Creepypastas

The Volstok/Chappelle Theory

I am a dead man. I would like to think of myself as a reasonable, level-headed individual; and that is exactly why I know that there is no happy ending for me by any measure whatsoever. I have only one thing left I can do... whether it works or not, this document is to serve as my last will and testament. I will not try to diminish my responsibility in what happened, but before I die the blame will be placed squarely on the heads of those who deserve it. It was the combined hubris of two men that sealed our fates: Dr. Chappelle and Dr. Volstak, the men who found God.

It all started when I transferred to the post-graduate studies program at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I had a shiny, new Bachelor's in Psychology and was looking forward to further exploring the nooks and crannies of the human mind. A friend I had graduated with put me in contact with a new colleague of his named Dr. Anders Volstak, who was looking for psychology and biology students to aid in a series of experiments that he was to conduct at the University. Volstak was a young psychologist from Norway. He was a generally pleasant man, he was respectful to most, very punctual and polite, but the good doctor had his demons just as everyone does. He grew up in a very hostile environment, his parents were far-right, ultra-nationalists; they lived in a make-shift community in the woods with others who believed similarly. He and the other children were subject to severe beatings, bleach baths, and branding any time they dared question any of their elders' beliefs. It was during one such instance when Anders's 9-year old brother was beaten into a coma by their father for not kneeling low enough before the cross. Anders remembered it very clearly, each time the axe handle came down his father would scream, "Er du skamme Kristi?! Er du skamme Kristi?!"... He was asking the boy if he was ashamed of Christ. Whether he was or not, he never woke up. Anders was able to run away with several other children one night, he was taken in by a boy's home right across the border in Sweden and that is where he began his education. He then traveled to the States to pursue his post-secondary, first at the University of Alabama, then Kentucky. It was in the Bluegrass state where Anders met Dr. Dominic Chappelle for the first time, from then on we were all living on borrowed time.

Dr. Chappelle was a born and bred Kentuckian, almost a walking stereotype. His family was famous for breeding racehorses, he kept a bottle of Buffalo Trace in his bottom desk drawer, and he had a very pronounced southern drawl to his voice. He looked more like Santa Clause than most of the boozers they stick in red suits down at the mall every Christmas; and he was just as jovial as you would imagine St. Nick to be. He was a very well thought of man, however, he was fiercely intelligent and when arguing he could make the opposing side feel 2 inches tall. In spite of his family's fundamentalist beliefs, he became enamored with the theory of evolution. He read The Origin of Species like it was holy scripture, he had adopted it very early on as a pseudo-faith of sorts. He became particularly fascinated with human evolution, physiologically and culturally. He was obsessed with finding and understanding what he called the "Tipping Point", where man shifted from a beast into an individual part of a functioning society. He believed that the Tipping Point consisted of two huge psychological steps: self-awareness and environmental control. First, an animal must become self-aware, or have the ability to distinguish itself as an individual separate from other individuals and its surroundings. A popular story is Charles Darwin's encounter with a female orangutan named Jenny at the London Zoo in which he observed it using a mirror to aid in grooming its back, thus indicating it knew the image in the mirror was itself and not another ape entirely. The Mirror Test has since become the standard in the scientific community for gauging an animal's capacity for self-awareness. The second step, environmental control, is a psychological device that helps an organism grasp abstract concepts about the surrounding enviornment. In man, this last step would be when he first looked up at the sky and saw gods. The Greeks and Romans saw the sun go across the sky, unable to fully comprehend astronomy or physics at the time, they attributed it to a god pulling it across the sky in a chariot. This is why myths existed in the first place, man has a need to think he understands everything. But as time went on, and man learned more about his environment, he was able to discern more practical explanations. It was that area in between that sparked the interest of Dr. Chappelle, and more so, what triggered it? How did primates make the leap from Jenny the Orangutan to cultivating societies around invisible, omnipresent deities? Once presented with the question, it seemed to consume Volstak as wholly as it had the man who had asked him. Volstak's discipline was developmental psychology, he had witnessed the emergence of self-awareness in human children and he became convinced that the key would be to monitor the brain activity of the developing infants, especially the bioelectric activity between neuron clusters. The two of them working together was a perfect storm.