Surfing Chance - Chapter 19

The team of hero Chance, Yuri and Cat was about to face the destroyer. Hero Chance exhaled a breath of warm air, which he then froze and compressed into a bullet. He lifted his hand and pulled out his index finger to direct its trajectory. It shot out with an exploding force towards the destroyer.

"Yuri, now!"

She multiplied the bullet a hundred-fold and each of them hit a different part of the destroyer's body. Then Chance merged all of the new worlds created and for a few seconds the destroyer was overwhelmed with the experience of having been hit by hundreds of frozen bullets. This created the opening they needed for the next attack. The cat leaped into the air towards the enemy and Chance figured that now is the ideal moment to entrap him.

The destroyer portalled away and then returned to the battlefield. He was now fully recovered. He used a different time dimension to get over the merging lag. He then initiated the strike-back by summoning a marble sized sun and firing it in the direction of Yuri. The shield deflected it without causing any harm. The destroyer wanted to test out the shield's strength.

Yuri was already getting ready to split the current world into multiple versions in a short span of time. Her role in this mission was to firstly switch their world with each blow dealt to the enemy. She was waiting for Chance to land the first one. He stood cautiously awaiting the right moment to jump in.

The destroyer froze the current universe to near zero Kelvins. The capsule containing Yuri, Chance and Cat was immune to this temperature drop and the destroyer stood opposite to them, also immune. The two spherical bodies got lifted in midair above the planet surface and the roof of the glass box crumbled into icy dust as they broke through its ceiling. No life on this planet could survive this extreme change of weather.

The destroyer broke entropy around the shield of the rescue team and corrosion started to eat up the barrier. As this was happening, the destroyer summoned a portal inside their capsule and started filling it with seawater. This faucet was slowly filling in the fish bowl-like structure and the cat immediately leaped onto Yuri's shoulder. As the barrier was being thinned, the temperature effect was cooling the water on the edges. Snowflake patterns started to form around the lower side of their orb. The sphere walls turned opaque and the destroyer could no longer see clearly on the inside. As Yuri and Chance were panicking and thinking of ways to unstuck their legs from the cold ice, the destroyer decided to play jingle bell sound effects. Their sphere reminded him of a Christmas globe that he used to own as a child.

Chance used the enemy's marble sun idea to heat up and turn the ice directly into vapor. The destroyer anticipated this move and forced the vapor to expand in volume. Now, the pressure inside the barrier was building up like in a steam engine. The sphere's elasticity was modified by the people trapped inside of it and now it was going through a process of inflation and at last it burst open.

Chance, Yuri and Cat managed to escape from this death trap. They switched to individual body armor without the need to all sit in the same place. This was the beginning of their outflanking tactic.

…

The destroyer used gravity to create an ellipsoid-shaped orbit around him pulling the three of them onto it. They were set like toy-trains on a giant track and Yuri was the closest to the destroyer and she was being pulled towards him. In order to protect her, Chance broke quantum mechanics teleported Yuri onto another point on the same orbit like an electron and then transported himself behind the destroyer. He initiated a first punch and with it added mass to the destroyer who fell to the ground and then was sucked towards the planet. The destroyer made himself immaterial, but with the retaining of his gigantic mass and this was pulling down the whole orbit towards the icy plains of the planet. The mass-adding punch backfired terribly and Chance reversed his breaking. He then saved Yuri and the cat. He transported them away from the glass box onto a safe spot on the surface.

The destroyer disappeared from sight and they were looking around for clues as to where he was going to strike next. The cat felt an Earthquake and then saw a volcano emerging red-hot from underneath the ice. From the volcano's vent, the destroyer emerged with a giant luminous sphere. He placed the glowing ball on the ground like a football and then he stepped back in order to get ready for the kick. The ball shot up into the air and as it flew it left a comet tail behind it. Chance was getting ready to catch it, but he was stopped by the white cat that grabbed his leg. The ball missed his fingers by a few centimeters and after it landed, it started expanding. It was the planet's core that was pulled out and compressed. The destruction of the planet had already started. The destroyer flew to the molten core that was expanding and touched it with his finger. In the spot where he touched the giant sphere it started to become pitch black. Little by little, the darkness expanded onto its whole surface and then it started to absorb all the planet into it.

