[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: There are many books written by intelligent design scholars and scientists that explore the scientific evidence for intelligent design and the debate over evolution.
But now a new book published by Discovery Institute Press manages to be concerned with both the origin and and the end of man in the same book.
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Well, today we have a treat for you. Jeffrey Simmons is going to read us a few scenes from his new thriller novel Oppenheimer's Demon. Simmons is a distinguished physician, a successful novelist, and a leading disaster preparedness expert. On top of that, he's authored two razor sharp critiques of modern evolutionary theory, billions of missing links, and what Darwin didn't know.
Now Simmons has masterfully combined his multifaceted array of gifts, experiences and training to create Oppenheimer's Demon. And he's reading an exclusive set of scenes for us here on ID the Future as well as giving us some interesting context about the characters and the nail biting plot.
After his reading, I'll be back to tell you how you can get a copy of his new book.
For now, sit back, relax and enjoy these intriguing scenes from Oppenheimer's Demon.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: I'm a fellow with Discovery and I'm a retired MD and I've written 11 books, several of which are thrillers. My newest is a thriller called Oppenheimer's Demon. Anyway, it's a thriller with has several subtopics content, one of which is sort of sci fi.
One is the conflict between people following or believing in intelligent design and people believing in Darwin and how that impacts institutions.
Another has to do with pursuing hidden memories in the brain and there's lots of work going on looking at memory stuff and see what they can retrieve. It's very interesting stuff and I just took it one more step to help solve this particular dilemma. So it's going to be a race against time and I'm going to read you the very first chapter.
Actually not chapters, they're all done by time.
This book is dedicated to my daughter who just passed away from a complication of mono and so I was just barely able to finish it with the help of the editor Johnson. Witty because I know I couldn't work on it after that. So this is mostly 90 some percent my work and a little bit of touch up by John and in the acknowledgment area I talk about that as well. And it's very reminiscent of the Z papers which I mentioned sold. I didn't say how many but sold about 350,000 copies with Bantam, was bought for movies twice and in fact the producer of Jaws was interested in this book as well. That book then. Anyway, this is the beginning and it it's all against time. So the first part of it says 00:19 EDT. That's Eastern Daylight Time. St. Joseph Island, Ontario Province A large white cargo band with two men inside approached the front gate of the J and J Lumber Company of Ontario, Canada. In the back are two compact tactical nuclear missiles. Each was covered by a Faraday tarp. Both missiles were mounted on a narrow launch system. They were primed and ready to fire, that is, given the right code. They had been transferred from a Liberian freighter to this van at an isolated spot where James Bay meets Hudson Bay.
The van looked as if some teens had taken it. Mudding its windshield was dotted with smashed insects, carcasses, and there were various splotches of dry and moist dirt, except where the windshield wipers had struggled to make their semicircles. Curtains in the back hid their cargo. The license plates were stolen. A lone guard was working inside a brightly lit security booth located about 50 yards off a country highway used mostly by log trucks and J and J personnel. There it was hilly and thickly forested. On a moonless night under the tree canopy, a hiker wouldn't be able to see his hand in front of his face. On this night it was uncannily quiet, barring an occasional hoot from an owl or the howls of a wolf pack. A few homes dotted the distant hills, barring one far away porch light this evening one wouldn't know people even lived nearby, except for that particular light.
The guard was an older man with a gray crew cut, former military and retired rcmp.
Although he was busy checking some papers on a countertop, he heard the van leave the asphalt and start down the gravel road toward him. It was a straight shot to the JJ front gate. JJ Lumber was a huge Canadian operation with several mills across Canada. This mill covered 10 acres laid out along St. Mary river and Lake Huron. Over 7,000 ships passed by them each year on their way to retrieve forest products from the countryside beyond Lake Superior and take them to foreign ports. JJ was located relatively close to Sault Ste. Marie, but southeast of the locks. This location saved international lumber ships time and money, avoiding slow passage through the locks. The road in was hemmed by the forest, mostly doug as firs that there were a few oak trees and a rare cedar. During the day one could see tons of bright yellow Scotch broom bushes Especially now in the spring. At night, however, they were black. Like everything else along the road. The crackling sound of tires on the gravel broke the silence. The sound a bit like a popcorn popper.
Without looking up, the guard automatically unsnapped his sidearm.
