Surfing Chance — Chapter 16
“I was always wondering why you had to choose such a strange dream”, said the Orion entity as it sat on an armchair near Chance. It knew that he was on the verge of waking up and wanted to hit the ground running, conversation-wise. “Why did you not choose a simpler dream in the area of wood carving or growing chicken. I would give anything to be able to enjoy a carefree chicken-growing life on Earth. Incredibly gentle creatures and they also produce fresh eggs each morning. A true blessing… Surfing the expansion line! I’ve been trying to unlock the mystery behind your choice of dream for eons. Longer than you can possibly imagine.”
“Why did you give me the powers to achieve my dream?”, asked Chance.
“You really do rush into things… Yuri was right. Out of all the questions that you could ask, is this honestly the most relevant one? Have you really learnt nothing about the fragility of extradimensional space? For all you know in the next half second you could turn into a microwave oven and spend the next millennia heating up a bowl of primordial soup. I’m not saying you will turn into one… but just imagine that you get to ask only one question and you waste that opportunity by asking a wrong question. Yes! There are stupid questions. In your case, your question sought to get an answer about how special you are or how you are worthy of preferential treatment. I apologize, but you seem infantile for a human of your age and I feel slightly disappointed that you came all this way driven by a simplistic need for approval…”
“I can see that you spent a considerable amount of time in solitude. My head aches from all your rambling. You promised me answers. If my question is meager, then perhaps start by explain to me where are we and who are you?”
“Yes. Now this is more inviting. A prudent question. I was starting to feel worried before. You came all this way and you started a conversation as if you were on some kind of awkward date where you try to impress someone… I mean, we are at the edge of existence and I am an omnipotent being for all you know… anyway. I will tell my story.”
Chance was still struggling through a terrible headache. His physical body was still processing the deeply troubling memory merger. He was lying on the emerald chaise longue and turned his head towards the Orion entity. Chance sensed a certain level of hostility from his host, but until now it only hurt him with annoyance and a bad attitude. Despite all, it got his full attention.
“My name is Bolzmann and I am not God nor omnipotent. My home planet was destroyed and my whole universe along with it. The swimming pool scene that you saw upon traversing the expansion line, that was my memory. I keep it locked on autoplay in micro dimension and you must have accidentally gotten drawn into it. It is not unusual. What you saw was the last seconds before my planet vanished from existence.
After my universe’s annihilation there was nothingness and chaos. Particles floating in a maximum entropy environment. Everyone and everything stopped existing. There wasn’t anyone to even experience this destruction from the sidelines. There was no mourning, no regrets, no crying. Through some miracle, a part of me survived the destruction of my universe but I wouldn’t go as far as to call this luck.
Thousands of years (in your time equivalent) have passed and out of the random nothingness a first shape was formed. Imagine throwing a million-coin tosses in a row, all of which fall on heads. This is the kinds of probabilities we’re talking about… billions of monkeys hitting on typing machines keys until one of them accidentally writes an entire Macbeth play. Given nearly infinite time, most statistical probabilities will occur and so a plant cell came into existence for a few fractions of a second. After another few million years a thought occurred out of a spontaneously assembled synapse. The thought was “how can consciousness outlast death?”. As soon as the thought played out, the synapse disintegrated back to nothingness. After another few billion years, the synapses reassembled themselves into a fully functioning micro-brain floating into the nothingness of space. That was me. Extremely fragile and locked into a dimension of disorder. Not knowing how long this stable state would last, I tried to do most to protect myself. I discovered a method of shielding myself from the effects of maximum entropy … this was the first time I managed to do a ‘break’ as you like to call them.
These coin toss equivalent phenomena were the basis for my rebirth. The first trick that I had to learn was how to preserve myself and then I started to rebuild the memories of my past life. I started my detective work, but it was the same as trying to follow the muddy footsteps of a mouse in a heavy rainstorm. There were little clues as to what happened, but matter still retains some amount of information despite its scrambled state. I taught myself how to control reality, existence, time and how to play around with dimensionality. Now I have a complex library of memories stuck into different micro-dimensions.
For eons I have rebuilt the timeline of what happened with my home world and my home universe. I became this outer-space brain being and I was obsessed with solving this mystery. In some way, this obsession was the one that brought me back from the dead. The curiosity outlived the disaster and I was reborn in order to experience the tragedy of my species. In the end I found it. My universe was destroyed by the human being called Tiberius Chance.”
