the nice notes of support you post and send me, as well as the occasional care package (Mom and Dad, I’m talking to you! The cookies were awesome! Send more soon!). Signing off for now, Aliya.” 

Third Act

“Doc, I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but from what I see, this may be IT!” The late twentysomething staffer was actually giddy with excitement. He was usually fairly energetic, but at this particular moment he had the wild eyes of a man who has just confirmed that the numbers on his multimillion dollar lottery ticket are, really and actually the winning numbers. He had known he was working with one of the sharpest minds currently alive, not just within the field of medicine, but in the entire world. But even with all of her abilities and past accomplishments, he had never believed she would truly reach her main goal. He thought they would achieve a minor breakthrough here, or an improvement there, or a new beneficial protocol for something or other, but no way did he think she was actually going to do IT!

His mentor and project lead merely smiled. She said “Yes, well, we will do our reviews, follow-ups, data and protocol assessments, and see what we see at the end. If we think we have actually achieved what we set out to do, we will, as we discussed from the beginning, repeat everything from a clean start. Everything. If we apply the same rigor in the next round of work, and we are able to duplicate our results, we will document everything and present our findings for peer review, and from there to the world. We’ve had this talk before, Ben. The world has seen too many claims of cold fusion, free energy, perpetual motion, medical miracles and peace in our time. When we go public with this, it will be only after the most rigorous reviews and documentation of all our processes and results. I want full disclosure, full transparency, all questions answered before they get asked. I don’t care if they want to know what brand of soap we use in the bathrooms here, it’s all in the open. You’ve heard these principles from grade school, and they only got more important when you put on that nice clean lab coat. True science, true knowledge, is verifiable and repeatable. Any similarly equipped lab in the world should be able to repeat our work and achieve the same results. Right?”

Ben had not been able to stop grinning since he read the last bits of data. “Yes, ma’am! I hear you loud and clear! But all I want to know is, is there anything bigger than the Nobel Prize? I mean, what you’ve done is, it’s, well, it really is a once in a generation, a once in a lifetime thing. Don’t you get it, doc? This is maybe one of the biggest scientific leaps ahead in science in history! How many millions, or billions, of people have died or been disfigured or just spent a rotten week at the porcelain throne because of these suckers, and you figured out how to pretty much make it all go away! I mean, doc, really, I don’t even see a smile on your face, and you know this is good. You know we didn’t screw anything up. We took our time, did duplicate protocols, documented everything. I mean, I don’t know how many nights I laid awake going over things and being worried that I messed something up. I didn’t count sheep, I counted growth cultures! We followed protocols and procedures so many times I can recite them from memory even after two six packs on Super Bowl Sunday. I was so scared I would screw things up by going off protocol or going off memory that I read and followed every word every time, and that was very hard for me. You know?” 

“Ben, yes, I know. I could see you, sometimes, just absolutely knowing you knew the next step and just for a second, thinking about not reading it and just doing it from memory. But you always did the right thing that I saw, and I am glad to hear you did it even when I was not around. I do, actually, believe we have made a breakthrough here. I also believe I am not going to get overly excited until it is clearly repeatable, and we have repeated it. I will also need some time to think of the implications, and, yes, how to handle the eventual publicity if this does end up how we want it to.”

“For now, Ben, I want you to keep this to yourself. We can work the information and data releases once we are ready for peer review. But for right now, I want you to finish closing up shop here in the lab and take the weekend off. You’ve certainly earned it. And, Ben, I do want to thank you for all of your work in this. Everything we have done here would not have been possible without your energy, and without your hard work and also your discretion. I can’t imagine how we would have been able to do our work with reporters and others bugging us all the time. So, have a great weekend, and see you Monday.”

“Thanks, Doc, you too. And, Doc?”

“Yes?”

“Look twice before you cross the street from now on. I can do the mechanics and the processes behind all this, but if anything goes off track I don’t know enough to get it back on. And this is too important not to see all the way through, so take care of yourself. See you Monday!”

She left the lab and walked down the short hall to her office. She entered it and closed the door behind her to block out the heartfelt but frankly awful singing from Ben which always accompanied his lab close-up work. She sat down in front of her computer, unlocked the screen, and chuckled. She had given Ben the ‘do it by the numbers’, stick up the butt speech she needed to, and which actually reflected what needed to be done, but in truth she was sure enough that they had indeed ‘done it’ that she was already preparing her submissions.

