1 Durand's Death

Today at John Hopkins Hospital, the atmosphere was extremely heavy. In their most expensive hospital room, lied a world hero, Durand. His room was packed with his friends, students, and several of the best doctors in the world who looked up to Durand. All of them wore sad expressions on their faces as they knew their idol was soon passing away. There was nothing to be done, Durand was suffering from old age at the age of 112. Oddly, Durand wore a slight smile as he saw all the people he had guided and raised. He closed his eyes a final time and his life flashed across his mind as the others in the room burst into tears.

Durand was born with nothing and from nothing. He was conceived from a cruel violence that pushed his own mother to take her own life just a couple days after giving birth. She had little strength to face the traumatic moments of her life and had no one around her to support her through them. As a result, Durand grew up in the foster care system; he bounced from abusive family to abusive family. Each family lasted only a few months and each too short for any lasting relationships to form. However, Durand was true to his namesake. He endured the mishaps and misfortunes, endured the hardships and torture, and endured the adversities and calamities.

He worked incredibly hard in school, earning perfect scores in every subject and frequently skipping grades. His efforts paid off when he turned 11; Durand won a full scholarship to MIT. There, he boldly decided to triple major in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Biological Engineering, and Chemical Engineering. At 13, he developed a mobile game between classes and assignments that grew wildly popular. Disinterested with the gaming industry, Durand sold his intellectual property to a powerful game development conglomerate for just under $20 million. At 15, he graduated with summa cum laude honors in each of his majors. After graduating from MIT, once again Durand won a full scholarship this time to the Whiting School of Engineering at John Hopkins University where he was selected into the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering PhD program specializing in nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

Durand thrived as a graduate student. He worked in a team of two professors and five other graduate students researching nanoscale surgery. With his incredibly broad and expert level skills in computer programming and medical knowledge, Durand significantly contributed to the project by writing the software for controlling surgical nano-machines. With the help of experts in materials engineering and electrical engineering, their research produced the first ever nanoscale surgical machines. Soon, they moved to animal trials for cancer treatment. And soon after that, clinical trials on humans. To their excitement, the trial research proved to be incredibly successful. Soon their faces were plastered on every magazine across the world heralded as the creators of a cure for cancer. Eventually, their project revolutionized the medical industry. Complicated surgeries no longer required anesthesia or large incisions. Small incisions and inserting the nano-machines proved far more efficient and less risky. Internal body checkups became more frequent as nano-machines worked best on diseases that have been caught earlier. After writing his thesis paper on this research, Durand received his doctorate at the young age of 20.

The medical world turned crazy with the potential possibilities and opportunities that feasible nanomedicine brought to the world. Licensing their research to every medical company on Earth, Durand, his team, and John Hopkins began earning billions of dollars by turning complicated surgeries and expensive cancer treatments into more affordable and less invasive injections that any nurse could administer to a patient. Their breakthrough in medicine saved millions of lives each year. Though a young man, Durand saw little personal need for his newfound money. Instead, he turned his attentions away from medicine and towards the unlimited untapped potential in space and saw an opportunity to help foster children like himself escape from a poorly designed foster care system. Using his riches, he created a massive non-profit private school that specifically enrolled hundreds of thousands of students primarily from foster care and focused primarily on space technologies and exploration. The school split itself into three sections: primary, secondary, and undergraduate. Any students that could graduate from all three sections became the best and brightest in the space industry and within 20 years, Durand and his school had led the first colonization of Mars. By his fiftieth birthday, Durand had transformed the world's foster care system into a space technologies corporation that had built a mega-city on mars call New Durand City.

Durand's space technology helped solve Earth's population crisis as more and more people migrated to Mars. Research into terraforming had transformed large regions of Mars into Earth-like habitats. Durand's influence grew and he became an incredible story of perseverance and diligence among the younger generation that followed. His death was mourned by the billions of people's lives that he had transformed. Unknown to the rest of the world, Durand's soul was wrapped in a massive golden halo of positive karma that guided him to the afterlife.