Universe Beta[1]
"Norimoto… Kimura Norimoto."
"Are you her next of kin? Or perhaps her guardian?", asked the male nurse that was filling in Yuri's registration form.
"No, sir. I was on my way to visit my son and this young lady happened to be in front of his apartment door. She fainted and I called an ambulance.", answered Mr. Norimoto quite precisely.
The doctor glanced at Mr. Norimoto suspiciously of how he happened to be the only eye witness to this girl fainting. He was on his way to call the police, but as he looked back on the hallway, Mr. Norimoto was already gone.
…
Chance arrived back on Earth and landed in his California basecamp. He packed the water samples for lab testing and sent out samples to a lab in Sacramento and then took an extra sample to be tested anonymously in Tokyo. His archeological journey was just beginning and he had great ambitions for his new Mars project. At the same time, the international investigation was brewing all sorts of new video evidence about his latest deeds. The Pakistani house fixings were caught on video by some teenagers and ended up as fan made TikTok video. The Chinese disclosed private information about the lunar site photographs showing unusual activity there and trying to connect it to the supposed orbit jump that caused the Pakistani flooding. Now the NASA team was also contributing to this project with the Curiosity Rover footage of Chance creating strange structures on Mars. "Man-made" was the final verdict and Chance became the subject of an international terrorist hunt.
…
Kimura Norimoto was born in Okinawa in the 1950s. After the end of the second world war the Ryukyu and Daito Islands, known today as the Okinawa prefecture, were under US military control. In his teens, Kimura was passionate about photography and one of his first jobs was as a photo reporter. Japanese newspapers from Okinawa were subject to rigorous screening so as to filter out all potentially radical messages. Kimura became one of the best photography developers of their team. He spent most days and nights in the darkroom, where he honed his craft. His skills earned him quite a reputation, however the newspaper industry was in decline due to the rising popularity of new media. On the day that their print shop closed down, Kimura received an interesting invitation letter to come work at the Kadena Air Base. Kimura never replied and instead burnt the letter in secret, afraid that his family would find out about this recruitment attempt. Working for the US government, would be seen as treason and shameful. This experience was so traumatizing for Kimura, that he decided to leave his family and seek employment far away on the main island of Honshu. The best development chemicals and camera producer at the time was Fuji, and Kimura set his mind to finding employment at their company at any cost. He took a janitor job at their factory in Tokyo and every night he was studying on his own, hoping to one day get an opportunity to prove himself. After more than six years, he managed to get enrolled onto an unpaid traineeship program at Fuji's production facility that was in dire need of blue-collar workers. Years later, after assiduous work he managed to climb the ladder all the way to head of operations in the development chemicals department. The promotion was awarded to him on his fortieth birthday.
…
As an Okinawan immigrant in Tokyo, Kimura was always seen as an outsider and was never fully trusted by his peers. In the first years after he moved to Tokyo, he tried to get his documents adjusted so as to exclude any mention of his birthplace. Kimura was trying to erase everything about his identity that did not fit in including his accent, his manner of speaking and even his skin tone. Without a university degree and with his provincial flare, Kimura felt that this promotion was the absolute most he could get in terms of a career at this company. His devotion, loyalty and hard work were rewarded with a new contract that would start now and end at his retirement. For many this would represent the peak of their career, the top of Fuji Mountain, but Kimura could not escape the sentiment that this was his dead end. He would be stuck in this job for the next decades with no chance of ever being promoted again no matter how good he'd perform. This bittersweet victory felt like a moral defeat that he did not dare express or show so as not to be perceived as ingratitude. His work colleagues took him out on that Saturday, after work, to celebrate his promotion. They all had dinner and got completely wasted on sake. Kimura left earlier and was walking on the busy streets of night Tokyo when he stumbled upon a karaoke bar. He was taught English in school, but he has been so afraid to speak it in the last twenty years that he nearly forgot it. Nonetheless, he entered and requested an old song that he half remembered the lyrics to and the DJ put "Fly me to the moon" by Frank Sinatra. Kimura sang horribly, but it got the attention of a young Australian lady that serendipitously happened to also be a huge Sinatra fan.