On her glowing monitor was an already-opened, recently created document, titled “A Protocol for Elimination of Viral Presence In Humans”, by Aliya Sarobi, M.D., PhD.

Fourth Act

She was scared, so very scared, and she hurt horribly all over. Her lungs were on fire, her legs ached, and she had a horrible pain in her side. The dust in the air and the sweat running down her face stung her eyes, but she could not stop running. She knew that the men chasing her were going to get her this time, and that they were going to kill her. She hated them for that, and she burned with the agony of anger and despair that this time there would be no escape.

She ran as hard and fast as she could, not thinking, just sprinting for her life. She was nearing an alley where there were trash bins and wheelbarrows and other things which might protect her or slow down her pursuers. As she was about to make the turn into the alley, she felt sharp burning blasts of pain in her left side and left hip, then heard cracking noises and the sound of gunshots. She had been running at full speed, and when her left foot next hit the ground, her left hip and leg gave out and she fell hard to the ground, rolling several times, finally coming to rest on her back. She heard the screams of anger from her pursuers change to yells of pride and success, happy that they had finally taken her down. There were no more shots as they ran up to her and surrounded her. There were six of them; all bearded men, all carrying rifles, and all wearing angry looks and breathing hard.

As she lay in the dust, her body screaming with agony, she felt the total despair of a person who knows there is no escape from certain imminent death, but she did not try to roll away or turn over. She remained on her back, staring directly and defiantly at them despite the overwhelming pain and fear. This seemed to make them even angrier.

The leader spoke to her, panting a bit. “Not as smart as you think, are you? You are not smarter than us, you are not faster than a bullet. We told you what would happen to you, and by Allah’s will it will happen today. We will shoot you and leave your body in the street for the others to see.”

She felt a hot rush of anger at these horrible mindless thugs, feeling every single one of the thousands of insults, intimidations and oppressions she had experienced in her short lifetime well up inside her and burst out in a rage. “You are nothing! You know nothing and you are nothing! I hope that one day soon you will feel all the pain you have given to others!”

She saw his face twist with rage and he snarled as he whipped the rifle up and pointed it at her. She heard him give one last cry of praise to Allah, then heard the deafeningly loud explosions and felt the terrible pain as the bullets tore into her body. The killer deliberately shot her multiple times in the stomach and limbs, to maximize her pain and to ensure her mutilated body would give the clearest message to any others who would defy him and others like him. She felt agony beyond anything she had imagined, a new burst of pain shooting through her entire body as each bullet destroyed skin and bone and flesh. The last thing she saw, through a blurry haze of pain and tears, was the muzzle of the rifle as it moved to point at her face.

After inflicting the killing shot between her eyes, the leader spat on the body, gathered the other murderers and left. The girl’s fourteen year old body lay in the dusty street, a butchered and bloody mass which only minutes before had been a living, vibrant and strong young woman. Her killers had pursued and murdered her, after months of threats and intimidation, for her ‘crime’ of believing that a woman was as capable and intelligent as a man, and for daring to try to make something of herself.

Her unfortunate luck had been to be born into a culture where the most repressive and religious antihumanist thugs had been knowingly funded and cultivated by states and individuals into a fully metastasized cancer, eating away at the essence of human life through institutionalized and inhuman repression and murder.

No newspaper covered her murder. There was no television or radio coverage to note her death. There was no obituary notice. Her parents, despite the shattering of their world and their desire to commemorate their daughter and her life and potential, mourned as quietly as they could, knowing that hateful eyes were on the lookout for any behavior which would trigger another gleeful slaughter in the name of religious freedom and repression.

Across the world, the United States was busy mourning the loss of thousands of its citizens, two of its most magnificent structures in New York, and a direct attack on its military’s nerve center. The eyes and ears of most of the rest of the world were tuned to television sets and radios describing the fires burning in America. People quickly began wondering which part of the world was going to eventually experience the fire and brimstone of American retribution. So the girl’s death was essentially lost to the world, an unknown and unimportant incident in a remote and repressed corner of the world struggling under repressive religious totalitarianism.

