Surfing Chance - Chapter 20

"Have you ever wondered, what is our cosmic address? We are at the University of Tokyo campus, in Shinjuku, in the greater metropolitan Tokyo area, on planet Earth, in the Solar System, in the Milky way galaxy in the Laniakea Supercluster… but we never bothered to give our universe a special name. It is our Home Sweet Home universe and we are lucky to be able to inhabit it. The laws of physics are fine-tunned to accommodate the formation of life. Intelligent life, even. In this manifestation of matter, the universe becomes intelligent itself and as some may argue, self-aware. We, humans, are most likely not the only entities capable of observing our elegant and fine-tunned universe and yet, we often believe ourselves to stand at the center of existence. Our problems are infinite, as are our worries. We aim high, but seldom can we see beyond the next deadline or paper assignment…

I wish that we spend more time in gratitude to ourselves for having reached this moment in time, despite the crazy odds. Out of millions of ways in which life could have emerged and manifested, here we are… the lot of you… me… in a lecture hall talking about our origins and our nature. Talking about the mathematical wonders that kept us alive for so long. The properties of water and the magnetism of our planet, the pull of gravity. By itself, it may not look like much, but in sum, all of these abstract things are what allow us to continue breathing and living. I wish to leave you with a question: What would you change in our universe so as to make it better? What constant or law? Which principle or fundamental truth would you alter so as to improve your experience of life? How would you act so as to upgrade the world with that one change?

Please think of this and let's talk more during our next seminar. Class dismissed."

…

Chance got back on track with teaching and he has been back in Tokyo for three weeks now. No sign of Yuri though and he realized that, in his clumsiness, he accidentally sent her to the wrong part of the planet. He could not contact her, nor teleport to her and he was hoping that she'd find a way to contact him. Each day after lectures he was working on finding a method for finding her. He was worries and scared that she might have ended up in a hostile environment where her life would be in danger. In him mind, she could be perfectly safe or in some sort of terrible predicament. He also thought of the possibility that she was simply not too keen on seeing him again.

"What if she never wants to come back?", thought Chance one day. "Perhaps she had enough of me and my foolishness. Nonetheless, it would be sad to not see her ever again. I've grown fond of her and she is the only being in this world that knows that the we are impostors… possibly my favorite human on this entire planet. The light at the end of everything."

…

Chance tried to imagine the odds of accidentally bumping into Yuri. Two people, on a planet like Earth, they have a 50/50 chance of being in the same hemisphere. They have a 1 in 7 chance of being on the same continent. A 1 in 4 million chance of being in the same city. If you have only one friend on planet Earth, the odds of meeting that person randomly is roughly 1 in 8 billion.

If we take a straight line, at the left end of which is the probability of accidentally meeting the one person you have in mind (1/8*10^9) and at the right end having the probability of being in the same planetary hemisphere (1/2), then all that is in the middle is the probabilities of passing by one another at big distances apart. The sadness of this is that you have a much higher probability of being 1 km away from that one person and never meeting, than actually ending up in the same coffee place. If the two units are constantly moving around the globe, the probability that they will end up at 1000 km apart is 20 million times more likely than actually bumping into one another[1]. This is the mathematics of chance encounters.

He suddenly got a brilliant idea. This concept could be turned into a formula. The probability of chance encounters as a mathematical principle that can in turn be tattooed and broken. The professor walked towards his usual tattoo parlor and asked for an immediate appointment. He drank green tea while waiting for the master to finish up his artwork on another client's back. A black striped tiger with big cartoonish eyes that was staring straight at him.

Chance hoped that Yuri was somewhere safe and he tried to not imagine the situations in which she was left stranded on some rock in the middle of the ocean, or in a cave next to a family of hungry polar bears. He was not yet sure if he could break a mathematical concept that he just invented, but it was worth trying.

