Surfing Chance - Chapter 9

Universe Alpha[1]

Chance was lying unconscious on the floor of his Tokyo apartment and Serghey was calling for an ambulance. He was out for a good fifteen minutes, but he was breathing and he did have a pulse.

"He is resilient and capable of extraordinary things, yet knocking him off is automatically switching all of his powers off. He is vulnerable and undefended here in his apartment but this could easily have happened to him while he was somewhere on a different planet. He could have frozen off instantaneously and nobody would be able to find his body in all of eternity. Chance needs to wake up as soon as possible so that we get Fermi and Mia back. Every minute they spend on that unknown world is drastically decreasing their survival chances. There is no way to contact them and the only two people that know of their whereabouts are me and Chance.", thought Serghey.

Mia removed her Orlan space suit, which returned to its 90 kg usual weight as soon as Chance left. They could not wear them anymore neither inside nor outside the greenhouse. Fermi estimated that they have around five and a half liters of drinkable water left in both their tanks. According to their estimation, this was barely enough to last them for the next 3 days. They needed to find a way to obtain drinkable water.

Leaving their spacesuits behind, they started exploring the greenhouse halls hoping to find out more about their environment. All the plants looked neatly trimmed and organized. The facilities were clean and well-maintained meaning that there ought to be some sort of 'gardener' looking over this project, but there was none in sight.

Mia figured that there should be an irrigation system somewhere underground that is delivering water or nutrients to the plant roots. The two of them started digging through the moist and soft soil. Instead of finding any type of plastic tubes, which Mia knew well, she discovered a network of plant tubes. When she examined it up close it had a bamboo-like outer structure and it was hard to break into. In her understanding, these tubes were providing water to the roots of big plants. She got up and told Fermi:

"We need to look for bigger plants!"

After having tried multiple routes and they stumbled upon a gigantic hall with gargantuan plants. Some of them had hardened bark the but most of them looked like overgrown shrubs and walls of cacti pillars. This compartment of the greenhouse was shaped like a pavilion and it had a gigantic pond at its center with a huge waterfall.

"I assumed there were types of plants with root systems that need access to surface water and I ended up being right." She was happy with her new finding and she hugged Fermi. They needed to check the quality of the water. Ideally, they would have to find glass containers to purify it through evaporation and condensation.

…

Fermi and Mia were waiting for Chance to come pick them up unaware of his condition. They did not have a plan for staying on the greenhouse planet long-term so they decided to not eat anything for the first few days. Humans can go on for up to a maximum of three weeks without food and the alternatives were quite bleak. Fermi proposed a plan for testing the roots and fruits of plants in turns until they discover something that is edible, but the risks of blind tasting were high. It could turn out that the first thing they try is lethal or highly poisonous and without any medicine to alleviate the symptoms, it could cause liver failure and a painful slow death for either of them. They needed to conserve energy and this was not going too well, because the process of purifying water was more labour intensive than anticipated. Collecting fire materials, starting a fire, breaking open the space suits to create equivalents to glassware all required tedious work.

Lighting inside of the greenhouse was generous and Fermi struggled keep track of the gloomy poorly lit outside days. By his accounts, it was already more than five days since the moment of their arrival. This meant that something happened to Chance and he can no longer retrieve them. If Chance passed away during his last journey, they will be stuck here forever. Fermi was not too worried with himself, because he was content and serene about his death. His worries centered around Mia and living long enough to see her get back to Earth or at least for her to not be left alone here.

Mia started collecting and examining fruits from the greenhouse forests. Some of these were impossible to split open or cut. Not only did she record the source of each fruit, but she was also trying to list the ones that they needed to stay away from. She devised a plan for them to each eat a tiny piece of fruit daily and in this way, they would be able to monitor side effects as well as build immunity to the food of this world. Both of them were struggling to do the daily assignments because of hunger fatigue and they needed to sleep more hours in order to conserver their energy. Mia counted how long it would take for them to obtain safe immunity from these new types of foods and the mathematics of it was not looking good. Unless each of them starts testing more than three types of food every half day, they would starve out soon.