Many months later, after coalition troops had come to the area, temporarily driven out the majority of the murderous thugs, and the area and the village had been rendered relatively safe for such things, a journalist came to the village in search of a human interest story. He was both an idealist and a realist, and had the (mostly) unadmitted strong desire by all who have ever placed real or virtual ink to parchment that this story was going to be the one to get him noticed. With that in mind, he very much wanted to get into the homes and talk to the families, so he had let his beard grow out for a full six months, had ensured he wore clothing acceptable to the people, had studied their customs and knew the appropriate and respectful personal interactions and behaviors, and was fully prepared to win hearts and minds and get a great story.

While asking one man if there was anything that had gone on before the troops came that he thought that the rest of the world ought to know about, he was told to look up a specific family and have them tell the story of their daughter, who had been shot in the street by a gang of religious murderers. He was told that the girl’s name had been Aliya. The journalist later found out that this translated to “superior” or ‘finer’ in English.

The journalist was able to speak to the girl’s family two days later. Evidently the original man he had spoken to was friendly with Aliya’s father. So he found himself in Aliya’s former house for a long late afternoon and evening with Aliya’s parents and a friend of her father’s who spoke the journalist’s language, sharing tea and stories about subjects other than Aliya. He knew they needed to feel comfortable with him before they would share anything significant. He told them of his travels, and how he enjoyed meeting new people and seeing the world through their eyes. After a time, the conversation shifted, and he realized that they had decided to begin to share family information with him.

He was, as he had been on each of his travels, again struck by the fact that there was always far more to the life of a person or a family than was apparent from the outside. Aliya’s parents were still gripped with grief over the loss of their daughter, and still feared that they received more than their share of attention from the murderers and their sympathizers. The journalist knew that some of these were still in the area, avoiding the coalition troops and waiting for the day when the troops would leave and the thuggery and oppression could begin again.

But Aliya’s parents had felt that this journalist’s unexpected visit had provided them a way to tell a story which would not otherwise have been told, and that perhaps something could or would be done to prevent it here and anywhere else in the world.

Although her parents had become willing to talk about their daughter after they had become more comfortable with the journalist, the sharp pains of grief they felt when they began relating details and memories held them back a bit. After a time, this gradually diminished as they were able to recover and relive some of the joy they had felt at having had their daughter in their lives, and the flow of information began in earnest.

They had obviously loved her very much. The journalist felt it had been fortunate that Aliya’s father had been more than the stereotypical ignorant desert peasant stupefied by ancient beliefs and anti-human and anti-woman codes and attitudes. It was clear that he was a man who would have felt much more at home in a first world country, surrounded by technology and knowledge and empowered women, and the freedom to act and think freely and openly. He seemed to hold his current faith only as a veneer of protection against the culture he lived in, for the penalties for not holding the faith went all the way to death. He did not say this, but the journalist was certain of it. He treated his wife with caring and respect, and they interacted pleasantly in the home. The looks and touches they shared when one of them related particular stories about Aliya left no doubt that the love for her had been equally strong from both parents.

One thing which was painfully clear was that they had wished for better circumstances in which to raise her. Her parents had tried to do the best they could for her, in the hope that with some education and training and a little luck, she might have been able to leave the country and make a new life for herself somewhere else. She had been a loving person with tremendous empathy, a strong desire to help others, and an iron-hard sense of fairness which she had developed on her own which was emphatically not the ethos of the culture. These were characteristics which made for a closely knit family life but which were not the most useful traits for a female in the time and place in which she had been born.

Her family had also known she was smart, but it was apparent to the journalist that they had no idea how intelligent she actually had been. They told stories about her learning how to speak well before she was a year old, and that she picked up ideas and concepts faster than anyone they had ever seen or even heard of. They told him that Aliya had memorized the layout of the entire village and had drawn a detailed map of it in the dirt with a stick at age two. Her father, having the ability to read and write, and a liking for the written word that was not exclusively religious, a relatively unusual trait in that area, had a meager collection of books. By the time Aliya was three, she had read them all, and had taught herself to write. Both parents related other and similar stories to the journalist about other things she had done and said, all seemingly without realizing their full implications.

As Aliya had grown older, she had asked questions which confounded and scared both parents. She had wanted to know all the typical things children ask, such as where the world had come from, why the stars looked the way they did, and what life in the rest of the world was like. Her father had given her the locally acceptable religious-based answers, to ensure she did not say anything wrong in the wrong company outside the home and thus greatly endanger herself. She had asked what made people get sick, and why more could not be done about it. The lack of ability of anyone to answer any of these questions to her satisfaction bothered her greatly.