This wasn't a high risk gig. Twice in 10 years he had to lock himself in the booth when a black bear ambled by with her three cubs. Once a big cougar had lunched at the window. As he told his bar buddies, until that moment he had thought he was immune to jump scares. But human threats there were none. During his 10 years working at JJ, there had been never a single incident. There was no money around. Every piece of equipment was too large and cumbersome to take. Business deals were handled elsewhere. Here they only handled paperwork and logs. In theory, a thief could show up with a log hauling truck and load them all up. But so far no thieves sufficiently industrious has stepped forward to attempt such a labor intensive heist.
So he figured the van pulling up was probably just lost. But something about it did strike him as unusual.
The driver's window started down. Be right with you, the guard called, and he let his hand rest on his sidearm as a note. I don't make voices. It's just going to be me.
No problem. The driver's eye studied the mill beyond. He spoke with an accent, but those two softly spoken words didn't reveal much. He had short black hair, drastically shaved along both sides. His left elbow rested on an open window. The size and shape of his arm, it had a serious weight lifting look. Sticking out beneath his short sleeve was a multicolored tattoo of a coiled dragon. The passenger remained silent. He was cut from the same cloth musketor with a similar haircut, T shirt and tattoos. The two men did not look friendly. Hang tight, the guard said. He looked up at the drawer beneath the counter and put a lone key inside his strip pocket. No hurry, the driver answered, although his fingers told a different tale. The guard could hear the driver impatiently tapping on the steering wheel, so they assumed they were lost. That was the most usual reason people came to the booth at night. The lights from the security booth stood out like a beacon.
You know how it goes as shift changes. This is the guard speaking. All kinds of loose ends to tie off. I'm coming on duty. I'm just coming on duty. The guard exit the booth and approached the vehicle. Evening ship always zooms. I'll clean up their mess. Yeah, I hear you, the guard, the guy said. The guard stayed cautiously out of the man's reach and bent down to get a better look inside the van. How can I help you? Driver glanced at him. The passenger still didn't look his way. We got turned around somewhere, the driver said. Got off the main highway and never found our way back.
That happens. Where are you headed? Sault Ste. Marie. You guys are way off track. GPS not working? Must not be. You need Highway 17, the Trans Canada Highway. It's a good bit away from here. The driver didn't reply. Beyond the closed gate, the gravel road continued along a downhill slope, ending in a long T shaped pier and a broad expanse of black water. A half moon hung low on the horizon, insufficient to show the acres of floating logs to the left of the pier or the well worn dinghy gently rocking in the small waves. The sawmill complex was surrounded by a chain link fence, open only at the security entrance and the entrance to the pier. Just past the guard shack, a white miser office trailer stood to the left of the gravel road. There was one light on the inside. Farther down on the right were three immense buildings, dark and all dark. Inside, every building had a small exterior light. Near the large building stood three giant cranes, two looming pyramids of sawdust, and several huge stacks of cut logs, all the same size, ready for shipping. The guard still felt uneasy but couldn't pinpoint the reason he decided to hurry them on their way. I've got some maps, he said, turning back toward the guard booth. Sketched them myself and copied them on the company's copying machine on their dime. Not mine, not mine. With the guard's last word, a suppressed shot from the driver's FNX.45 Tactical struck him high in the back and sent him careening forward toward the security booth. A single burst of air loaded with blood ushered from his mouth. He was probably dead before his head slammed against the metal strip at the entrance. The driver's partner quickly exited the van, came around from the front, pulled the guard out of the way, and entered the security booth. The open button was exactly where he expected to be. A motor word, weird word, yes, and the fence rattled as it rolled to the left. He dragged the guard's body to the other side of the fence and behind the thicket. The ran. The van rolled forward. The other guards in the office, the one who had been riding shotgun said when the driver pulled even with him. I can see the top of his head. He's probably sitting. Doesn't seem to have seen us. Don't assume there's not another guard out there making rounds right as the one on foot approached the front door of the Mazer office, gun drawn, the driver punched a button on a burner. Foam. Yes, the man's voice said. It was raspy and curt and followed by a cough. We're in, the driver said. Everything's going as planned, as it should be. We're about a mile offshore. Can you see our lights? Driver strained to see. Yeah, maybe. Well, not sure. There are a few lights in your general area. No matter. We will dock as soon as you tell us you're ready. Everything okay with your baggage?