Chance knew what was going to happen next. He saw this same type of universe-eating blackhole when he destroyed the simulated Beta universe. This gave him a new idea, and he acted quickly by breaking the shielding that allowed the destroyer to stand close to the blackhole without being absorbed by it himself. This instantaneous attack caught the destroyer off-guard and he focused all of his attention on restoring the forcefield. This second of hesitation acted as a perfect opening. A breach in his impervious defense system. The cat jumped into the air and started scratching his forcefield-related tattoos. The whole team of scientists was working on pinpointing the exact location of the right tattoos for the whole duration of the fight. Yuri looked into multiple versions of the future in order to find the variation of their plan that has the biggest probability of success. At every second of the fight, she made sure to switch the worlds seamlessly (like a remote-control switching channel with each blow) and now they were locked inside a simulation that she co-created with Chance and they were about to seal it inside another universe. Layer upon layer they added the universes on top of one another with the time dilation effect and the hundreds of thousands of Yuri-generated worlds were sewn into this magnificent time prison matryoshka doll.

Chance compressed the hundred-thousand world structure into a diamond-sized artefact, which he then implanted in his upper right ear. Yuri was holding something on the inside of her hoodie. The cat's white head emerged from her grey hoodie's neck collar. Chance walked towards her and carefully analyzed the cat's claws. They still had pieces of the destroyer's skin. He carefully collected the samples into a glass tube.

…

The destroyer capture was complete. The mission succeeded. The multiverse was saved.

…

"Do you think it will hold him?", asked Yuri quite concerned.

Chance thought for a second about the destroyer's way of fighting them. It was more playful than menacing and at the end it felt like he wished to be defeated. It is possible that he gave up long before the end of the fight. Like a lonely child, all that he truly wished for was to have fun. He never had proper playmates and this made him grow angry and frustrated. His mother's anxiousness planted the seed of anger in his mind. This seed snowballed into anger and hate. The constant moving aways, the constant changes, his mother's passing away in absurd circumstances… He spiraled down onto a state of mind where everything around him got stripped of meaning. The universe, the world, society, constructs of family, friends, connections… none of the usual things that keep a person within the borders of sanity were available for him. He bailed on his wedding and he moved to Tokyo where he was more alone than ever. A professor, that came to accidentally obtain omnipotence, and at the same time he had nothing and no one to fight for. He was left with only one last option of saving himself with this power. Building his freedom and his happiness. He went off to explore Earth and the solar system and even here this failed. He was captured by government agents, tortured (much like in the Beta simulation storyline) and then, when the last attempt at happiness failed… when he was on the very bottom of the abyss… he felt the last speck of hope vanish from his life. An ordinary person would have committed suicide, as a last way to fight back for control over his own existence. As an omnipotent being, he committed reverse suicide, where he chose to eliminate the very existence that was threatening him. He chose to erase a world that has rejected and exiled him. As the destroyer, he took back control.

…

"Yes. It will, Yuri. I think it will hold him for now. Please don't generate worlds in which our plan fails."

"I can try but … I mean, you told me that it is slightly beyond my ability to control it entirely."

"Do you feel that it is a burden for you? Virus extraction is not my specialty, but I could try it."

She hesitated for a moment. All the ways in which she was different now and even the fact that the simulation split allowed for the destroyer to be captured. The split allowed for simulations to be generated and a hero to emerge from a string of bad apples. In a way, it was like she gave Chance as many second … chances … as he needed to get things right.

"In the next 16 thousand billion years, I don't think we will be needing your talents again.", said Chance, in an attempt to lighten up the mood.

Yuri smiled in response to this. She felt ready to go through with the extraction surgery. Chance placed his palm on her forehead. She closed her eyes and it was over in an instant.

"In the end, all viruses are the same whether it is a common cold or an exotic alien one. It is not too different from healing people …"

Yuri opened her eyes. She felt the tranquility of open space. The cat leaped in her lap and allowed for her white fur to be stroked.