In about 30 minutes, the artist invited him to sit on the chair and he started to sanitize the back neck area. He did not have too much skin left for his tattoos, taking into account that he could not present himself at the university with tattoos on his face or hands. He was already forced to limit his university attire to long sleeve shirts and sweaters. The upper neck area was one of the few areas left.

As the blood was still drying, he paid and left the shop. He attempted a first break of his mathematical concept and nothing happened. He tried opening a portal to a random location on planet earth and as he looked through it, he saw an Ocean during a hailstorm with roaring winds. He hoped this was not the place, so he opened another portal and there she was – Yuri, tucked in warmly in an armchair facing a fireplace inside some old wooden cabin. She was asleep and Chance entered through the portal. He was not entirely sure if he should or should not wake her up. Since the moment that Yuri met him, nothing was normal anymore. At first, she created the professor's fan page and then she was taken to Pakistan… and then she was almost crushed during an apocalypse and then she was abducted by an alien brain who might or might not have been her biological father. No wonder her mind was constantly splitting existence into broken shards of probability.

Chance took a step back and was about to leave, when the white cat jumped on top of Yuri's blanket and woke her up.

"Professor, where are you going?"

…

(3 months later)

Yuri was decorating her new Tokyo apartment. She was buying plants and hanging them near the window and on her bookshelf. The white cat was quietly residing on the living room couch. She was in a big and spacious new loft apartment with a view to the magnificently red Tokyo tower. When she arrived in Tokyo, Yuri had no passport, not identity card and she was practically non-existent. Chance had to help her get new documents and this was not legal strictly speaking, but the breakings helped tip the odds in their favor. After they created her new identity, Chance collected some titanium ore from an asteroid and sold it on the Mexican black market for cash. He then created an anonymous trust fund in Mexico and connected Yuri to her long-lost Mexican uncle, so to speak. Through an inheritance document, Yuri became financially independent and could afford to buy a proper apartment in the Minato area, not too far from where she used to live in the alternative version of Earth.

…

Chance met with his father and finally reconnected with him. The two of them organized a proper family grave in Japan for Sam, his mother. Chance even volunteered to bring her cremated remains that were left in the United States at the moment of her death so many years ago. The two of them left white chrysanthemum flowers on her grave and lit up an incense stick. It was important to honor her memory.

…

As it turns out, Mr Nakamura got married again with a Japanese woman that had a teenage son and now Chance also got to meet his step brother. They played soccer together and spent family dinners in the pleasant company of one another. Yuri was always welcome to join their family dinners but she always politely declined the offers, so as not to intrude. She preferred to spend time with her new pet cat (nonetheless, she made sure never to go through the house undressed after her morning shower in the presence of the cat).

After so much wandering into space and the multiverse, Chance finally achieved the bliss of feeling welcomed at home. The darkness of the past was creeping from behind his happiness, but it was well contained. He could not have reached the place where he is now without the experiences of having had failed so many times… at life, at happiness, at not destroying the entire universe. The sum of all this, was the strong foundation of his current peace.

…

At the end of summer, he started teaching a new class of first year students. He was excited to meet the new class. One of the first assignments was for the students to choose a field of astrophysics in which they wish to do research and give the reasons for their choice. Chance was scrolling through the topic choices with wonder and curiosity. "Deep space colonization using robotic avatars", "Dyson sphere engineering and wireless energy transmission across vast distances", "Zero-matter particle behavior". It was the start of a promising new academic year.

…

Chance picked up an odd-looking yellow autumn leaf and stared at it. Fully functioning, great texture, authentic and beautiful. The craftsmanship and engineering of it all. Out of all the forms of existence available, this is the only one that works. A nearly impossible configuration of laws, phenomena and particle properties that in sum generate the experience of exaltation, awe, love. A complexity that transcends comprehension. Part of who Chance is now destroyed multiple universes and multiple civilizations, however there was a part of him that was always well-intentioned. As creator of this new universe, he appreciated it in all its splendor and detail. The leaves, the stones, the breathable warm September air, the crimson urban sunsets. He was both the seed and the gardener. The merciful king and the tyrant.

