Surfing Chance — Chapter 17
Yuri gasped as she woke up in her small apartment. All of the horrible things that she witnessed, the quicksand room and her talk with Mr. Nakamura, her arrest — it just seemed part of an incredibly vivid nightmare. She rose out of bed and wandered confused through the room trying to manage her anxiousness. A warm coffee, a piece of Ethiopian dark chocolate and getting wrapped up in a warm blue fuzzy blanket. When she looked through the window, she noticed the gray sky and raindrops racing down the screen.
For all the worries she had in her life, there was no other person with whom she could share all of this. Alone, she often thought that her mind was playing tricks on her. This caused her to be even more timid, wallowing in self-doubt. She had a vague memory of fear, but she could not remember what was the source of it. These unexplainable elements were all attributed to her dream experience and this was the only way that she could move on with her daily routine.
Yuri felt like she lost something important or that she forgot of someone that was close to her. Either a dear friend or the love of her life that only lived now as an unremembered song. She found the power in herself to get out of the house and attend her autumn lectures. The second year started with new courses and new professors, none of which impressed her. Yuri felt broken inside and there was nothing that could be done with it.
She resided in a new simulation that Boltzmann created especially for her. When designing this world, Boltzmann imagined an elegant coffin or a trumpet case lined with red velvet. A perfect fit world, where she could stay safe. On his home planet, he dreamed of fathering a daughter. The home world was destroyed prior to him having found the time to realize his parenthood dream. Yuri was not only part human, part virus, and part simulation but she was also part Protonian — the original race of Boltzmann. She was a multi-ethnic galactic creature and the key to saving the multiverse.
…
Chance was watching Boltzmann as he was using his needle to highlight the existing tattoos on his body. The essence of the former Orion entity and even its starry glow was being injected drop by drop into Chance’s skin. The alien world, the secrets of the universe, the ability to conduct simultaneous universe simulations — all of this knowledge was being passed on to him. Libraries upon libraries of lost alien memories and other unknown worlds. He saw the universe light up before him like a giant map and then he started seeing all of the pocket dimensions and micro-universes filled with valuable intelligence. He saw beyond the dark matter that was just Dyson sphere-covered solar systems of type 3 civilizations that inhabited entire galaxies that looked like nothing to an outside observer. As Boltzmann faded away, Chance felt all the pieces falling into place. The machinery of his mind was now computing at quantum speed. When he finally opened his eyes, they were glowing red like iron-rich shiny nebula dust. The solution came to him in the form of an epiphany. Yuri was the key and he knew exactly where to find her.
…
The history of Chance’s DNA
Tiberius Chance Nakamura was born in 1990, on the 1st of August, in southern Okinawa, Japan, planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, in the original Gama1 universe. In the year 1993, he was taken to Australia by his mother after a series of misunderstandings with his father. In the year 1996 he moved with his mother to Ohio. In the year 2006, his mother died while eating chicken soup. She chocked on an oversized piece of carrot and nobody was around to help her. Chance found her body a few hours later. In the year 2021, he backed out of his own wedding and moved to Tokyo to become a university teacher in astrophysics. On September 2021, he took on his first class of students most of which were recent school graduates. In October 2021, Chance unlocks his abilities to toy with laws of physics and starts experimenting with them. By June 2022, he is identified by a special group of investigators and he is labelled as a global security threat and one month later he is taken into custody and neutralized. After spending 21 days in custody, Chance goes berserk and destroys his whole universe and everyone in it by means of a black hole. He escapes his universe and is released into the multiverse. Chance explores other universes and settles inside one of them that presents itself as a suitable host for Gama1 universe beings. He calls these kinds of universes, the Bosson-type universe. Not because of the Higgs-boson, but because of the famous song ‘one in a million’ that presented a suitable statistical probability for how often a life-hosting universe occurs. In his quest to tame other universes, he realized that many of them are highly inhospitable and in an attempt to adjust the laws of physics in them, he ended up erasing them out of being. Chance was bothered by the question of whether the multiverse is finite or not. The grand frontier at the end of all, even if it means the destruction of everything, he decided that he needed to reach it. During his rampage, he was confronted by Boltzmann and a fragment of his DNA got stolen. Boltzmann retreated and formed his simulation farm in order to obtain the perfect simulation-bred clone that would counter the original Tiberius Chance (Gama1). Alpha-Beta Chance, a merger of two clones, was the ideal candidate and now Boltzmann was transferring all of his experience, knowledge and power onto this candidate. The hero Chance is expected to find a way to stop his original self and to prevent the destruction of the entire existence.
