Ordinary days. Thomas had no idea how much he would miss them, when he woke up on what appeared to be an exemplar of the type. A fumbling hand silenced his alarm clock, and he arose reluctantly, noting the fingers of light peeking into the room from beneath the window curtains, highlighting with glittering gold the various motes of dust drifting through the air.

Had he any inkling what was coming, Thomas might have paid more attention to his apartment that morning, as he bumbled about, showering and dressing and avoiding Persha's attempts to wind about his feet. Certainly he would have spent more time rubbing his cat's silky black fur, given more attention to the food he was setting out, the water dish he added a splash of water to, uncaring when droplets sprinkled the kitchen floor tiles.

A simple bowl of cereal, with a bit of chocolate milk mix sprinkled over the top, would certainly not have been his choice for his last breakfast in that apartment. Then again, perhaps it might - had he known he would be moving out, had he been planning and arranging, boxing his collection of slightly gaudy and certainly not fight-worthy swords, his aging but still reliable computer, his shelves of books, anime, manga, and videos, well, there might not have been much else in the apartment to eat. As it was though, he certainly had the ingredients, though perhaps not the time, for a nice bacon and egg and toast breakfast, whose absence he would soon regret.

Between his evening classes and his daily work, however, his schedule offered no such time for morning frivolity, for sitting and pampering his pet, for enjoying a long hot shower, or lingering over a well-cooked breakfast, and so he hurried through his perfectly ordinary morning, slipping out of the apartment and clattering down the exterior steps only three quarters of an hour after he had dragged himself unwillingly from his bed.

No-one knows what the next day will bring, it is sometimes said, but for Thomas, each day brought much the same as it had the day before. To be sure, as with most people, there had been upheavals, times of great change, as when he left his parents' home for his first dorm, or later his first and second apartments, but these were akin to the punctuated equilibrium theory of speciation - sudden sharp changes separated by long dull expanses of monotony.

That is not to say that Thomas found his life boring, or unrewarding. He lived a life of quiet satisfaction, enjoying his work for a small local ISP--Internet Service Provider--and in spite of not yet having a job befitting his Computer Science degree, enjoying his evening classes as he worked towards a second degree. He made little enough, on the whole, but his expenses were few and his savings were slowly growing, and he could afford to pay his internet and electrical bill each month, which provided plenty of entertainment.

Had you asked him whether he saw things changing anytime soon, he would have laughed. Change was not in the cards for him, as he saw it, for several years. If he had possessed the fortitude to do a double-major off the bat, things might have been different, and he might be even now employed at a university doing computer work in a physics department, but taking the maths and the sciences together had seemed daunting, so he was years away still, at a part-time student pace, from that second degree, and he was comfortable and happy at his job.

Oh, certainly some of his coworkers would likely leave before then, driven slightly mad by the incessant and often ridiculous demands of clients who could not understand that their equipment needed to be plugged together to operate, or that the ISP was not the purveyor of and responsible for whatever site they managed to wander to on a given day, but Thomas weathered it calmly enough, and found the vagaries of their customers more amusing than infuriating.

Thomas' expectations, of an ordinary day, of an ordinary life, of a tomorrow that was much like today, were not to be, because today, on this perfectly ordinary day, Thomas bumped into someone who was perhaps as far from ordinary as can be imagined.

When walking down the street, most people know intellectually, if not emotionally, that everyone they see has their own lives, their own issues, and that when someone is in a hurry, or bumps into you, they are probably not doing it intentionally, or maliciously, that they are probably preoccupied with their own issues and don't mean it as a personal slight.

Sometimes though, the person you bump, or are bumped by, has a different motive. Maybe they aren't willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and seek to make an issue of it. Perhaps they are a pickpocket, or working with one, and seek to distract your attention. Sometimes, their reactions can seem startling, or out-of-place, highlighting that they are not quite part of the same society you are, that they don't abide by the same cultural rules as you.

Thomas apologized practically by instinct when he bumped into someone while paying too much attention to an altercation happening next to a minor fender-bender, the two drivers of the involved cars making a bit of a ruckus, but even as he turned towards the person he had impacted, "I'm so sorry, I . . ."