“Me? I destroyed your home world?”
“Well, not exactly. Chance did.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not him and this brings us to the second part of my story… please be patient. All the answers will be presented in an orderly fashion.
After the discovery of the fact that Chance destroyed my home universe, I started to investigate him. I started searching for him. I understood that he was a supreme being — some sort of God that could break laws of physics and surf through the multiverse… After passing the expansion line, his conquest did not stop.”
…
“I built up my skills and my strength. I built a containment unit for my brain, the Orion constellation body, which is more familiar to you. With this body, endowed with new powers, I tried to confront Tiberius Chance.”
…
“I managed to transport him to a micro-universe where I’d ask him why he destroyed my world. He said that he doesn’t care about living beings anymore and he told me of how he dreamed to surf the expansion line of his universe. He said that now he had a much bigger dream in mind but he failed to mention it.
“It is beyond your comprehension. There is no point in wasting time with explanations.”
I felt the difference between our powers as I was standing there. He was covered in blue-glowing tattoos on all of his body. Some of them were in Earth mathematics and some of them were in languages from other civilizations. He had symbols and dots, hieroglyphs, cuneiform-like script and other analogue writing systems. With a mere thought, he transported me inside a blue slurpy machine so as to give me a brain freeze. I was stuck at near zero Kelvin temperature in this pocket world and he could do as he pleased but then he transported me back to the battlefield. He obviously still retained a dark sense of humor…
I used a zap of electricity to shoot at his head, but I was actually aiming for his golden locks. He was amused by my attack, but I did not stand around for his counter. I used a micro black hole to attract those fallen blonde hairs and then entered the micro-black hole myself. I needed his DNA and now I had gotten my hands on it. Tactical retreat.”
…
“Now this brings me to you. I knew that I cannot beat Tiberius Chance with a direct confrontation, but perhaps I could outsmart him. Using his DNA, I launched a set of mirror universe simulations. Hundreds, thousands… In each of them I placed a unit of Chance’s DNA and I watched the universe around it replay his life from beginning to end. In all of the simulations, the ‘Chance’ element was acting as its self-destruct button. Every single simulation that played out with his DNA, ended up in 100% annihilation. Same outcome, guaranteed.
As I studied the individual named Chance, I started to form theories of what causes him to act the way he does. He obtained this mysterious law-breaking power and then an unknown factor caused him to go berserk on his own world. He goes mad and he ends up destroying everything. Galaxies upon galaxies. Trillions of solar systems.
After tens of thousands of such simulations, I developed a response software, an antivirus to Chance’s destruction. A being that could learn his patterns and respond in a way that minimizes the damage done. A being that could apply variations to the simulation and split the simulation into multiple alternative scenarios. You know that being as Yuri. To me, she is known as Yuri the splitter. My own ingenious design. Each following simulation had a Chance and a Yuri, and the variations were endless. The simulations were too many to follow, so I decided to employ a support team that would assist my monitoring. These are Albert and Stephen and the replicas of Earth scientists that you so admire. The lolicon team.
And you… I needed to create a version of Chance that does not destroy his universe. Not without the help of Yuri, if I may add… this blueprint that was created; the one Chance out of 100,000 that did not destroy his own universe.
…
The two simulations that were of relevance to me were Alpha and Beta. One of them was inhabited by a Chance that replayed the exact scenario of our universe’s demise. Meaning that the Chance that lived in Beta is the closest copy to the original Tiberius Chance. I even made sure to set him on the exact path with minor deviations. The Alpha Chance needed to experience a world in which he is awarded redemption. Yuri, a marvelous contraption, was the primary change factor. She was the connection that Alpha Chance needed to his peers and in the other universe she was the isolation catalyst. It is difficult to oversimplify my designs so that you follow its logic, but this is the gist of it.
It was necessary for you, the final product, to have the memories of both the destroying Chance and the other Chance. These two minds combined, would have both the strength and the resolve to face the real Tiberius Chance — the current biggest threat to the multiverse. You are my tool for justice against yourself, if that makes any sense.”