…
Kimura would often reminisce in the memories of their romantic encounter and the unbelievable odds of them meeting. Two strangers from two different worlds, in that one stupidly random karaoke salon. When someone asked him if he'd ever been married, he'd answer with: "Sometimes fairy tales have happy endings and in other cases only happy beginnings…". They got married and decided to start a family in Japan, where Sam accepted to remain for the time being. Their marriage crumbled and they separated eventually, but from all this seemingly endless chain of misfortunes and darkness, one good thing came. Like a hopeful ray of light, their son, Norimoto Tiberius Chance.
…
Chance was back in Tokyo for his afternoon class and he noticed that Yuri was missing. During his lecture he was talking about black holes.
"Mysterious objects in our universe that have been theorized by Albert Einstein. These objects have high gravity and they are the universe's vacuum-cleaners. They suck in matter and compress it to infinite density. The pull of a black hole does not allow even light to escape its interior and this is the way it got its name. If someone were to enter a black hole, passing its event horizon (the point of no return) they would be turned into spaghetti by the incredible gravity. Space and time get compressed in its nucleus and this turns into a singularity – the point where certain properties such as mass and density become infinite. Singularity can also mean, the place where laws of physics are broken.
What good is a law, if it cannot predict an outcome? Nobody knows what really happens at the center of the black hole. It is impossible to see inside, to send in any kinds of probes or radio wave transmitters. It is impossible to get information from inside any black hole and due to this and all theories of what is inside of it are just theories. Speculation."
After his lecture, he vanished onto his next adventure. Day in day out, he'd be exploring various places inside the solar system. He was cave exploring on Mars in search for bacteria or any other traces of life, but to no avail. The lab tested water samples came in and the water was indeed safe to drink. The deeper he dug into the Martian crust, the warmer it got and after about 1000 meters the first fossils were found. Strange insects, sea critters, petrified tree bark pieces and his greatest find, a giant tooth. These were casually displayed in his university office after being carefully cleaned and put into sealed glass containers. Chance used an online service to radiocarbon date his artefacts. For a small fee, the lab would send small containers in which to put the pieces of organic material and they'd estimate its age based on the radioactive isotope of the carbon inside it.
Chance was humming the "Singing in the rain song" as he was opening his see-through umbrella to take a stroll through the acid rains of Venus. He went diving in the oceans of Jupiter's moon, Europa where he ended up swimming with the gigantic sea moles. These strange creatures had features of both sea turtles and white whales, and their bodies looked like ancient Cambodian temples moving slowly underwater. There were perhaps five or six such creatures in the whole of Europa and Chance assumed that they were the only creatures to live on this satellite planet. On some days he was comet hunting and searching for diamond-filled asteroids. On other he went skiing on the icy peaks of Pluto and skating on the flattened rings of Saturn.
…
Yuri woke up and tried to remember what happened to her. She was dressed in a white hospital robe, naked underneath, in a cold corridor. After getting up from the bed, she walked to the counter and asked for a doctor. The last checkup proved to be useless and the doctors could not find an explanation for what happened to her other than her being overwhelmed by stress. She was bored with their lecturing, but she wanted her things back and it was part of the procedure. As she was exiting the hospital, she stopped by a cigarette vending machine and bought herself a pack. The dark clouds looming over her mind have cleared away and she was puffing carelessly toward the sunny sky.
"Good morning. May I please speak to you for a few minutes, young lady?", said Kimura as he approached her. He had been waiting for hours at a nearby coffee place hoping to see her leave the hospital.
"Good morning. I feel like I've seen you before, grandpa. How can I be of help?"
"I was the one that called the ambulance on you. My name is Norimoto Kimura."
"Yes. Thank you…", whispered Yuri with a voice that half-wanted to have been left there lying on the floor of the apartment building. She felt gloomy when remembering the moment of her fainting.