One day, she had asked how she could talk to the Prophet or to Allah, in the hopes that one of them could answer her questions. After being told this was not really possible, and after also asking the inevitable questions about where both Allah and the Prophet came from, and why she could not talk to them, and after again not being satisfied with the answers or the logic behind any of the answers or indeed the whole story, she decided that there were no such people or things and felt she would have to find things out on her own.

This had profoundly frightened her parents, and their fear of Aliya accidentally, or even deliberately, saying something dangerous grew too great. If that ever happened, they told her, she and perhaps the entire family could be beaten, tortured, or put to death.

Her parents resolved to get her whatever education they could, even though it was dangerous to do so, and told her never to mention any forbidden thoughts in public, or even to her friends. They could keep secrets and have secret talks within the family, but she was never to say anything ‘unacceptable’ outside the home. Her parents had felt that if they could get Aliya through a few years of this, that if they focused her on getting an education and that they were eventually able to find a way to get her to a safer and more accepting country to start a new life, that things would not get out of hand.

This had progressed acceptably for a time, and their hopes had increased fractionally with each successful day that passed, but it had all come to a horrible end that day in the street. Aliya had defied edicts to stay away from books and education, and it had been heard and acted upon by the local enforcers.

As the father finished the last bits of the story, both parents fell silent and the mother left the room. The journalist felt that had been a signal that the discussion was over, and that the man and his wife needed to be alone. He gathered up his notes and thanked the father very profusely and respectfully for his time. He told the man that he thought that he and his wife had done the best they could, and that his daughter had been extremely brave. He said he would absolutely tell her story to the rest of the world, and let make sure that people everywhere knew what life was like for innocent people here.

On the long plane ride back home, the journalist tried to compose his handwritten notes into a semblance of an outline and story on his laptop, but he found he could not concentrate. He reflected on his unexpected discovery in the wretched corner of the world he had just left. A wonderful little girl had been born into one of the most backward, oppressed and religiously stultified societies and cultures on the entire planet. This particular little girl had possessed incredible intellectual abilities, and was apparently one of those special prodigies which appear once in a generation or so. She might have been one of the top five or so most intelligent humans on earth when she was alive. In other circumstances, he was certain that she would have one day been doing truly amazing things for the world. He imagined her on various stages accepting academic or professional honoraria or distinguished national or global prizes for achievement, or simply heartfelt thanks and gratitude for her contributions to the world and the good she had wrought for everyone on it.

But it was not to be. Hers had been the astronomically terrible bad luck to have been born in a place where no woman is ever as good as any man, intellectual capacity is trumped by capricious and fabricated religious rules and beliefs, and breaking even the most trivial of the many insane rules made for the most insane reasons can lead to a death at the hands of ignorant and hateful barbarians. He felt physically ill at the thought of what a horrible waste her death had been, and of the potential for advancements in knowledge which the world had lost when she had been brutally cut down in a dusty street. The world had lost a precious jewel, ripe with intelligence, compassion, humanity and a potentially global impact for good. Her intense light had been put out like a cigarette tossed onto the street and crushed under a heavy boot.

When will we ever learn, he thought. When will humanity ever stop killing our best and brightest? When will we stop doing insane things for insane reasons?

He opened the most recent image file which he had saved on his laptop. It showed one of the pages from the little diary which Aliya had kept intermittently for several years, after she had secured some paper. Her parents had let him take pictures of the diary and some of its pages. The interpreter had translated the words on the page, which the journalist had written down and which would echo in his mind for the rest of his life. They had been written five years before she was killed, when she was but nine years old.

It said “I am so sad for the people here. So many get sick, and die, because no one can help them. The people in this place don’t know very much, and I want to know so much. I want to leave here and go to a country where I am allowed to go to school, and I want to learn all I can about medicine. I will miss my family very much, but I don’t want to live in this place. I want to learn how to heal people and to make their lives better. I will be very happy when I am doing this.”

He shut his laptop, leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes and let out all his breath in a long sigh, slumping into a boneless mass. He was suddenly tired far beyond mere physical exhaustion. He thought again about the incredible loss which the world had suffered at the hands of ignorant religious savages. He thought about the pain and suffering of a grieving and loving family. He thought about what had happened the day Aliya was murdered, and imagined the sights and sounds and feelings that had followed it.

Murderers of young girls had screamed with joy and praise as she lay dying in agony in the dust.

Her family had screamed with agony at her death.

The world screams with agony at its loss.