This new world was like a paradise with air, water and plants at an inconceivable distance from Earth and this place could easily become a colony sometime in the future. With the right lab equipment and with reasonable time to adapt, people could learn to live in this environment in a matter of years. Mia and Fermi did not have that timeframe, nor the resources to outlast their initial adaptation. Fermi started to suspect a sad truth and he could not find it in himself to tell Mia about it. Time could be passing at a slower rate on this planet as perceived by someone on Earth, due to special relativity.

…

A monstruous Grizzly bear was chasing after Chance through the forest and the ground was shaking under its heavy paws. He was out of breath and had nowhere else to run when at last he spotted an easy climb on the entrance to a cave and he leapt onto the branch of an old birch tree. As soon as the bear reached the tree it started to maul its trunk and try to shake Chance off of it. Then the bear removed its head and it was the head of a young blonde with glasses. Stephen.

"You again! Why do you torment me so?", asked Chance.

"Professor, we've already told you that deep dream memories need to be recorded with adrenaline rushes. We're still new at this. My message to you know is that you need to wake up now. Your students are stuck in a solar system that has a high-density black hole near it…"

"How bad is the time dilation effect?!"

"One Earth hour is equivalent to one year on 186f…", said Stephen.

…

Fermi and Mia were on their tenth day on the greenhouse planet. They managed to build supplies of drinkable water after purifying it. The search for food however, was not going as smooth. Mia almost fell into an anaphylactic shock after eating three pieces of fruit on the fifth day and Fermi had not only a severe allergic reaction on his skin but his stomach was in constant pain. It was impossible to say if this was due to hunger or incompatibility of food to his gut flora. Fermi proposed that they switch from fruits of plants to roots and they started digging under the plants to check for promising candidates. The risks of eating roots were apparently lower, but without any kind of heating these were all but impossible to chew. The calories needed to make a fire, heat up and chew through the roots were less than the energy they were getting from the roots themselves. On day fifteen, Mia fell asleep and Fermi had no more strength left to wake her back up. In his hunger delirium he left her there and was roaming through the greenhouse corridors in a last attempt to find something that looked edible. He drifted so far from his initial location that it would be impossible to return there, but he was focused on finding at least something that looks like food. Either because of the toxic fruits he last ate or because of physical exhaustion he was having hallucinations. The plants were glowing green traffic signs and they were guiding him to a certain location. He allowed himself to be guided in this half-dream state to what looked like a giant open field greenhouse. It was perhaps five meters tall and its shape was like an Olympic stadium. He fell down in relief when he saw a vast opening with wheat like plants. The field had a checkered structure with patches of different cereal-like plants. This soft and fuzzy blanket of wheat like plants reminded him of the fields of green-gold wheat and barley in the Italian countryside. He tasted the dried-up seeds in the upper side of the plant stems and they were sweet and crunchy. He stuffed his mouth with a hand full and filled his pockets with as much as he could take before going back to find Mia.

…

The farther Fermi departed from the cereal fields, the more he was afraid of not being able to find it again. He was passing plant hall after plant hall in an attempt to remember how he got there and was panicking. After stopping a few times and going back he devised a bread crumb system in which he'd use colored fruit from plants to mark the route. Frustrated and exhausted that he had no way of contacting Mia to tell her to wait for him. To stay alive a little longer.

Despair was overwhelming. He and his brother had been abandoned by their mother in Naples. Later on, he abandoned his brother in Berlin to come to Tokyo and now he abandoned Mia. Each time he did it, it was a subconscious decision and it was all coming back to him. It felt like in each of these instances he abandoned his younger self again and again. Running away from his terminal disease treatment, his country and everything that represented his former self.