"If I may ask, why were you at my son's apartment? Are you, his girlfriend?"
Yuri was shocked by the question and could not answer straight away. She shook her head so as to deny this allegation, but could not come up with an alternative answer. There was so much to talk about, however at that moment she was at a loss for words. Her facial expression was saying that something terrible had happened in connection with Chance, and Kimura caught this hint.
It started to rain and they sought cover.
"… I have not seen him in more than twenty-seven years. Sam, his mother, we got separated and she took the boy with her. I always thought that this was for a few months until she'd get better but, my hope was in vain. Even today, I have no clue as to where she is anymore and Chance… I learned of his coming back to Japan through a short letter that he sent me. He wrote that he now worked at Tokyo University and he would like to meet me. I got the letter and rushed to the address written, but his apartment was empty and then I saw you… entering the same apartment expecting to find someone there and then fainting… I don't know now how to find him anymore. Yuri, perhaps you have an idea of where he could be now. This is why I waited for you here. Forgive me if this was not appropriate, but I have no other way of contacting my long-lost son."
"I'm sorry. At the moment, I also don't know where he is… but there is something about him that you need to know.", said Yuri nervously pulling her fingers as she was getting ready to confess to Mr Norimoto of what happened to Chance in the last months. She needed to get this off her chest. For too much time, she carried this burden alone…
…
"There are six billion Earth-like planets in the Milky way galaxy, alone. So, why have we not encountered any aliens until now? If we think of Earth, our cosmic footprint is incredibly small. There are few clues to our existence spread out throughout our neighborhood. Think of the Voyager 1 project, the space probe launched by NASA in 1977 to explore the outside of our solar system. It has been travelling for more than 45 years at speeds reaching more than 60,000 km/h and it still did not exit the solar system. It is now at about 23 billion km away from Earth and it is still sending back signals. If we consider our solar system limit to be the outermost orbit of planet Pluto, then Voyager 1 is the first man made craft to have exited into interstellar space. However, if we consider the solar system to be the total area of solar influence, then the Oort cloud is the farthest region of our solar system. It is a belt of mountain sized icy-rocks, more like a solar system shield, that is in the gravity field of the sun. The Voyager 1 is expected to leave the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 YEARS…
Imagine this, in the distant future, when humanity masters interstellar travel from solar system to solar system, a family travelling in a vessel might leave a distant system and travel back to visit relatives in our solar system. Their children will be eager to get there faster and they will ask their parents constantly questions like 'are we there yet?' and their parents would answer something like 'we just exited the Oort cloud, so we're almost home…'. This is the sort of cosmic distances we are talking about. Now related to aliens, there is a needle in the giant cosmic haystack chance that they will track Voyager 1 and this will be clue to us being here, on Earth. Our civilization barely has the tool to detect other systems… even if there would be an interstellar probe, lost in some solar system cloud, we would almost certainly never find it.
Our only option would be to spot signs of an extremely advance civilization that has mastered its environment and is influencing the space around it. We'd be looking for Dyson spheres – huge megastructures built by theoretical type 2 civilizations (Kardashev) for capturing most if not all of a star's energy. Of course, there could be alien civilizations that are so advanced, that we cannot see them nor distinguish them from the universe itself…"
Before finishing this last thought, Chance was hit by a sleep dart from a silenced pneumatic gun. It was shot by an undercover agent that was sitting in his lecture hall waiting for the right moment to strike. They had him immobilized and disarmed, and as soon as he gave the signal in his walkie, a group of spec ops militaries entered the classroom causing lots of panic and screaming. "Everything is all right; we are just here to apprehend a world renown terrorist. Stay calm and we will be gone before you know it." After picking the professor on his shoulder, the agents left the building and boarded a helicopter. They flew him over to the Okinawa Airbase.
...
[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. His actions on the Moon and planet Mars gets unwanted attention and he is declared a global threat to humanity by the federal investigators. Probability of universe destruction estimated at 100%.