…
“Yuri. Do you remember me?”
“Professor?”
“It seems that you still do. I am glad. Forgive me for all that I did… at the same time, I have to ask for your help one last time. I realize that I have no right to, but you are my only hope.”
Her memory was cloudy, but she felt familiarity, honesty and trustworthiness in his intentions.
…
Chance had reached Yuri’s place and before moving on with the plan, he asked for a place to rest for a few hours. She allowed him to sleep on her living room couch. It was covered in soft gray blankets that smelled like lavender. It felt good to get a firm grounding and to once more feel normal. He was lost in thought and quickly slipped off into a semi-dream spiral.
Is it really what I want? Do I need to follow through with the Boltzmann plan? I’d be doing it out of guilt for something that has no connection to me whatsoever. The people that died as a result of my actions were merely simulations after all. I am not responsible for any of the deaths and I am finally free of this burden. This sense of peace came to me in a most troubling form and now suddenly I have a new responsibility and a new mission. Arthur Schopenhauer said that a man can do as he wills, but he cannot will as he wills. My dream of surfing… Chance’s dream…was it really a choice or was it predetermined? A statistics error… The vision that defined my identity for so many years, was just another’s dream that I was ‘surfing’. And now, after all this time, why was I so quick in jumping onto a new identity? The identity of the savior that was so easy to inherit from Boltzmann… it was never truly mine. A meritless journey of a hero that plans to save all of the multiverse without any eye witnesses. What if I fail? Would it really matter if my mission succeeds or fails? If a tree falls in the forest…
Chance inherited alien trouble that was never his to bear. Even his home address, Atlas Ave, was suggesting that he had to carry all of the multi-world’s weight on his shoulders. His mind was working at full capacity trying to solve this giant riddle. In truth, he already had a half-solution, but he was not sure it would work.
…
“Yuri, do you know how your abilities work?”, asked the professor. “In order for our plan to succeed, you will need to become aware of them and gain control over them. Fortunately, there is place that we can test them out without risk to the outside worlds. I will open a new simulation for this exact purpose.”
Chance and Yuri entered a blank world. Chance created a plain white floor world filled with cats of all shapes and sizes. Some of the cats were exhibiting quantum mechanics features as they were disappearing from one place and reappearing in another.
“Please try to split this world into two versions. Imagine that you are worried about something terrible happening to all the cats.”
Yuri imagined a giant vacuum cleaner at the center of their world and all of the cats started running away from it. The world started to experience accelerated expansion. Out of this worry, two versions were created. One in which the cats were lazily spending their afternoon and one in which they were running away from a monstruous vacuum cleaner.”
…
“This is a self-contained simulation, so feel free to create as many new worlds as you can. We will be honing your skills. Now imagine yourself a young mother. Your baby is two months old and you locked yourself out of the car.”
Yuri created a world in which she was the mother of a two-month-old boy, whose name was Jonathan. Her residual mental image transformed her look and she now had longer slightly messy hair, strands of which were escaping from her gray hoodie cap. She was wearing furry house shoes and a sleeveless olive-green jacket. Her old silver Honda had a worn-down battery and the lock system was often malfunctioning. She made herself imagine that it never bothered her before so she kept postponing the repair mechanic’s appointment. As a single mother, she did not have time to keep up with all of these troubles. Her boy was now locked inside the car and she was on the outside of it. He was crying and her mind immediately exploded into thousands of scenarios of all the things that can go wrong from asphyxiation to chocking on his own vomit. She called 119 and was now waiting for the fire department truck alongside the ambulance. Due to traffic, both of them were running late and she kept staring at her phone to check the time. The phone battery was at 1%.
Chance stepped into her simulation and broke the front car window with his elbow. He unlocked the car and Yuri reached her child. The simulation ended with Yuri standing emptyhanded hugging an invisible shape. She got so trapped in her own imagination that now the feeling of her motherhood was still lingering.
“6,201 worlds. Not bad, Yuri. Let’s try one more. You are a teacher, stuck in a school in the middle of a warzone with a class full of children. The occupying forces have launched a missile strike and you brace for impact.”
