Son of Science
This document is being presented as part of the Red River Resistance research effort. As it is an unverified secondary source, it may be biased or contain inaccurate information.
During the spring of 1987, a boy named Nathan Wilhelm Nolte was born. His birth seemed quite unremarkable. He was born to modest parents in the small, unassuming town of Genoa, Ohio. It was the type of town where the bartenders know your favorite drink and the preachers know your favorite sin. At the time of his birth, Nathan’s father was unemployed, although he was a salesman by trade. His last job was with a vacuum cleaner company in the early 1980s. After an incident involving a cat during an in-house demonstration of the company’s newest model, he was fired. He opted to spend most of the next seven years professionally unemployed, after a brief, but failed stint at the Post Office resulted in termination. Delivering mail to the bottom of the lake is never a good idea in that line of work. Nathan’s mother ran a small novelty shop on Main Street, supporting the family with her crafts.
Science, in various forms, has been around for many years upon many years, although it came late to Genoa. When evolution was first taught in the local schools in the 1960s, the outcry was so fierce that one local preacher proclaimed that Satan had taken over the schools, which were no longer safe for the children. Bombarded by parents and the administration, the disgraced teacher was forced to repudiate evolution. Science, blamed for the moral lapse, was banned. Science books were pulled off of shelves, chemistry labs were locked, and names like Einstein and Newton were cleansed from the curriculum.
Science had long believed that one day a man would be born who would change everything. The Spanish called him , “Hijo de la Ciencia” – the Son of Science. Sir Isaac Newton wrote in 1698 that everything science had discovered, learned, and applied would be “invalidated” by this “Son of Science.” Newton believed, as Galileo had before him, and Einstein after him, that the stars foretold such a birth. One of science’s oldest traditions, astrology, regarded by many as the most sacred of the sciences, spent years reading the stars for a sign that the Son was coming.
Followers of this cult of science style themselves as scientists. They seek the truth in how and why things work the way they do. But they are limited by their own rigid rules and doctrines. The scientific method, for example, is crippling to them. Consider: Anybody can claim the sky is blue without submitting evidence to the fact or explaining how such a conclusion can be reached. A scientist, however, rigid in their ways as they are, is forced to explain, is forced to submit evidence, and, in many circumstances, is forced to admit that, actually, they might be wrong anyways – it’s just a theory.
These frustrations, these seemingly futile attempts to always be accurate and precise, hinder scientists, who sometimes, unable to bear the strain, crack in their fruitless efforts to turn postulates into fact. They needed someone. These scientists needed someone to save them from their own efforts. They needed someone who could turn postulates into fact as easily as rain changes to snow.
The early Greek philosophers, interested as they were in the world, are regarded by some as the first of the scientists. When they theorized that there has to be someone not bound by the constraints as they were, they were written off. Yet, future scientists could not disprove their theory. By the time of Galileo and the continuing modernization of science, this theory, long relegated to the underground, began to gain traction. Some postulated that the stars, long attracting people to science, held the key. They said the stars knew when this unbounded force, this, “Son of Science” was coming.
As a boy, Nathan loved to watch the stars. When he asked, “What are stars?” He was told they were the souls of the dead shining from Heaven. Nathan never liked this answer. He knew what happened to people when they die: They’re boxed up and stuck in the ground – he’d seen it himself at a funeral. And no amount of digging that he undertook ever amounted to a tunnel to the sky. “How does God get the souls to Heaven?” Nathan asked once at Sunday school. “Jesus carries the souls of those who have lived good lives to Heaven when they die.”
Nathan knew what he had to do…
He had to catch Jesus.
Nathan would slip out of his second story window at night, climb down his tree, and run to the graveyard near his house. Jesus and Santa were both roughly the same to Nathan at this stage of childhood, as he was still quite young and kind of had the whole “keeping a list” and “saving good souls” concepts pegged as roughly the same thing. With this logic, Nathan figured Jesus would probably strike at night.
It wasn’t often that people were freshly buried, but Nathan figured that since lots of people die, and Jesus obviously works alone, that there was a chance there could be a delay. He hoped he’d catch Jesus coming back for some soul who had passed away a few weeks or months ago and had just been hanging around in the ground waiting for Jesus’ schedule to open up and allow a successful soul harvesting. Once he’d caught Jesus, Nathan assumed that like the leprechaun at the end of a rainbow who is forced to give up his pot of gold to the lucky person that finds him, Jesus would be forced to explain how souls are turned into stars.
But night after night Nathan would slink back home before the sun rise, sleepily crawl back into bed, and drift off into a short sleep. He wasn’t having any luck catching Jesus. In fact, he wasn’t having any luck seeing Jesus at all. After a few months of this nightly graveyard ritual, he decided to air his grievances at Sunday school. He explained his predicament to his Sunday school teacher suggesting that maybe Jesus wasn’t real, because if he was, why wasn’t he ever showing up to “grab up them souls?”
Nathan began to understand the severity of suggesting the non-existence of Jesus when his dad sentenced him to a lifetime of yard work. He was forced to spend weekend after weekend cutting the grass down to a very specific size as his father tested the structural integrity of the living room floor by carefully sleeping on each portion of it as Nathan carried out his sentence. When his Sunday school teacher told his mother what he’d said during class, she cried.
All of this confused Nathan. He was merely reporting his honest observations. What was there to be upset about? His Sunday school teacher tried to explain that Jesus couldn’t be seen, except by the dead people whose souls Jesus was taking to Heaven. “But how could you know that,” Nathan asked, “if Jesus can only be seen by people once they’re dead, how would those people be able to tell us about the experience when they’re in Heaven, and we’re down here?” This line of questioning was met with stammering from his teacher, who tried to explain a variety of concepts and ideas at one time, resulting in a bunch of “But um, you, uh, you see, the thing is” and whole lot of, “uh, err.”
Nathan never would get a satisfactory answer, but he quickly understood that in a town like Genoa, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. Even though he understood this, he couldn’t help but to be inquisitive about the world around him. For the remainder of his childhood, Nathan would continually be disappointed by the answers his questions received. Luckily he was able to find salvation in books. While the local library had more vampire books than books about the geological makeup of the Earth or space exploration combined, Nathan still managed to learn a few things he otherwise wouldn’t have.
Nathan was first introduced to astrology by the librarian. She was in her mid sixties, with long gray hair. She was the type of lady that could easily be pictured owning at least a dozen or so cats. She was a social outcast as Genoa wasn’t really fond of its library. The way most people in town saw it, the Bible was the only book they’d ever need, and the library was just a waste of taxes. Well, except for those few times when it was necessary to use its Internet connection to list an E-Bay auction. But other than those infrequent trips to the library to use E-Bay, most people of Genoa stayed well clear of the library.
While Nathan picked through the endless vampire romance novels one day, the librarian approached him, asking him what he knew about astrology. He didn’t know much, he explained, as the only parental endorsed reading in his house was the Bible, Bible related texts, or lawn care guides. He told her how he was forced to turn to illicit trips to the library to satiate his thirst for knowledge. As they got to talking, he detailed his past for her, including his childhood problems related to his inquisitive nature. These problems still plagued him now, he explained, despite the fact he was in fifth grade. The librarian nodded silently as Nathan recounted his life story. When he was done, she excused herself to her back office, saying she would be back soon to explain astrology, the sacred science, to Nathan, who was very intrigued.
Back in her office, the librarian quietly contemplated Nathan’s situation. She had been watching the stars for a sign, like so many others, for many years. It had only been ten years since that warm spring when she saw… But, no, it couldn’t be. If the Son of Science was real, if the Son of Science was to ever appear, he wouldn’t be in Genoa.
Would he?