Surfing Chance - Chapter 12

Universe Beta[1]

Chance woke up to find himself immobilized in a dark damp underground military depot. His skin, in the areas where the tattoos were, had been torn off and as soon as he moved, he felt the excruciating pain that only burn victims know of. He was betrayed, by someone that knew how his breaking works and now he was back to being human. His lower and upper arms, his lower legs, thighs and chest areas were puncturing pain and oozing a mixture of blood and puss that he felt dripping on his bare feet. The adrenaline rush was cutting the pain in half, but this rush was soon to go away so as to leave him completely engulfed in the darkness of pain. Trapped. Caged like a bird with no wings, he was processing the circumstance of his situation and desperately trying to find a way out. His mind was racing against itself, stopping itself from falling into despair and other anxious non-productive states. The pain was there, but he was using it as a catalyst. If he were to black out now, he'd be able to connect to his usual support team and perhaps they could explain one more time the full instructions of his gift. This was one option. Perhaps there is a way to break the laws with other means beyond getting tattoos.

He was infuriated and mad. He was screaming in painful blinding rage thinking of all the ways in which he would use his former skills to torment his captors. The gravity of Jupiter applied to a certain area would break all of their legs and force squish their bodies to the floor of this military facility like bugs to a windscreen. Their particles, forced to disorganize rapidly or vibrate up to the point of spontaneous human combustion. Portal-ing them all in outer space to have their blood vessels freeze and then explode from the power of the vacuum. Chance was lingering in his revenge plotting madness, hiding his pain beyond the fury of what he was going to do to them. "They left me alive, and this is one mistake that they will not live to regret…", thought Chance. Blood boiling with hate and destruction, blinding him from wanting to think of pragmatic solutions. Chance felt like a fool for previously wanting to save humanity and contribute to their wellbeing…

A sudden surge of guilt-driven despair quenched his red-hot fury. "Perhaps, this is fair payback for the lives I took in Pakistan… Perhaps I deserve to be here and dwell in my repentance…". Chance's temper was cooling off like a nuclear reactor that was at last restabilized. His mother, he thought of her and how she always took care of him when he was sick. He remembered himself playing in the sand innocently and how this very same child overplayed his game. Naivete and curiosity brought him here, but it was still unfair all that was happening to him and the pendulum was switching back to rage. "All that I did, was a mistake and given the opportunity, I would pay back my duty to society. I would heal people; I would find ways to revert ecological disasters. I would help find technological solutions that would ultimately save thousands… millions. In a fair trial, I would get to testify and explain my situation. Bargain my way out of this, with a sentence focused on community service. It is unfair…". With this last thought, Chance felt his body numbing and his mind going into a state of self-protecting hibernation.

…

Chance saw himself as a child throwing around toys and hoping that they would break so that he takes a peek inside. He was always curious about how mechanical things work. His favorite car has been taken apart like it was in a garage workshop, and the child was digging into it to see in how many distinct pieces it can be broken down to. In amazement of how pieces of plastic and metal can make something move itself, Chance opened the small turbine engine. When he connected the cables of the engine to a battery, he saw it spin and now he understood how the small red car works. Like clockwork he figured it out, but now he had to put the pieces back together in the same order that he took them out and this proved to be a real challenge. The pieces were not fitting together and this caused frustration. The fascination of discovery turned into anger and the child started punching the ground in rage. Chance was monitoring this scene with serenity and calmness. The younger Chance started crying after he understood that this toy will never be the same again. He hid it in one of the drawers of his room, in a box of many dismembered pieces. It was filled with magnets, light bulbs, cables, candles, matches, batteries of various shapes and sizes, dyes, wooden parts, small engines, colored diodes, duct tape and notebooks. This laboratory of broken things was how Chance became interested in science and this memory was trapped inside him until now, waiting to be released…

…

The image swirled into a white light and Chance saw himself between the ages of 2 and 3 when his family was still together, living in the small apartment in Tokyo. His mother put him in a closet and asked him to stay inside and not make noise. She asked him to not get out until she would tell him that it is safe again. Sam, his mother, was crying and trying to make this into a game. She told him that it is a game of hide and seek that they would be playing. Chance was stuck in the closet, silent, and developed a strong sense of discomfort. He wanted to get out and play again on the floor of the room, but he was told by his mother not to move. The adult Chance watched the child struggle to find a way in which to sit down in the uncomfortable wardrobe and then the child was crying silently and sniffling his tiny nose. Being boxed in… asked to stay silent… not to move for some unknown unjustified reason. The child was rescued from this pit of darkness by his father, Kimura. He opened the doors to the closet and smiled in relief of having finally found him. He hugged him and took him out of the house.