…

In another part of town, Tetsu, a robotics engineer was sleeping on a tarnished red couch in his home garage. His mentor asked that he deliver the designs for a new android before the end of the week and he was overworking. Malnourished, poorly-showered and half-shaven, Tetsu had his workstation full of various faulty designs. Some of the papers on his desk were crumpled and thrown on the floor through an improvised basketball hoop. Model airplanes, cars, motorcycle engines were hanged on the wall of his workshop. There were huge boxes with materials such as silicone, black leather, ultrathin titanium fiber and a vast collection of plastic dye. The 3d printers were molding continuously based on the specifications from multiple screens, where modelling had been done earlier. Tabs and tabs of open half-products with arms, legs, eyes and other mock body parts. Tetsu already had a mediocre Beta software for the android that he was planning to build. His intention was to develop a buddy/companion unit that could easily be mass produced. Helping people with daily tasks, while also retaining basic human features such as speech and compassion.

When he woke up, he quickly checked his phone and then said: "Damn it!". He was late. He quickly went to the university bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. His hair was long and messy and there was no way that he could put it back in order in such a short amount of time. He pulled the hoodie cap over it. On his left-hand index finger, he was wearing a chrome nut-shaped ring. When he went back to his garage, he saw her. She had arrived already and was waiting for him.

"Sorry, Yuri! I completely forgot about our date!"

"No worries.", she smiled. "We will just order in and watch a movie together. I hope you don't mind that I brought my cat. I didn't want to leave her alone in my apartment. She didn't get quite used to it yet."

The cat was tucked cozily in a special travelling backpack, which Yuri placed on the garage floor gently so as not to wake her up.

…

Albert, Stephen, Edwin and Isaac were in the vessel's control room when the screens turned back on. The cat woke up.

"Stephen! Stephen, come quick! Guys, you aren't going to believe this!"

The started in wonder at each part of the lab as the cat was exploring it.

"This is exactly what we needed? An engineer that can extract our consciousness from the cat and place each of us in our individual android vessel. He even has humanoid feature designs and the end result could look like the shape in which we are now. Teenage androids!"

The scientist girls were ecstatic and they were ready to get to work to improve on Stephen's algorithm for cat control. They managed to influence part of the cat's behavior during the fight with the destroyer, but this algorithm was far from perfect. In order to complete the consciousness transfer, they'd need an open communication line with the host engineer.

"Tetsu is his name. It is written on that diploma."

The white cat finished inspecting the garage and noticed a semi-open basement door. It crept through it and sneaked into the lower level of the garage workshop.

"Albert, look!", through the cracked door dim light, they saw the silhouettes of four ideal teenage androids. "I can't believe it. He's built them already. How is this possible?"

As the cat got closer, it jumped on a nearby table and accidentally triggered the sensor light. What seemed like four female androids, were in fact four stiff teenage girl corpses. Part of their arms and legs were severed and placed in plastic molds. This wasn't a workshop, but a slaughterhouse. One of the severed hands of the girls was placed on a stack of blueprints next to a stack of crayons and measuring tape. Tetsu was a psychopath that murdered young women in order to study their bodies and create a perfect design based on his observations.

"We need to warn Yuri about this! Chance!"

"GO, STUPID CAT! GO BACK!!!"

The cat turned around to go back upstairs, but all that they saw was Tetsu at the top of the basement ladder. He was staring at the white cat as he slowly closed the basement door. The dim light was extinguished. Darkness.

The End

…

You can read the full story on: medium.com/surfing-chance

Thank you for reading!

[1] The equator has 40,000 km and the probability that two people are in the same hemisphere could mean, hypothetically that they are no more than 20,000 km apart; ½ is 20,000 km, thus, being 1000 km apart is just ½ divided by 20 = 1/400. 8*10^9 / 400 = 20 million.