Yuri was in post-soviet school in and she was a 50-year-old woman wearing cheap low-heel black boots and a pleat skirt. She was wearing bug-eye red glasses that made her look like a sorceress and her white hair pinned with a copper butterfly piece. She talked to her pupils in some strange unknown language that she did not know she could speak and she instructed all of them to hide under their desks. She instructed everyone to stay as far away as they could from the windows. The bomb sirens were heard loudly from outside and everyone was boiling with anticipation. Yuri’s mind was scarf-knitting scenarios into a long endless roll. A tailed missile broke into the classroom and shattered the window. Everyone closed their eyes and covered their heads. Five, ten, thirty seconds passed. It was a dud. Yuri started crying her eyes out and she hugged as many of her pupils as she could as if to protect them from the dangers.
Chance ended the simulation and Yuri was in the white room her eyes still closed and her arms around the nothingness that remained. She got up and wiped her nose with a napkin that Chance handed to her.
“25,327 worlds. You are talented, Yuri. I won’t be torturing you much longer and I ask that you please trust that this is for the greater good.”
“Can I suggest the next scenario? I think I can hit higher numbers. I will write it on a piece of napkin. She took out an eyeliner crayon from her bag and wrote it down. She handed it to him.”
Chance laughed.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. This works for me.”
…
Yuri was transported into the life of a movie star where she was getting ready to attend the Oscar’s gala. She was nominated for best female actress in a leading role. Yuri was boiling butterfly soup in her stomach, in anticipation.
“Yuri-sama, please come with me quickly. The ceremony starts in two hours and we still did not manage to pick you an outfit. Let’s go in the dressing room and pick something now.”
Yuri was a 45-year-old stylish lady walking alongside her younger assistant. The assistant was wearing a turquoise Tom Ford dress with black designer sneakers. She was cat walking elegantly through the hallway. She thought to herself that her assistant was impressively overdressed and would be able to provide valuable advice. She stopped in front of a safe-like door and put in the password combination. The door opened to what seemed like a plane hangar that was used for World War 2 zeppelins. From top to bottom there were shelves with shoes. There were probably thousands.
“We need to mix and match an outfit. Here we have the shoes. On the right-hand side, we have lingerie and other undergarments. Further down the aisle we have dresses, skirts, tops, pants and suits. After you are done here, we will go to another hangar wardrobe for accessories…”
“How many are there?”
“You have exactly 58,000 pairs of shoes, and 20,000 dresses. Then you also have about 900 tops, 300 skirts, 3,500 pairs of pants and 2,500 elegant suits. If we talk about scarves, you have 600 that can be added to any outfit. There are also other hats and hair ornaments. In accessories you have 100 watches and jewelry that can be mixed and matched.”
“That is a total of …
Chance stopped the simulation.
“… 1,67 * 10²⁴ outfit possibilities at the very least, which converted into a quadrillion new worlds. Will this be enough?”
“It is impressive to say the least!”
…
“We are about to go into confrontation with one of the most powerful entities that ever existed and he won’t be so easily deceived. He is a threat to the multiverse so the only thing that we can do, is to have him lost in one of the quadrillion universes that we will generate. Each version will be a universe that will look like the multiverse and I will make each version to be encapsulated into one another like a Russian doll.”
Chance paused in order to think of the best way to explain his plan.
“Yuri, do you remember when you found out that the sun is going to burn out for the first time?”
“Yes. I remember I panicked at first. I started crying and I asked my mother about it. Then she said that it will be so long before it happens that I should not worry.”
“Exactly. On the Earth that we experienced, it would take another 5 billion years before the sun hydrogen runs out. This is the same principle that we will apply to our enemy. We will not cancel the destruction of the multiverse, but we will do our best to indefinitely post-pone it. We will reach the peak of demolition permit bureaucracy…”
“Yes, but as I understood it, the Chance that we plan on defeating has immense power. Won’t he be able to just break out of the conundrum that we will create?”
“Not really… it will be like a game of three cups. You hide the stone in one and then you rotate the cups. It is a 33% probability of guessing unless you cheat. We will create worlds and transport ourselves along with him from one to another.
What he won’t know is that we are not just switching from one universe to another, but we will be building them up like Russian dolls. This structure that will go into the quadrillions, will have its time slowed-down through special relativity. x100 for every encapsulation. Even if it takes him 5 seconds to break out of his first layer, those 5 seconds in the first universe will convert into 8,33 minutes in the second universe. If we apply this delay effect to all of the universes we create, it will delay the destruction of the universe by 16 thousand billion years.
If he waits around for another 60 seconds in the first universe, figuring out where he is before starting to break out of it, this will push the number well into the 150 thousand billion. The ultimate prison for an omnipotent entity.”
Thank you for reading! Link to Chapter 18.