Chance was monitoring this situation with suspicion. This part of the memory, he did not remember. He had not a single memory of his father, and yet, when that man opened the closet door, the child immediately recognized and ran towards him. His mother was not around and Chance did not understand what happened to her. Why was she not the one to open the closed. As Kimura was walking through the streets of Tokyo with the young 2-year-old, the memory was interrupted by another swirl back to nothingness.

…

The space in which Chance was kept reminded him of an empty airplane hangar. The high concrete walls were worn out and cracked from the multiple earthquake shocks that they withstood throughout the years. He was tied up and locked in a deep meditative trance that was interrupted every few minutes by pain spasms and muscle cramps. Nobody came down to speak with him and this was what bothered him most. He could not connect to his captors, nor bargain with them in any way. He was clueless and alone. Looking back to the last year of his life, his one year in Tokyo as a professor, he was alone the whole time. The other students and professors were reluctantly conducting their day-to-days. The paradox was that he was living in one of the biggest cities on planet Earth and yet, the only talking buddies he had were the lolicon scientist girls in his dreams. "How pathetic. One disaster after another. An unending chain of failures that started with an attempt to marry and ended with my desolation in this bunker.", he thought.

"If they wanted to kill me, they would have done it by now. They would not have gone through the trouble of trying to disarm me… the only other person that knew of how my tattoos work was Yuri. She was also probably captured by them."

Chance was digging himself out of despair. He had a brilliant escape plan, for which he prepared months ago. He had a 'just in case' solution that was thought out to be for situations in which he'd be stranded in other galaxies or dangerous alien worlds. It did not even cross his mind, that he'd have to use it here on his home planet, to escape the danger of other human beings…

…

Three months ago, he had another lecture session with Stephen and Albert in his dream.

"Do you know, Chance that your skills have two ways in which they can be used?", said Stephen.

"What do you mean?"

"Imagine that you want to lift a car. You use break and you temporarily reduce the mass of the car. You will be able to lift it with one hand, but if someone were to throw a stone at your head and knock you out, the breaking would be undone and you'd be crushed under the weight of the car that you just lifted. However, there is a different way to use your skills.

If you were to aim for a permanent modification of the car's properties, like binding it to a hot air balloon, then you'd be able to lift the car without risking it to crush you when the breaking was to be undone.

Temporary changes in the laws of physics are great for certain tasks like flying and opening portals. If you wish to survive in outer space, you will have to start thinking of permanent changes and perhaps even permanent changes to your body.

Say, you are trapped on an alien planet and your skin gets partially burnt. What do you do? Where will you find a tattoo artist on that planet so that you may get back to Earth?"

"I'd need ink and a needle, or at least something sharp… I could probably tattoo myself"

"Where would you find ink on an alien planet?"

…

Chance thought long and hard about this dream and about making permanent changes to his body. One day as he was eating Takoyaki after work, he had an 'Eureka' moment. He bought the biggest live octopus he could find at the Tsukiji fish market and carefully removed its ink gland. Using entropy, he fused the ink gland with his spleen so that it may be harmlessly kept in his abdomen. The DNA of the octopus was pushed to merge with his own and with the same process used for healing, he ensured a stable tissue connection that would preserve emergency ink inside his body.

…

"As soon as they unbind me, I will use any sharp object I find… to break into my abdomen and retrieve the emergency ink. I will tattoo any one law and then I will break out of this hell hole…", thought Chance, catching a glimmer of hope at long last.

