Yuri was inspecting the quality of the refurbished house. The plates were on the shelves, the drawers were filled with cups and cutlery. Towels, cloths, drapes were all fresh clean. Yuri sat at the table and decided to make herself a cup of tea. Chance joined her and they had a long talk about the surfing incident. He told her of how this all started and the plan that he had for making things right.
"People probably died. Missing can also means dead, you realize that don't you?" said Yuri, looking down into her mug.
"I know. I will try to fix this somehow.", said Chance, while trying to avoid thinking of words such as mass murder, genocide and involuntary manslaughter.
"Can you bring back a dead person with your new tattoo?"
"I don't know. We will have to try. I propose we start out with the simpler things and build our way up. We need to act fast and get back to Japan in a few days.", said Chance while standing up and looking for something to write with, in the kitchen drawers. He put a piece of notebook paper and a pencil on the table.
"The news said:
- 12,500 damaged or destroyed houses,
- 1,000 + missing persons,
- 350 wounded in hospitals nearby,", said Chance while writing this on his paper page.
"If the average time per house is 10 minutes, it will take too long.", noted Yuri.
"I will do it faster. I will fly from neighborhood to neighborhood and take care of the houses. Once I feel comfortable enough fixing unliving things, we can go to the hospitals and take care of the wounded. Please do some online research into which hospitals have the most patients that are flood victims and if possible, which placement centers host the gravely injured.", said Chance in a calm voice, whilst feeling broken and carved out from the inside like a Halloween pumpkin. It was one thing to look at numbers on a screen, but being here now, seeing the damage, the muddy roads, understanding that the mud underneath their feet could be filled with corpses of farm animals and people… and perhaps even children, was dreadful.
Yuri was also feeling the weight of this guilt. Doing online donations was not the same as doing on-ground rescue missions.
"Get working on it please. I will be back in a few hours.", said Chance as he flew out. She was left to do her research. The whole area was deserted so there was no one to run into.
…
Chance got to the center of a giant flooded neighborhood and put his hands on the ground. "Break…", all of the houses were getting back to their original state, mud was being cleaned out. Everything up to road signs, lamp posts, garden fences was getting back to normal and it was happening faster than expected. Without realizing it, Chance was progressing through his skill much faster than he did with gravity. He was doing months of growth, in a matter of minutes without even thinking about it.
After clearing an entire neighborhood of about 60 houses simultaneously, he walked through them and felt a sudden strong smell. He shrugged and grabbed his stomach area with both hands. It was the decaying corpse of a cow. He held the sleeve of his Tokyo University jumper in front of his mouth and nose. He touched the remains and with a muffled voice said "Break". The condition of the cow was changing. Her meat and tissues were being fixed. Her black and white fur became soft and warm and Chance touched her waiting to feel a heartbeat. He did not. His worse fear has been confirmed. Bringing corpses back to life was not possible.
…
"What are the laws of thermodynamics? They explain the bonds between the thermal energy of a system and its possible conversion into kinetic, or movement energy. This set of rules allowed for the first steam engines to be invented. Heated water was used to power locomotives and the first cars. The second law of thermodynamics is part of this set of rules. It states that any system, say a cup of hot coffee, dissipates energy and in a short amount of time will reach a thermal equilibrium. In other words, the coffee will cool down and it is extremely unlikely that it will spontaneously heat up.
Heat is motion. At particle level, the vibration of many particles causes friction and energy, some of which is emitted as heat. Entropy means that energy flows out of that hot object in only one direction, the direction of time. Entropy is irreversible. It can also be seen through the lens of statistics; any ordered system becomes disordered in time because there are more ways in which particles are disorganized compared to the probabilities of them being organized. For this reason, the second law of thermodynamics is also called the law of chaos."
Chance turned around to see his audience in the lecture hall and the light suddenly switched off. When the light came back the audience was different. The people there were Pakistani men, women and children whose faces were disfigured. Most of them were rotting corpses that turned greenish and swollen due to having had drowned. Some even had their mouths, nostrils and eye sockets filled with mud. It was a horrific scene. They were all silent and Chance was staring at them all. Each and every one of them.
He woke up on a bed of a house that he restored. Exhaustion got the better of him, but physical exhaustion was only half the story. Truth of the matter, the irreversibility of the situation he created was mind wrecking. He had to go back to Yuri and finish this mission as soon as possible.
…
He went back to the house where he'd left her. There was a note: "By the river". Chance found her sitting on a leather jacket on the Indus River bank, watching the flow of water. It was good to see a friendly face.
"Did you manage?", she said without lifting her eyes from her phone.
"Not quite. I tried it… It did not work."
"But why? Isn't life supposed to be the product of the very same laws of physics governing all objects."
"I was thinking the same. I was hoping that this kind of damage can also be undone."
They sat in silence for a while, as if coming to terms with the new reality.
