Surfing Chance — Epilogue

Warning: In the following paragraphs, I give my own interpretation of the novel. If you wish to keep your own original understanding of the story, I’d suggest not reading further on. However, if you crave a key to the door… a solution to the puzzle, read on and enjoy the curtain fall.

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Somewhere in an Eastern European country, there’s a young man ordering a Big Mac on a self-service screen and before completing the order, a pop-up question appears on the screen to ask if he would like to add bacon to his sandwich. Normally, in the country’s culture pig cutting is not to be taken lightly and it used to happen only once a year for low to middle income families from the rural countryside. Yet, now, some UI/UX engineer thought that this would be a clever way to increase sales for a global fast-food chain for the company that already feeds 1% of the world’s population.

Think of the desensitization that is happening here. I mean if you were hungry for a sandwich and had no more than 20 minutes to grab lunch somewhere in the city, you would never think of murdering a pig to add an extra aftertaste to your lunch. However, if someone somewhere was to murder a pig in less than a few seconds, at the click of your button, for an extra 50 cents on your receipt, your guilt would shift. The choice of murder is easier to make when it is normalized, simplified and made to be remote. The click of a button. How much harm could come from a simple a command as that?

However, the worst environmental disasters are done exactly in this way — the click of a button to buy a cheap t-shirt from a sweatshop in Vietnam that uses chemical dyes that pollute rivers or underpays its young workers. Harmless if done once and world-shattering if done repeatedly by everyone every day. The choices that we make, do end up hurting others but we care less about this because shopping is normalized, simplified and made to be remote.

During the latest pandemic and during the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen this huge supply machinery being broken. When the grains in Ukraine don’t reach the Odessa port, we see the people in several countries face the risk of starvation. When China goes into lockdown, the gadgets that we got so used to aren’t shipped according to schedule anymore. The people in this machinery, the ones that make it function, are often overworked and underpaid. Think of the Japanese people that often sleep in subway trains on their way to work, while standing in a jammed compartment. Let’s zoom in on the life of that one person, stuck in the jammed train compartment on her way to work for long hours so as to be able to afford her food and rent. Think of the options that the woman has in an economy where losing a job could mean being unemployed for 6 or more months before finding another job. The dependency of her child or children on that income. The risk of being kicked out of their apartment if she doesn’t pay rent or mortgage on time.

A boxed-in human being with little to no hope.

Think then of the ones that react with wrath to this boxing in. Getting into street fights with strangers, smashing glass bottles in public spaces, urinating in public places, getting a tattoo, having reckless sex with strangers or buying a gun off a black-market website and getting ready for a school shooting. The walls of life are closing in on a human being and she doesn’t know how to stop it. She was never taught how to react to such a life-threatening crisis. It is about survival in savage conditions and this is why we end up seeing news about mass murder, shootings or mass poisonings. People seek ways to fight against a world that to them seems hostile. A world that was inhabitable until a few days agon, and now suddenly became inhospitable. Some choose suicide as an ultimate form of taking back control, and others choose to externalize their suffering in a form of ultimate rebellion. Universe destruction.

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The novel starts with the understanding of entropy. The frustration of all things breaking and the reaction to break everything and quitting is an infant’s reaction to frustration. However, in the world of today we see grown men with power reacting in the very same way. We have Russia’s Putin threatening to go into an all-out nuclear war at the push of a button. A reaction caused by the fear of losing control. We see Elon Musk, trying to take control of public discourse through the acquisition of Twitter only to get a remote control on the degree of free speech in the world. However, when we look at average individuals that don’t have billions that can be used to take back control. What do they turn to? What options are left to them? This is the beginning of suicide, crime, indiscriminate murdering, mass shootings and other such events.