…

Hours and hours have passed and he was still stuck in this bottomless dark abyss. Chance was still bound; tremors of pain and twitches cause by an unending claustrophobia. Nobody was coming to see him. Nobody would even unbind his hands, not to say completely freeing him. He was starved and thirsty, stinking of urine, dirtied by his own bowls and drooling spit. He had lost all hope of ever seeing the blue sky again and he was wondering as to how was he mysteriously still alive. Outside his body, he was exploring all corners of the bunker and all of what means to be a 'self' had melted onto its damp concrete walls. There was no more professor there. No more human. Only a tied-up beast that would wreak havoc upon anyone daring to touch him. A mad dog, dreaming of biting back the hands that put him there.

…

Like a light shining through the cracks of broken wooden window shades, through delirium, Chance felt his hand freeing itself from its long straightjacket sleeve. During his sleep he moved uncontrollably as if under a strange exorcist curse. One of the belts must have loosened and he removed his hand and arm out. He crawled on the floor using his one free hand, since his legs were still cuffed in chains and he could not walk, not that he had the strength in them to do it. Chance started laughing in madness and he started hitting his only free hand repeatedly on the nearest concrete wall. He was hitting it as hard as he could until his hand was hanging down like a bloody leather glove free from its wrist. He bit his hand and started to chew and spit his own flesh. Not too much time before the blood loss will kill him so he had to do it fast. He bit into his forearm, so as to free the two bones there and then he tore his hand with all tissue away so as to expose his ulna and radius bones. He pressed them against the wall and used his forehead to hit them until they broke, forming sharp pointy edges. His forearm became a sharp weapon and he used it to puncture his abdomen. The straight jacket started getting black at the place where he stabbed himself. He reached the squid ink gland. He started puncturing the upper side of his foot. Point by point, carefully, he was writing back his second law of thermodynamics tattoo.

…

The scribbling was clumsy, and he needed to constantly wipe the blood that was blocking the view of his writing. He was trying to keep himself awake, despite the insane pain and debilitating blood loss. At long last, seconds before falling into total darkness of the mind, he finished typing and called for a break… His straightjacket became yellow and then black and cracked open like a shell of burnt paper around his body. He freed himself of it and immediately broke it again to heal his disfigured forearm and bleeding open abdomen. His mind, destroyed, could not be as easily fixed from the trauma of escaping this near certain death situation. As he lay there on the ground, he was jumpy and his eyes were zig-zag-ing the room for possible surveillance. A sleep dart, could put render all of his hard work meaningless in a fraction of a second. He used break to free up a concrete wall column and take out a piece of metal railing from inside. Then he immediately broke into the concrete floor and formed a human sized hole through matter decay. He then closed it back with him in it. He built a temporary shelter. After toying with stones and the piece of metal railing that he took with him, he punctured his abdomen again to get more ink. As he stood there, safely, he had time to tattoo the law of pressure. He then used it to press the metal railing into an ultra-thin needle. He continued… he inked the law of gravity, the laws of electromagnetism, special relativity, elasticity, laws governing energy, light, radiation, the weak force and the strong and every other law or formula he could think of. His body became a canvas… an Egyptian hieroglyph column, a Nordic rune-rich tombstone, glowing in the dark… The last of what was human about him was bleeding out, to be replaced by dark ink.

"I wished to be an ally to humanity, but I have been betrayed by all other and by myself. The survival instinct, I sharpened it with my teeth when carving into my own flesh. Freedom is the only memory that will outlive this world. Break!"

The place where the military facility was, as seen from a bird's eye view, became scooped out like a ball of ice-cream and nothing remained of it. Chance was left at the center of a sphere-shaped crater, floating in mid-air, naked and glowing. He compressed all of the military base into a fragment the size of a peanut, using the pulling force of a temporary black hole to which he was immune. After this small test, he put the peanut in the ground and again increased the mass of it infinitely so as to continue compressing space-time at an accelerating rate. His plan was to pull the expansion line of the universe, all the way back to its beginning. A reverse big bang of annihilation. He sat on an improvised throne made of compressed star dust and was watching the universe collapse on itself like a red car toy that was finally breaking open to reveal its insides. Probability of universe destruction, 100%.

...

[1] Universe Alpha is the Universe in which Chance and his students explore the universe together.

Universe Beta - scheduled for annihilation.