Yeah, absolutely ready for transfer. I want the whole place. I mean everything. Every building, every pile, every twig burned to the ground and it and everything around the mill shouldn't be hard. This forest has been dry for a long time. That'll keep someone busy tonight. Meanwhile, inside the office, the driver's partner had found the other security guard. It actually was a woman, heavyset, kind of young, with brownish with a brownish blonde ponytail. She was doing some sort of paperwork at the desk. Her back was an easy target. Perhaps she got a quick view of the intruders reflection in the window. Maybe she even heard the muffled shot. He walked back to the driver to port. Just the one, he said. Take a hike around the property. Make sure there's no one hanging around, and then meet me at the dock. He handed the partner a box of incendiary devices. The partner shrugged a scent and made his way around the J and J property, tossing incendiary devices inside every building and onto every roof. He found no other guards. The only living beings he encountered were two cats and a fox that vanished as soon as he glimpsed it. We're good, he told the driver. The driver flashed his headlights in the direction of the approaching vessel, a cabin cruiser. He flashes lights three times, followed by a long pause and then three times more. A moment later there was a matching response.
And so that would be the first chapter. And that's kind of a Michael Crichton style, who I like a lot.
A lot of authors have what they call a hook or something. I think. I think there's different things that people look for in reading. And sometimes it's just an idea about the story, sometimes it's an idea about a great character, and sometimes it's a killing or shooting or some mystery. You see that on television a lot.
The second section I'm going to read has to do with another main character. The second is the main character who's the district attorney. He's a JD and an md. He went to medical school, graduated, practiced medicine for a short while, didn't like it, went back and got a law degree. So now he's A few years have gone by and he's the jd. He has a JD and he's a district attorney. And so he's in bed, he gets called and notified that something's going on. I'll leave that to read. But so including some possible bomb threat at a huge high school.
So now he's at the office a few hours later, Downtown Chicago. By the way, the Z papers takes place in Chicago also.
I spent a lot of time in Chicago. I went to medical school there and I kind of know my way around. In fact, if it weren't for the months of January, February and August, I might still be there with those Three months are intolerable in Chicago. Anybody who lives there would tell you that. Anyway, so here we are. Downtown Chicago. It says 08 and notably throughout the book there's a T minus something time. And it's. It's a countdown. And as the book progresses it's getting lower and lower and you'll see that.
So this is downtown Chicago. Winders is the name of this main character. Not Winders. It's Winders. It rhymes with cinders.
Winders was at his office desk when the phone rang.
It was his administrative assistant, Scotty Attoe, an extremely organized man. I have Captain Clint Morgan from the bomb squad on the line, scotty said. He says it's extremely important. Okay to talk? Yeah, sure, windu said absently. He was studying the photos for today's case for the 10th time, which this case also becomes part of the book.
Morgan came on the line. It's a drunk driver who kills two kids out of three. Driving very poorly.
Anyway, Morgan came online. You got a second? Scratch that. Definitely have a second for this. Winter straightened up in his seat. Please tell me there was no explosion at the school.
No, thank God. Turns out there was no bomb and the car trunk at all. A dummy bomb. CPD has the guy laying. Kids are all safely attending class. It's no worse for wear. But I'm not calling about that. We may have a bigger problem. Or maybe it's a nothing burger, but I need you to know about it. Go on. Windows said was already starting to drift back to the evidence photos. Every day on his job he had a bigger problem. Usually three or four or four, along with a few hundred lesser problems swarming about like a cloud of angry gnats. Multitasking and rapid fire delegating became an indispensable Tool of survival.
My mind's reminding me that I didn't mention also that a lot of TV shows, mystery shows, start off with something to grab your attention. And so I'm kind of copying that. But not on purpose. Anyway, going on with this, he received report from an officer patrolling near Oak Street Beach. That's where I used to go sometimes when I was living in Chicago. Morgensett was saying all this. Guy stopped him and it was ranting about an intruder in the bushes he calls home. The officers thought the homeless guy was crazy, but there was actually a guy lying face down to the bushes with a gunshot wound to his head.
Hey, I think I saw that. Winter said a jog passed there this morning with my dogs. Yeah, well, here's what it gets. Here's where it gets interesting. The intruder happened to have missile plans in his pocket. What do you mean plans? You mean dummy plans printed off the Internet? What are we talking about here? No, it's worse than that. They were on a thumb drive and they looked legit, or so I'm told. I haven't seen them yet myself, but here's the kicker. Looks like they're for sure for real. Nuclear tipped missiles.
Winders knew how freakishly difficult it would be to smuggle a nuke into the US Never mind one strapped to a missile flint. We're past April Fool's Day. He said. No joke. As I said, very possibly a nothing burger. But there's enough here that meets looking real. The gunshot victim wasn't a homeless guy printing conspiracy stuff out of the public library. He was wearing a Rolex and expensive pajamas.
We're going to our door to see who he might be looking at. The wealthy condos along the drive. No idea why he was down near the shore with the missile plans in his bathroom pocket. It's a hoax. Somebody was willing to put a bullet in the man's head to sell it. Sounds like a case for the Superintendent of police. And then later, maybe us. Or maybe yet the military.