The first colonists that came to the American continent must have experienced the same frustration of finding an area of blissful peace and bountiful resources that felt like a trap or some kind of prison. Fermi was stuck in this place and no matter how human-friendly this alien environment is, it still felt like he was a fly in a Venus flytrap plant. The walls were closing in on him, he was sweaty and his ankles were sore from all the running. Fermi was hopelessly wandering through the greenhouse until he could move no more. He stopped to catch his breath and he laid down on the ground.

…

By the time Fermi returned, it was too late to save Mia. Her body had been taken over by the plants and moved into a vertical position onto the bark of a bigger tree. She was kept in that position by moving vines and the bamboo-like underground tube roots. Fermi stretched upward and tried to find a breath or a pulse, but he already knew that had she been alive, the plants would not have claimed her. Prior to dying she had her water tank in her arms, and even now it was stuck up there with her. Fermi tried to pull it away, but it was also wrapped in strong vines and could not be separated from the body. Like a strange renaissance painting, she was pinned there and all Fermi could do is wish that he was in her place. After all, he was still believing that he had leukemia and he was oblivious to the fact that upon that earlier handshake, Chance had cured him. In one way, Fermi was saved from the terminal illness. However, in his years on Kepler he kept expecting for his life to end year after year and only much later did he realize what Chance did to him. Fermi was neither happy nor sad of this outcome, but eventually he made peace with it.

As the years passed, Fermi became the new guardian of the greenhouse and its sole caretaker. The greenhouse was a never-ending maze oozing with things to be discovered and studied. A gift that kept on giving.

One day as he came back to see the place of their initial landing, he saw the body of Mia again completely covered in foliage still without any traces of decay. When he looked closer, he was reminded of an old gesture of kindness …

"I squeezed a half lemon in your water tank so that you don't get nausea…"

… a single lemon seed must have accidentally fallen inside the tank. It sprouted into a gigantic lemon tree, fusing with the body of Mia. She looked serene and almost alive, but perhaps in a sort of… vegetative state, like some giant daikon radish ghost. On some days, Fermi thought that perhaps she was still connected to the living plants of this world and interacted with them in some way. Perhaps they were sharing each other's consciousness because as soon as Fermi discovered the lemon tree, he started noticing how the other plants were starting to share features of this plant. Like a virus, the DNA of this lemon tree started to be shared through the tubes of plants and he noticed how the whole room was becoming leafy and warm. The smells were changing and the air quality. In this one strange part of the greenhouse, he felt more at home than in all other.

The lemon tree, was the first Earth plant that was added to this greenhouse cosmic collection.

"What if all the plant species of this greenhouse were brought in like this. Perhaps the planet has a sort of attractiveness to it, like a flower pulling in bees. It attracts visitors that are trapped in like flies and forced to add something, if not themselves to the collection. The information, the DNA, the species were making this one of the most intricate ways to store data. A backup archive or a monumental library built not accidentally, but by design…"

…

Fermi could tell the passing of time, neither by the length of the days nor by the changing of seasons. His clock was the lemon tree that was growing larger and richer. The tree was aging, he was aging and Mia was always remaining the same, smiling like a porcelain doll that looked like it could wake up and start moving at any given moment. Fermi was recording information about plant species by drawing them in his catalogue. He built himself a collection of ink-based writing tools, brushes and colored paint for his sketching. One day as he finished brewing himself a warm kettle of tea, he sat at his work desk to make some notes on a poisonous tulip type plant that he discovered. He heard something move behind him and he thought that perhaps it was Mia that finally came back to life. Fermi stood up and rushed to inspect the lemon tree, and there next to it, he saw another familiar face that he had not seen in what felt like more than half a century. Chance.

...

[1] Universe Alpha is the Universe in which Chance recruits Fermi, Mia and Serghey to help him explore the Kepler system. Probability of universe destruction 99%.

Universe Beta is the Universe in which Chance loses interest in the human world and pursue space exploration on his own. Due to his sudden disappearance, Yuri feels lost and disoriented. Probability of universe destruction estimated at 100%.