…

Inside the cat, the scientists were celebrating their victory. Stephen found a last-minute method to adjust the cat's neural synapses. The cat saw the destroyer as a threatening cat that she needed to attack. It was still an imperfect method, but they found a way to help out Yuri and Chance to fulfill their mission. Albert, Isaac and Edwin were holding cups of champagne and toasting to Stephen – a brilliant mind, that can outsmart any bodily limitations.

…

"I have one last surprise for you.", said Chance as he took the glass tube and placed the particles of the destroyer's skin in his palm. "This matter sample is very precious, because it is the only untarnished remains of the original Gama1 universe – the home universe of the destroyer." Chance applied reverse entropy to it and the universe started taking the shape of a crocodile eye that had multiple eyelids that were opening up. With each new layer that was opening up, the sphere grew bigger and bigger until it took planetary proportions. The Gama1 universe was restored to its rightful place in the multiverse. Chance was glad that this crazy hypothesis actually worked. The universe and Earth were restored to their initial state, prior to the destroyer having discovered his breaking gift. The University, the students, the life he had in Tokyo, was waiting for the professor's return. The simulation-born Chance knew that he needed to build a home for himself and Yuri. This was it.

He opened a portal to Earth and invited Yuri to take the cat with her.

"Aren't you coming?"

"Not yet. I still have one thing left to do."

As soon as Yuri stepped inside the portal, she realized something and turned around to say: "Wait, stop!", but her words did not reach Chance. Yuri reached planet Earth, but she was not in Tokyo. Chance accidentally sent Yuri to another location and she was now on an odd-looking seashore. The white cat leaped down and started to smell things. Yuri walked towards the top of a nearby cliff and she noticed big stone heads coming out of the ground. Yuri and the cat ended up on Easter Island.

…

Chance was left alone on the outside of the reassembled universe. In truth, he never was inside of it because he grew up as a clone in a simulated universe. Even so, he felt that his home was on the other side of the starry event horizon. The Tokyo streets that he knew, the students in his class, the father with whom he never got the opportunity to reconnect. He could choose to go anywhere.

"What do I truly want? What is the road that I must take in order to feel happy and fulfilled?"

He found the answer in a mere second and then opened his eyes. He smiled. He took the empty glass tube from before and transformed it into a smooth-surface plain. Then he molded the glass into an ultrathin surfboard, which he then reinforced with a forcefield. He stood upon it and he was ready to enter the home universe, surfing it from the outside, in.

"The dream of surfing the expansion line of the universe, I will still surf it, even if it is not exactly in the way that I imagined it. I will puncture it from the outside and will fly through it all the way to home."

He built velocity and then surfed directly into the dark event horizon. He saw the lightshow and he witnessed scenes from the beginning of the big bang that seemed like some ancient cave paintings. Enjoying the thrill of the ride, the professor was finally there, at the end of his dream. He continued to surf through the open space between luminous galaxies. It felt relaxing. Like a lonely drive through the desert at the end of a long workday. He could teleport back to Earth at any point, but he just felt like riding through space for a bit longer.

As far as he knew, Yuri was in Tokyo waiting for him and everything turned out exactly as planned. Finally, after so many breakings, he managed to fix something and bring it back to order. If this worked out, perhaps there was hope for himself as a person. To live a fulfilling life and to spend his days in good company.

"The multiverse is saved. The expansion wave – ridden. Now, I can spend the last of my days in Tokyo and go on space exploration journeys now and then. Perhaps I shall start to compile a space travel journal…"

Before going back to Earth, he wished to make one more stop. He took a piece of the Boltzmann DNA and used it to track the location of his former star system. Chance opened a portal to his planet in order to witness it as it was before being destroyed. All the way into the horizon the neon party lights like an anarchy music festival.

"I don't know if you are seeing this, but we did it, my dear friend.", said Chance, as he was inspecting the alien planet from the sky. He stood there, like a watcher, like a guardian and then he retreated back into the darkness of the outer orbit. It was time to go back home.