"I was thinking of all these empty houses. The futility of my attempts to fix things.", said Chance after some time. "The houses seem brand new. Still, nobody is living in them and it may take some time for people to accept coming back. The fear and distress are strong demotivators. People that have lost a family member, may never want to return here even if this was their home since forever. Probably the same goes for bodies. Life is not easy to bring back even if all the infrastructure is there… life does not feel welcomed to come back."
She felt his pain, quivering in his voice. The unimaginable guilt of having had killed innocent people with no reason. People that were just going about their daily lives.
"Let's go help the ones that we can.", she said, hoping that this will relieve some of the tension.
Yuri discovered that most of the flood victims were gathered up in one location. The nearby village hospital set up tents around it and all of the doctors were working overtime to care for them. They both went to the hospital and in a matter of hours, Chance went quickly from patient to patient pretending to distribute snacks such as small pastries and sweets. Every time he gave out a savory snack, he touched the patients and instantaneously healed them. He healed all of the people in the tents and then he moved on to the main building of the hospital. By sunset, even patients with terminal illnesses were healed without even knowing.
"Let's get back to Japan. There is nothing more we can do here.", said Chance to Yuri. Chance wanted to say to her that had she not been there, he would have been overwhelmed with the anxiety of it all. He was glad, to have someone nearby and share his sincere regrets. Their relationship did not involve much talking, but it did involve compassion and understanding of one another.
On the flight back they were silent for most of the journey.
"Forgive me.", said Chance, "for involving you in all this. I should have warned you from the start, but I was not thinking clearly. I did not wish to place this burden upon you and now… you know what I did. I can't imagine how you must feel. Probably you wish to go to the police and I would not judge you for it. I … no matter what action you take from now on, I ask that you forgive me and I wish to thank you for helping me treat those people. In all my lifetime I may not atone for the things I've done in Pakistan… you are a kind person, Yuri."
"Professor, if you don't mind, I will continue with the donation's website. I think it will do good to keep it running. With regards to going to the police or taking action… I am not sure if the police will even believe any of this. I am not sure… the one thing I do know is that not all the patients in the hospital were sick because of you and you took the time to treat all of them, without exception. Some lives were lost, some were saved. Perhaps in the future, you will have the opportunity to keep doing this. I mean saving people. If this is the case, then the lives of the people that died in the floods were not in vain… perhaps there is some obscure and dark kind of meaning in all of it… if you are imprisoned, it will not help anyone. It will not save anyone. Being alone is the sure way to self-destruction."
He wanted to say more, but he could not bring himself to find the right words. He nodded as a sign of having understood what she wanted to say. They reached Tokyo on Monday morning. Class would start soon and neither of them was ready for it. The exhaustion was eerie and Chance was afraid to go back to sleep.
Chance remembered how he read Harry Potter when he was a teenager. For the first time ever, he understood what J.K. Rowling meant by the dementors in the third book. He felt life being sucked out of him. He felt the dire need of conjuring a strong happy memory and eating chocolate. He tried to think of himself, as a child building a sandcastle on the beach shores of Australia. His happy place. As soon as this image appeared in his mind, he saw himself with sand pouring out of his eyes and mouth… a grim scene. He opened his tired bloodshot eyes, to get rid of this horrific image.
He was pushing a trolley through the airport and to the unsuspecting people there he was just another stranger. He got lost in a crowd of people minding their own business and it felt good to just blend in with all of the phone-scrolling citizens. To them, Pakistan is just another finger flick. He opened his briefcase and took out a KitKat bar. This was the first thing he ate in the last three days.
…
"What do Black holes and the Big Bang have in common?", asked Chance at the beginning of his lecture. He was still exhausted after the trip and the emotional toll of it all. Despite this, he was mildly energetic when talking to students about the cosmic dilemmas. "Stephen Hawking dedicated his whole life to the study of Black Holes and the Big Bang because he was interested in discovering the Theory of Everything. Could anyone tell me what this is?"
"Physics is divided into the laws of big objects such as special relativity and the laws of small objects such as quantum mechanics. They are currently incompatible, because special relativity does not work on quantum scale and they may matter behaves at quantum scale is different than how we are used to seeing it behave. It would not be a problem to have two parallel theories working at different scales, however during the Big Bang when all the matter in the universe was compressed into one single point, both quantum mechanics and special relativity had to have clashed. Same goes for the singularities inside of Black Holes – it is an infinitely small point where objects of near infinite mass interact with quantum sized particles.", said Ukrainian exchange student Serghey.
"Indeed. We have no way of glaring inside a Black Hole so there is no method of observing what happens beyond the event horizon. So far, we only have theories. Same goes for the Big Bang. Prior to the explosion, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in an infinitely small point. Spontaneous creation during the Cosmic inflation period is one of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics. From 10-36 seconds until 10-33 seconds, the size of the universe multiplied by a larger factor than in the following 13 billion years. This is what Alan Guth called 'the ultimate free lunch'", said Chance with a very subtle smile.
At the end of the lecture, Serghey together with James and Yuri went to the professor's desk.