My office prosecutes, remember? Yeah, yeah, I get it. But you might have to put your other hat on. You're still incident Commander for the Emergency Operations center, right?
And this may fall into the EOC's lap. Assured order again. A note. As I'm reading, I've tossed taught disaster preparedness for 20 years. I've actually taught at the NASA clinics. I've lectured nationally.
I have another book called Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness.
I have a very long history of doing this kind of work and so I've mixed what I know into this story.
Winders frowned. You're really worried. Yeah, just a hair. It's not the sort of thing to take chances with. So the plan's taken off the thumb drive tactical nukes, huh?
That's the thinking. If the threat is real, maybe we're coming.
Maybe they're coming to Chicago.
Maybe they're already here, aimed at God knows what. Willis Tower, Millennium park, and then he adds in, maybe Sox Park.
But I'm not going to comment at that point any further.
I don't want to get into a debate. As Chris it sounds like the White Sox were doing better this year. And of course it would be because I commented on how poorly they were doing.
It's almost predictable that would happen.
The last section takes place in the Illinois Medical District. Mind you, I went to medical school at the University of Illinois. In the Medical district, I went to Navy Pier, which is now a tourist site. It's a long pier into Lake Michigan, shooting out from just the north side of Chicago almost a mile long, and that's where our classes were, and sometimes we really had to run anyway. And I went to the University of Illinois Medical School, which is still in the same place, and I've been back many times, and so I use that as a background.
Partly out of knowledge and just kind of a burnout. Nice thinking about the old place. Anyway, it's 09.57 CDT Central Daylight Time, Illinois Medical District, Chicago.
When Emily Latner that's the lady who's the of the heroine of the book, reached the lecture hall, it was already packed and quiet except for a few whispers.
The room was brightly illuminated with everything from the seating to the AV system, new and up to date. Latimer was wearing a dark blue dress under a white clinical coat, with a coiled stethoscope peeking out of one of her pockets. Neurological tools were packed on the left side lower pocket. Around her neck was a small gold cross. Most attendants were the students who had survived this first far into the semester, but sprinkled among them were community physicians seeking continuing medical education units, along with several staff physicians who had come to hear Dr. Latimer lecture on her specialization.
Dr. M, as some of the students called her with her blessing, was named after Dr. Emily D. Terman. This is a real lady, her great aunt, who was a near legend in Chicago medical circles. She'd been appointed medical director of Cook County Medical, Cook County Hospital, in 1986, becoming the first African American woman named the director of a major American hospital. Her specialty was pediatrics, like her great aunt, Emily Latimer, had grown up in the projects. She had worked her way through med school as a housekeeper and seemed destined to follow a trajectory as lustrous as her aunts.
Latimer earned a bachelor's degree in biology and statistics from Harvard, PhD in neuroscience from the University of Chicago, and an MD with special training from the University of Illinois. She was first black female neurosurgeon with a PhD at the University of Illinois Medical School and had already published over 30 papers, half dozen of them increasingly cited, and had edited a textbook that was seeing widespread use in neurosurgery. Celebrities, dignitaries, and the very wealthy physicians from all over the country were starting to seek out her opinion and her operating skills. It was no wonder fellow physicians came to hear her lecture.
The atmosphere inside the amphitheater was quiet, not unlike the library. A few students were whispering, projected on the two screens to either side of the lectern, where this was the title of the lecture Memory and the Human Brain. Remember this becomes really important to help solve this problem, and I expect it'll be used in the near future as the science improves. Em had almost reached the steps onto the stage when she spotted Dr. Victor Hernandez, Mentor of hers from medical school days, coming down the aisle toward her. She paused to give him a hug. He was a lean, elderly man with a quiet style. She considered him one of the wisest men she had ever met.
Thus she went to lectern, rechecked the lecture slide deck on her computer, and with a minute or two to spare, she glanced at her phone's epic secure chat app for any messages. The most recent was from her personal secretary in the neurosurgery department, Dr. Zymanski, in the ED update regarding John Doe number 113, male with a gunshot wound to head says patient exhibits a split brain phenomenon, CT pending patient's vital signs stable.
Split brain surgery was sometimes performed in cases of epilepsy, when the catastrophic seizures begin in one brain hemisphere and spread to the other, dividing the brain in half. That would be like this at the corpus callosum. Callosum sometimes was the only way to bring relief. So if this side is kind of acting up electrically and then you would go over this side, the person would have a seizure. If you cut the brain right here, communication is blocked significantly, and these people are cured of their seizures sometimes.