So, what is the way out? What is the solution? The remedy is terribly ordinary and non-exceptional. Our friends, our parents, our wife, our children and the emotional support that we receive from them is world-saving. Yes, losing control is difficult, but losing it while being alone is devastating. This is why the novel splits into two timelines, so as to show the impact that a single individual can have on the fate of the universe. The link to others that allows us to share the burden together or to celebrate small victories, can sometimes be a single person. In our story this role is played by Yuri and this is why the full character’s name is Yuri the splitter. She has the power of oversight and world splitting, but in real life we are all splitters. Our actions can either aggravate or alleviate the suffering of other people. This is the responsibility that we must be aware of in all social interactions.

Chance is both a breaker and a savior. Within himself, neatly stacked, are the experiences of having had failed and only in this way can there be true victory. Winning has true value only in contrast to failing and this transforms him into a humble hero. A hero that has empathy and compassion for the world and this drives the willingness to save. In our story, Chance’s motivation may seem driven by guilt and in a way, this is not untrue. Every savior is driven by a hybrid of guilt and a willingness to save himself together with the world. Integrating past mistakes and accepting them, seeing the truth and taking action is also a form of self-preservation and taking back control.

At the end of the novel, Chance has within himself three versions of himself. One is the version that nearly destroyed the Alpha universe (simulated) out of negligence; the second is the destroyer of the Beta universe (simulated); and the third one is the destroyer of the Gama1 universe (unsimulated) that becomes compressed in a time-prison and is stored as a diamond in the ear of the current Chance. Two evil versions and one well-intentioned, often clumsy, version. A recipe of a standard human being that has both good and evil mixed within himself. Acceptance is the basis for absolution for our protagonist. Winning. (Re) Creating a universe is the taking back of control that the protagonist has been craving since the very beginning, masked under the crazy dream of wanting to surf the expansion line of the universe. Dream was a stand-in. A place of refuge for the child that was exiled out of a hospitable life on earth. A boxed in individual with no other place to go, but up. A child in the darkness that wanted to see the light.

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Those that you that got this far must be familiar with the Schrodinger’s cat concept. A cat locked in a black box with a poison vial that is connected to a single decaying atom. Given the nature of quantum mechanics, the atom at its level can be both decaying and non-decaying at the same time and in consequence the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. As much as I would like to flatter myself, I will never be able to simply explain quantum mechanics, but just trust me on this when I am saying that in quantum physics a particle can be 0 or 1 or 1 and 0 at the same time. These are the three states of being possible only at that level. The ending of our story is neither a 1 nor a 0, but it is a 1 and a 0 at the same time.

Schrodinger used to say that as long as you keep the box with the cat and the poison vial closed, the cat must be assumed to be both dead and alive at the same time. Not until you look inside, that it must choose to be alive or dead. It is in a superposition and since we keep the box closed, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Now here comes the tricky part. In Schrodinger box, we had a single decaying atom connected to a radiation meter connected to a poison vial that may or may not kill the cat.

In our story’s ending we have a cat locked inside the basement of a psychotic serial killer, that did not manage to warn Yuri of her impending doom. Yuri is both dead and alive at the same time, much like the cat that was locked in the dark basement. Chance’s ‘guiding light’ (Yuri) is now both dead and alive at the same time and this means that the universe exists in superposition. It was impossible to predict how Chance would react to Yuri’s murder, but in the past, she was the only person that stopped him from annihilating or accidentally ruining the universe. His pillar of stability. His anchor. Think of Tetsu, a human being that is just another version of Chance, in pursuit of a crazy dream and willing to make sacrifices along the way. If we are considering the fact that he may murder Yuri and for this he is to be seen as some kind of monster, think of the fact that Chance murdered Yuri before and nearly killed her several times afterwards. Tetsu is relatively… nearly innocent. An individual striving to take back control and failing at it. The actions of Tetsu have much to do with the fate of the universe and in the end, he may be just as responsible for its destruction. The ending depends on your perception of reality. Do you believe in a deterministic world or a free-choice world? Is Chance just a heat seeking missile that can be aimed at any target or is he an adult individual with free will capable of staying cool-minded. Will he act or will he react? This is the essence of the book’s grand finale. So please, do not confuse it with a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger finale because it is not one of those. This is as good as it gets.