"Professor Chance, Yuri told us that you had some family issues in this last weekend and were not feeling too well. In light of this, our class decided to organize a weekend away from Tokyo. A short class trip and we would like to invite you to join us. Nobody should be alone at a time like this. When you lose someone, it's terrible.", said James.
"I appreciate your efforts, James… I am not sure that this is the best…"
"Do you have other plans, Professor?", asked James.
"No. Not really.", said Chance, quite surprised that he could not come up with a quick excuse.
"Ok then. We will see you on Sunday at 9.00 at the Chiyoda Train station.", said Serghey.
…
Chance's first years were enough to fill in a large lecture hall, but a bunch of them grouped together and became friends. Yuri, James, Serghey and Fermi were among them, but there were other local and foreign students in this company. Yoshi was the one that proposed to take the internationals to have an Onsen experience for the first time in their lives. They chipped in and rented a reasonably priced ryokan in the Yamanashi region, next to Fuji Mountain. They even made sure that the establishment is friendly to international people and can be rented exclusively for the members of one group. Chance, despite his heritage, has never been to an Onsen. He knew about them, but he just never got the opportunity to visit one. Prior to him taking the job as a professor, he was in Japan only for the first 3 years of his life.
They arrived before lunchtime and all of them went to take a warm and relaxing bath. The hot springs were segregated by gender, but eventually they all joined back together for a late lunch. After "Itadakimasu" people reached out to grab the takoyaki, tempura, sashimi and freshly grilled eel. Chance was glad to have accepted this invitation. Yuri was right, being alone is the sure path to self-destruction and being surrounded by people, helped. Chance felt endeared to watch them all have fun. He felt himself, truly belonging for the first time in his life and this really felt like "the ultimate free lunch".
…
"Professor, tell us about your tattoos? Did you get them to help with your graduation exam?", asked Serghey and everybody shared a friendly laugh.
"They might not have been there on the day of my graduation exams, but I assume they will play an important role in my PhD thesis. It's connected to my research."
"What is the topic of your doctoral thesis?", asked Yoshi, "you never mentioned this during our lectures."
"Do you consider our universe finite or infinite, Yoshi?"
"Finite, on behalf of the Big Bang. There is a timeline, with a beginning. Infinite, due to its expansion."
"Yes, but there is no certainty as to the exact moment of birth. There might have been events prior to the Big Bang.", added Ema while reaching out to her cup of Genmaicha.
"Saying 'before the Big Bang' is like saying North of the North Pole. There is no 'before'. Spacetime was created during the Big Bang and unless there is some sort of time outside time, some sort of 'absolute time', there is no point in following the logic of pre-Big Bang arguments", replied James.
"What you are quoting is a theory, James. There are other theories stating that the universe is going through cyclical compression and decompression, so the argument for pre-Big Bang remains valid.", responded Ema.
"Well," interrupted Chance, "it is part of my thesis to touch upon some of these items, but I feel that we are drifting away from the initial focus point. The universe's shape that is either finite or infinite. This was the beginning of our discussion. The universe is ever expanding at an accelerated rate. We are now already at a point in time, when 94% of all observable universe is inaccessible to us, due to its expansion faster than the speed of light. How is this possible you may ask? The stretching of spacetime itself is not subject to the speed of light limit. Even if we invent a rocket, that is able to travel at 99, (many nines) % the speed of light, we will be unable to reach the greater part of the galaxies in our universe.
My research, however does not focus on GPS planning humanity's space voyages, but rather asks the question of 'what is the universe expanding into?' What is beyond the accelerating expansion border? This is my area of study and my life's mission is to find the answer to this question."
"Well then let us help you. I am certain that all our topics will converge at some point. We need to pick our research topic for the final thesis. Let's work on merging all of them into one giant research project.", proposed Fermi. "My topic is related to habitable planet systems. Yoshi is thinking of writing about Black Hole radiation and how the new James Webb telescope can lead to new findings about them. Ema is writing about ancient stars that were created very early in the immediate post-Big Bang period. We can investigate these topics together, collect data, contract supercomputers for advanced mathematical calculations and so on."
"I was already considering this", said Chance. "Give me a bit more time, and I will be able to share with you more details about my ongoing project."
He realized that once Yuri knew about his skills, it was just a matter of time before one or another student starts suspecting his unusual behavior. The concept of a hive mind, means many brains connected to the same problem, finding solutions together. Chance was beginning to suspect that he needed more help in understanding his own skills potential. In order to avoid oversights such as the Pakistan incident, he needed to double or triple check his experiments before performing them.
These people, his class, were some of the smartest he ever met and coincidentally the only people he knew in Japan. Even students from Japan, rarely live in the same place they grew up in. The foreign students and the local students and Chance they all were living far from home. They all needed a support system of friends and people they trust. What Chance felt when spending time with his students was a deep sense of understanding and compassion. Of course, he had his own wild dream, but these students each had their own dream that may not necessarily be less crazy or less grand.
He smiled, as everyone was still busy with post-lunch snacking and talking all kinds of odd topics. Soon enough, he would tell them about his masterplan. The ultimate space exploration team-up.