He stopped mid-word. It was not the hateful black glare of the infuriated stranger that choked off his speech, nor the faint otherworldly appearance of the . . . man? . . . but the sudden and instantaneous change in his surroundings. The sound of the altercation, the rumble of city streets, the smell of exhaust, the low hum of conversations all about, it all vanished in an instant, replaced by an overwhelming heat and humidity. Sweat beaded on his forehead, running into his eyes almost before his words fell into silence, and all about was green and brown, the ground had gone spongy beneath his feet, and spots swam before his eyes, and the stranger, the angry, sneering face of someone looking at a piece of slime they were scraping off their shoe choked at his breath.

"Sniveling monkey," the man snapped, his eyes lit with smug satisfaction. "How dare you touch me!"

Thomas struggled for words, but it was as if the stranger's gaze was a weight on his chest, a physical mass pressing him down, so that he would have looked to his feet in fear he was sinking into mire, were his gaze not held fast.

The man's sneer lightened a tiny fraction. "Ah, but it is not sporting to merely crush the weak . . . nor as amusing. One word, monkey. You monkeys love your superheroes, with their ridiculous one-dimensional pretence of omnipotence. One word, and I'll give you that power, and we'll see if it does you any good, with your witless mind. What will it be? Strength? Speed? Fire?"

Omnipotence, thought Thomas, startled, but that's self-contradictory from the start. He very nearly blurted out the common philosophical question of omnipotence, of whether God could create something so heavy he could not lift it. He gulped, thinking furiously. Tempted though he was to actually say "Omnipotence" it was blatantly obvious that the stranger would happily squash him if he was not finding something amusing in this. In a panic he tried to think what his chances would be if he said strength, or speed, or. . .

A rumbling crash sounded in the middle distance, along with loud rustling, like something big pushing through brush, as Thomas' eyes darted about, trying to take in the oddly jungle-like surroundings.

"Almost out of time," the stranger said tauntingly, "and that sounds quite large." He seemed almost happy at the thought that Thomas might be about to be eaten, or crushed, or what - what were his chances? That was it!

"Probability!" Thomas blurted, and the stranger frowned, then snapped his fingers.

"Clever monkey, but have you the wit to use it?" He sneered, and snapped his fingers again and vanished, leaving Thomas to stare bewildered at his surroundings and the sounds of something that seemed ever larger and nearer.

It was a forest, or jungle, that was clear. The ground was spongy but hidden away beneath a thick carpet of tall ferns, while strange trees towered overhead, but for a jungle, where were all the vines?

His head swimming with dizziness, and blackness threatening at the edges of his vision, as if he had been hyperventilating though his breathing sounded slower than normal to his ears, though perhaps that was just time behaving strangely in his panic, Thomas tried to focus on the sounds, desperately hoping that the stranger, whatever it had been, had genuinely been powerful enough, even if omnipotence was a logical impossibility, to give him some kind of influence over probability.

What were his chances of surviving that thing? Dismal. Somehow he actually knew that his chances were barely registering. What was the chance that it was coming for him? Overwhelming. What was the chance that it might be distracted before it reached him? Ah! There it was, a glimmer of hope, a faint thread of possibility, like a silvery vision before him. It had to be stronger! It had to be more probable, more, it had to happen!

A massive cry, not a roar of a lion or trumpeting of a bull elephant as he half expected, but something more like the piercing single note of an eagle, but immensely loud, sounded a short distance away, and the sound of the trampling changed, and he desperately refocused. His chances of survival were still slender, but greater, and as he turned about, he could feel the shift in those chances as he considered different directions.

Had it taken anything from him to shift the probabilities? Had he even affected them? Or was this just a fever-dream, or madness? He stumbled along the path, twisting his head back and forth, groping almost blindly along the path of increasing probability, struggling up the slope of his own survival. It was a harrowing experience, as the path was narrow and as he scanned from side to side, he received glimpses of his own near-certain demise. Worse yet was the nature of those deaths, as he fell victim to predators that simply should not exist, things that he was certain were dinosaurs, like downy-feathered knife-toothed birds.

Finally, he found a hollow deep in the ferns beneath a fallen tree that lay propped up against another, where the probability of his death was at least no longer imminent. It was still shifting and wavering as if the forest still sought to kill him, and he could hardly bear to look away from it at all, for fear it would become all but certain while he was not looking at it.

He wanted to climb a tree, it felt safer to his mind, but even glancing at them with the thought in mind conjured visions of his death. He was not sure what the larger predators were, but they seemed impossibly tall, and getting up a tree, where he would be visible to them, seemed a guaranteed death sentence.