Chance was still finding all of the new evidence hard to believe. All that he, or they, experienced was a product of a complex set of simulations borrowed from someone’s actual life. They were bad copies of the overwhelming original. The vision of life and the memories of all those people that were destroyed, that lived only inside a simulation now like ghosts of a distant past, it was so vivid in his fractured mind.
“How did you know that I would ultimately want to join you in the quest for justice? After all, half of me is just as bad as the one you are pursuing? Why did you make this gamble?”
“I had enough DNA to run hundreds of thousands of simulations and I tried all sorts of outcomes. You are not the first Chance to get out of a simulation and talk to me in this manner. In fact, most Chances did find a way to cross the expansion line. None of them was fit for the mission I have in mind… for this I formed a hypothesis about merging two opposite versions. You are the first merged version.”
“What about the original, how did he get his law-breaking power?”
“I don’t know. You will have to ask him yourself.”
“Me? A clone that grew up in a simulation? I’m not sure that I would be up to such an ambitious endeavor.”, said Chance.
“You will not be alone in this…”
…
Boltzmann sat on the armchair after finishing its story. Chance glanced at the strange universe-like dimension in which they were now existing. He noticed how beyond the Orion constellation; a faint shape of a brain could be seen. The mastermind behind the creation of his world and everything he knew. The creator of his simulated reality… and what a goofy fella…
“I am not sure I wish to continue with your plan. This is a lot to process. I would need some time to think it over back on Earth.”
“Which Earth? The one that was already exterminated or the one that was came within a hair’s breadth of its destruction? Or perhaps you are interested in leaving your simulation and going to a real non-simulated Earth for a change? Going back is futile because all of the worlds that I just described, simulated or real, are all facing the same risk of extinction.”
…
“The expansion line, it was just the exit from the simulation?”, asked Chance.
“Yes. The world that you inhabited was created by me. I’ve launched multiple simulations at the same time waiting for a specific outcome. The God, the brain and the intelligence behind your universe’s design is me; but it is not an original creation but a mere copy off the original.”
“In a way, my dream is still far from being achieved… the real expansion line. I am certain that you don’t even know what it looks like, do you?”
“There is perhaps only one person that has the answer to your question. You’ll just have to ask him when you meet him.”, suggested Boltzmann. “You are my fighting cock. My attack dog. I trained you for one single purpose and that is to help me to defeat Tiberius Chance. I do not mind if in the process of pursuing your mission you get to wander around and seek certain answers.”.
Chance was lost in thought. He barely managed to sort out how he was responsible for the deaths of billions of human beings and now he had to accept that he also caused the extinction of other civilizations as well. He was feeling guilt for his actions, but also for the actions of his Beta version and even for his ‘original’. How could he not feel empathy for the one that had the exact same life as he did. Like a twin brother, that experienced the same pain and pleasures as he did. There was this one quote by Orson Scott Card that played out in his mind:
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment, when I love them … I destroy them”
…
“Who, if not you are best suited to fight against Tiberius Chance. You have been fighting him all these years. Fighting his bad thoughts and unhealthy habits… fighting with self-destructive impulses and bad dietary choices. You are the ideal cadet, for this seek-and-destroy.”
“What about you? I am certain you must already have a plan for all this? What is your role to play?”
“I do have a plan. I’m not sure if you already noticed this, but your breakings, they don’t work here. Try it!”
Chance failed to break any law. His gift was gone. Panic overcame him. Powerless, his dream hijacked, unable to return home, his reality shattered, all of the people he knew — ended up being simulations, he himself was the reason for the destruction of countless lives… this was all too much to handle.
“How am I expected to help you out?! I have no more powers? I am confused and lost… stuck here with you… I wish I never left my simulation world.”
“Don’t worry. As I told you, I really do have a plan. Your tattoos may not work anymore, but I still have the power to break laws here and in other un-simulated universes.”
Boltzmann transformed himself into the old Yakuza tattoo artist that Chance met on Earth long ago. He grabbed a tattoo pencil machine and started to add a layer of fresh ink on top of Chance’s existing tattoos. As he applied this new ink, it was consuming Boltzmann’s constellation body. He was transforming into the ink on Chance’s body and little by little, his consciousness was growing dim.
“I entrust you with everything…”
Thank you for reading! Link to Chapter 17.
