“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Every Sunday when I was growing up, there was one thing that I could always be certain of.  As soon as I would open up my eyes that morning, my mother would already have my suit laying out for me.  Like the good Catholic she was, it was her duty to make sure that her husband and three children were properly dressed to go mourn our faith.  There were more than just the ritualistic Sunday practices as well.  Come summer, I’d be shipped off to Catholic Youth Camp in McGregor, which is just over 75 miles along the i65 out of Cambridge.  This isn’t a plug, nor did I have a any beef with the camp.  My tale isn’t about that.  It’s something far more important than anyone’s stupid exploits at camp.
There was camp, there was the Sundays, and of course, there was the Catholic School I went to; St Scholastica. What a joke that was. If you’ve ever gone to a Catholic school, you’ll know what I mean. Luckily enough though, one of our science teachers had an “in” at MIT where I studied psychology, with minors in religious studies and electrical engineering.
Yes, it was an odd mixture, but there were also reasons for it.

It was likely around the time I hit puberty that I really began to fun afoul with God. Like most of the boys my age, we had lost our belief in anything spiritual. The idea of any sort of creationist theories had become absolute bullshit in our minds. The internet had taught us that religion was created as a form of control and social engineering.
Most of my friends simply turned their focus to the seven deadly sins. I, on the other hand, came to the conclusion that religion must be removed from the earth. It was religion, after all, that brought upon us war after war throughout human history. It brought on the 9/11 attacks (I still don’t believe the conspiracy theorists on that one), and it brought me my own misery every Sunday until I was finally finished high school. To me, it was time for the world to finally become enlightened to the truth.

Back to my unusual subjects at MIT.

To be able to rid the world of any theology, I knew that I would at first need to understand them all– at least the major ones.  I would also need to know how they effected the brain.  I wrote a thesis on brain waves and religious belief.  This thesis was at the very core of what I intended to do.
The reason behind the electrical engineering was simple: I would need some sort of machine to carry out the destruction of all religion.  Through my psychological and religious research, I discovered that it was there was a section within the temporal lobes that was active during any sort of religious practice.  It didn’t matter what it was.  You could be offering a virgin to Satan or simply singing a hymn.  This one part of the brain would light up and start emitting a brainwave.

This was the discovery I was looking for.

Now that I had mapped religion, I needed to figure out a way to destroy it.  I needed to build a device that would pinpoint that location in the brain and fry it.  In the same way that cell phones get triangulated, I was determined to triangulate and eliminate faith.  This was actually the easy part.  Within a couple of months I was able to engineer a device to do just that.  My first trial had turned the most devout of Muslims into an atheist just like me.
In hindsight, I should have studied this subject further, but I was too eager.  I was blind to the possible ramifications.  My obsession had possessed me.

I now needed to broadcast the signal from my belief removal machine to the world.  Having been schooled to MIT, this also wasn’t hard.  A simple “I bet you can’t” had every programmer scrambling to do it first.  Around the world every radio station, every TV station, began broadcasting in inaudible signal.  On that very same day, the church bells stopped ringing.  No more chants were heard.  The local Gospel choir began singing “In a Gadda da Vida.”  It was like everyone shared a global joint and became mellow.  Israel and Iran became fast friends.
Everyone was cool.
I had succeeded.

It wasn’t until a few days afterwards, after I had finished marvelling over my own genius that I also noticed something far more terrifying.  My belief removal machine did exactly what it was made to do.  It had removed belief in everything–including science.  Including people.  Including the thought of building a better tomorrow.  People had, in short, simply stopped caring and began, if you can pardon the expression, living in the now.  No more saving, no more planning for the future, no more planning anything.

I immediately stopped the B.R.M. upon this realization but it was too late.  Brain damage had occurred in almost every single living being on the planet.  I don’t know why I was spared.  I was the Doctor Frankenstein.  Why wasn’t I killed by my own creation?

As it stands, the world has become stagnant.  The global economy is falling apart.  Our society is collapsing and everyone is okay with it.  The only hope left are the fetuses that currently exist.  Even if they aren’t effected, the chances of the world surviving by the time they can make any sort of difference is pretty slim.  And it’s all my fault.