Steel fleas

Jesu turned off the light, filling the room with darkness, the explosion outside the window illuminated the teacher. Large fiery sparks returned him to the past, to the fire.

It was one of the most vivid memories that changed everything. A small mutation in a gene that controls the tongue led to a major shift in human history.

During his short "monkey" life, Jesu went through abundance and hunger, love and hate, peace and war, devotion and… He tried to express everything, every phenomenon through the

Word

Grant a name.

One of the latter brought particular pain: “Betrayal.”

Jesu was a capable leader. Thanks to a new type of communication, his community flourished. But other males envied his success.

They united against him and, taking advantage of his trust, lured him into a trap - a deeply dug hole.

It reminded him of a cave with only one difference: there was no exit. The slippery high wall didn’t give him a chance to get out. Other monkeys had dug it in a special way - at an angle. In doing so, they used tools that Jesu himself had invented.

The familiar fear of death returned. He didn’t believe that he’d been betrayed after everything he’d done.

After the first attempts to get out, Jesu became angry and furiously tried to get out, but each time he fell to the bottom.

Then he thought of making numerous depressions in the wall steps. But the ground was too hard and rocky.

Jesu was at a dead end; his mind was powerless here. Feeling incredible anger, Jesu for the first time didn’t just want to destroy the enemy, but to take revenge. He made a kind of promise to himself that he would do what he’d planned if he got out.

Day and night, Jesu racked his brains and hands in futile attempts to climb up, driven by the constant fear of death. The only thing that kept Jesu alive were the insects living in the ground or accidentally falling into the hole, and the rain. The latter was also an enemy, washing away the steps that Jesu continued to work on and making the wall more slippery. Rainwater intensified the night cold and carried carriers of infections. However, the hole was so deep that there was practically no chance of it being filled.

From the routine that had been repeated for many weeks, leading to no results, Jesu sank into despair. For the first time in his life, he thought for so long about what had happened and was happening. He reflected.

"Why did it happen exactly like this then? Why did it happen like this now? What will happen…

…in the future?"

Previously, only scattered particles of this concept figured in the monkey's life. Now she formulated it in all its depth. What would happen to Jesu in a day, a week, a month… The concept of time was emerging. And most importantly, what would happen in…

The end?

"Death." Jesu guessed.

For many days nothing changed, except for the gray hair on the monkey, who didn’t want to accept death.

After a while, Jesu contracted an unknown disease and became completely weak. He only had enough strength to occasionally search for bugs and drink from a puddle.

One dark night, a heavy rain poured down and thunder rumbled, preventing Jesu from sleeping. He looked at the sky, although it was only visible during flashes of lightning. Then he saw a writhing silhouette that was slowly crawling towards him.

It was a giant snake, which Jesu would now call Titanoboa. More than ten meters long, it sank to the bottom and attacked the weakened monkey. Jesu covered himself with his hand, which the snake bit off at once up to the elbow. The monkey quietly cried out in pain, looking at the protruding bone. With his free hand, Jesu felt the stone he used for work and threw it into the snake's eye. It attacked furiously, almost completely swallowing the monkey. Only its legs and head were sticking out as the fangs entered its body.

Jesu felt the will to live as never before and picked up another stone and furiously struck the snake's head until its grip weakened, and it recoiled. The monkey swung a bare bone, but the snake dodged despite its size. The bone stuck in the ground, surprising the monkey.

The snake lunged, Jesu turned around sharply and stuck the bone in the snake's eye, it wriggled in pain. The monkey quickly realized and tried to climb up the snake's body, but the scales were slippery, so he stuck the bone in. The snake began to wriggle even more.

Jesu jumped on the snake with the last of his strength and suddenly noticed that the snake was preparing for a fatal lunge. The monkey's vision became clouded and, although he didn’t give up until the very end, his brain itself determined: this is the end.

A clap of thunder.

As the snake threw itself, lightning struck it, Jesu saw a flash and received an electric charge. He fell into the open mouth of the snake, which died instantly.

The monkey lay in the warm insides of the snake, trying to comprehend what had happened. Before Jesu could utter the word "miracle", he formulated its source.

God!

Afterwards, Jesu treated the wound with snake venom and was able to get out of the pit. he’d enough meat to recover, as well as strong scales for protection and powerful bones for tools. It took weeks for this, during which Jesu made a second stunning discovery in himself. His hand was regenerating and growing, which he’d never seen in anyone.

Immortality.

He would formulate it later. Jesu forgot about the place for a moment and raised his restored hand to the Sun, discovering a completely new thirst in himself.

"Find. God."

The brain of a monkey, and later of a man, couldn’t contain so many memories, but this thirst remained insatiable and led Jesu through the entire history of mankind.

However, no religion could show Jesu God. Science remained his last chance. Immortality drove him mad, causing unbearable suffering.

Jesu's main fear wasn’t physical death, but mental. That his "personality" would disappear before he could meet God.

No matter what he did, Jesu always seemed to be one step behind God, like Achilles and the tortoise.

"Big or small? Outside or inside? Microscope or telescope?"

One thing Jesu knew for sure. He needed to speed up to keep up. But he didn't understand how. To restore his mental health, Jesu began to travel more. Perhaps he was trying to escape from his primal thirst.

When he was in Rus' at the end of the 19th century, he was incredibly captivated by the story "About Lefty and the Steel Flea." So much so that Jesu immersed himself in mechanics to create a more skillful and smaller "flea" that would be able to get inside him and help him understand himself.

Deus ex machina.

However, even having achieved mastery, he understood the stupidity of his undertaking. All the products that Jesu had sweated and bled over, he sold or gave away during his journey to the east of Rus', until the revolution began. Jesu fled to Japan, where he continued his work.

But the war caught up with him here too. First the First World War, and then the Second, which ended with a nuclear bombing. Jesu saw it with his own eyes in Nagasaki. And although he’d gone through thousands of thousands of deaths and all sorts of horrors, it awakened a primal fear in him.

Jesu was helping the victims of a nuclear explosion, when one of them grabbed Jesu with scorched radiation, wounding him until he bled. Unexpectedly, he noticed how the skin of the victim was gradually recovering. This surprised Jesu, because early experiments with his blood were ineffective.

As were the following ones. Jesu couldn’t answer this question, as well as the most important one: "Where is God?" After the first flight into space, Jesu "returned" to the USSR, but his hopes were again not justified.

Jesu improved the "steel flea" with new technologies and moved to the United States in the 1970s, having learned about the emergence of microrobots. By that time, Jesu was already holding on with his last strength. He began to believe that he wouldn’t live to see the turn of the millennium.

Jesu, as if having given up, didn’t know what to do with his body. After all, it’s unknown who will live in it when his personality dies due to madness.

Probably, as a protective reaction of the body, Jesu's body was divided into two, like a living cell. This process was repeated many times. Jesu's copies divided the areas of knowledge of different sciences and responsibilities among themselves.

Having created a personal underground laboratory, all the copies worked on the development of their perfect…

Nanobots.