EM had never heard of a case where a gunshot wound was the cause. But then gunshot wounds to the head were fatal 90% of the time, and those that were not would surely only be in Rare cases travel the relevant pathway to neatly split the two hemispheres, she answered. Interesting. Will head over after the lecture, tells Zamanzi, Split brain also means that one side might decide to do something and the other side doesn't want to do it. And it puts the persons in conflict in funny ways that often clears in short time, but not always.
She had spoken with Zymanski earlier about John Doe 113, but Zamanski had made no mention of behavior consistent with split brain. It must have manifested itself as the patient's swelling subsided.
At the moment they couldn't do anything more than they were doing already. Not until the CT told them about the path of bullet, the extent of the damage, and whether an intracranial hematoma was developing. It's like a bleed swelling inside the brain, a hematoma, and that pushes on the brain and cannot kill somebody if it gets to be pretty big and so forth. She had hoped to have the results by now, but they couldn't do the scan until his vitals were stable. She slipped her phone into her coat pocket and greeted her students. As she remotely dimmed the overhead light. She noticed that a little red light above the control booth, the far back, was on and a tech was inside. The light indicated that her talk was being recorded, but it was something she had not requested.
And then, surprisingly, there was Dean Abrams and this is the guy I mentioned, the conflict between Dawer and Intelligent Design.
Seated in the back, now close to the tech booth, with a dour look on his face, he was a thin 60 year old man with wire rimmed glasses. With wire rimmed glasses and an uninteresting bow tie. Always uninteresting, always plain in color. He was known as a workaholic. 12 years ago he had been appointed chief of neurology. Not long after that he was promoted to the position of dean at the University of Illinois Medical School. Stroger Hospital served as one of its training affiliates. That's a hospital basically across the street. When I trained there, Cook County Hospital was one of the biggest in the world, certainly biggest in the country. And it was just a crazy place. And I could tell lots of stories about Cook county and they have, they say part of the building there, which is part of also being used as a hotel.
Abrams was a company man with mixed feelings about Emily Latimer who was very pleased with the that she brought positive international attention and huge donations to the med school. But her refusal to follow the secular party line worried him. It was clear to him that Darwin was not wrong yet A recent feature story, the Chicago magazine had highlighted her Christian faith and coded her casting doubts on modern evolutionary theory. Of all things. Her opinion was, at a minimum, not helpful to the system. Abrams held told her that exactly that. It had been a restrained scold for the good of the medical school to keep her private views private.
He insisted they had a big NIH grant pending. She could help lock it down for them, or she could cause them to lose it. To be sure she heeded his advice. He had decided to begin dropping in on some of her lectures unannounced.
M. Knew the professional danger of publicly doubting Darwinism or of getting branded as a creationist. But beneath her sweet demeanor lay a stubborn streak. Abrams thought he could intimidate her into ignoring when she considered important implications of work, was badly mistaken. The complexities upon complexities, including unfathomable sophistication of the human brain, the nanomachinery of every cell, the billions of simultaneous chemical reactions every millisecond alive, and the DNA information system, a coding system in need of a coder on her. But view all of that and more should have left Darwin's explanation in the dustbin of the history of history, along with the flat earth theory long ago. She did not intend to wantonly torch her career. She tended to be a diplomat as possible without dishonoring what she signaled she regarded as the facts. Yet here Dean Abrams was staring down at her from the back row of the lecture Turk hall, judging every word she said, Emma's own personal thought police. Unfortunately for Abrams, she wasn't in the mood today to be told what to teach. Using a troll panel on her podium, she turned the lights down. A moment later, two big screens descended from the ceiling, one on each side of her. The first projection was a giant image of the human brain, which slowly rotated as if mounted on an invisible turnstile.
Different sections were different colors and each was labeled.
That'd be it for me today. I hope you get interested in the book and buy it and like it. Of course,
[00:29:16] Speaker B: that was Jeffrey Simmons, reading to us from his new thriller novel, Oppenheimer's Demon. As you heard, it's a race against the clock to stop a shadowy nuclear terrorist and Prevent World War III.
We also got to meet a few of the novel's central characters, including Chicago DA Glenn Winders and the diplomatic yet feisty young neurosurgeon, Dr. Emily Latimer. Look out for our interview, also with Jeff Simmons, about the book in two separate episodes of I D the Future and to get your hands on a copy of this book, you need to visit Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press, the website for Discovery Institute Press, the publisher of this novel. It's also available online at places like Amazon. So a few different places to go. Discovery Press and online retailers like Amazon. For Idea of the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery in the Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