Still, he could not, simply must not do nothing but use his power to stare at his own death. The only way out of this would be to use the one thing he had, as a human, for his defense, his brain. Unfortunately, he had no practical survival experience to speak of, no camping or living off the land to back him up, and though he was in moderately good shape and still young and healthy, that would mean little if he got sick or broke a limb. The simple fact was that a squishy human with no tools in the time of the dinosaurs was little more than a snack, so there was only so much fighting with the probability of his death could do. He would have to sleep sometime.

He wanted so much to cry, to break down, to sob at the unfairness of it, to scream at the bastard that had stranded him here, and for what?! A casual bump on the street? How many people had been vanished by that thing? Making any sound at all, though, would likely be fatal - as of course, would merely remaining here for too long.

He had to think and hope and pray that his wit could manage something, whether the bastard believed it or not. He did have a kernel of real hope now. If he was not insane, then he was seeing and manipulating probabilities, which meant the bastard was at least potent, if perhaps not truly omnipotent, insanely potent. He dared not dig in his pockets for any loose change he might be carrying, for fear of the noise, but his sweat would do.

He held his hand closer to himself, so that the sweat dripping from his hair could fall upon it, and for a brief instant, as a drop fell, allowed his focus to shift from the probability of his death to the probable path of the droplet. It was as if his hand was momentarily covered by the silvery slime of a thousand slugs, glimmering in moonlight. As soon as the drop had passed he shifted his attention back to survival, then back for the next droplet, confirming that the brightest path he saw tended to be the one the droplet took, though the brightnesses shifted continually, probably in response to the minute involuntary shifting of his hand and the currents of air.

On the third droplet, he pushed, willing the path along the back of his hand and between his thumb and forefinger, down the web of skin to become the brightest, and watched the droplet follow the path. Three more times he did this, before allowing it to wander again and refocusing on his survival again.

Time was up, and the thread of his survival drew him out of his hiding place and back on the move. He was sure now that he was not breathing too fast. Indeed, if anything, his breaths were coming slower than normal, deep and slow, yet still blackness threatened, and spots came and went, and his mind raced furiously.

It was exhausting, swinging his head back and forth, and after a short distance, he found a better method. This ability the bastard had granted him, apparently, was somewhat adaptive, and when he focused on finding the path of the greatest and increasing probability of survival, without trying to look around, he found he was able to sense it as a pull, a directional sensation. He followed it with relief at the ability to rest his neck, but a slowly growing sense of frustration. He had needed that rest but it had not been long enough. He knew it was not enough to simply follow the path of the greatest chance of survival. It was akin to following a temperature gradient, and he knew from his studies in both computer science and physics that merely following a gradient would lead to a local maximum, but there were no guarantees that it would be anything close to a global maximum, or that such a local maximum would be very high at all.

There was nothing for it, though, as long as it kept him on the move. Finally, he found another shelter, again in the ferns beneath a crumbling hillside. It was almost certainly the den of some animal, and probably one that could eat him, but for now his power claimed it was safe enough.

What could he do with probability that would give him a genuine chance for survival? Seeing probabilities of possible actions was all well and good, but it was not the same as suggesting actions. Could he segregrate his chances? He tried to focus on the chance of dying from something other than an animal attack, and then slowly pushed aside the next, and next, and next most common ways of dying, while trying to push further out in time. If he could get around the animals and poison and food and water, could he survive a year? Two years? Five - no.

He stared in blind and utter horror, finally understanding what the bastard had been smirking about. Those probably were tyrannosaurs he had seen himself being eaten by - he vaguely recalled that they were one of the few, along with the triceratops, that were accurately placed in the numerous portrayals of the end of the dinosaurs. He had only five years to not only find a way to survive all those hazards, but to somehow survive a near world-ending cataclysm.

One at Sufficient Velocity - it was an amusing maxim when encountered online, but much less so when you were the target. He had little doubt that he was very near the strike point - if this was some Earth analog, he was presumably in what would eventually be southern Mexico, near the Yucatán peninsula. Or maybe not, he might simply be somewhere that was in the strike zone of the tsunami that would result from the impact; regardless, he was surely somewhere that was scheduled for a smiting worthy of an angry god, placed there by a malevolent bastard and given a power said bastard was reasonably certain would be pointless.

Well, he was lucky - if it could be called that when you were the one warping the probabilities - to have a power that could at least let him know that he had a time limit. Five years to . . . he stared up at the sky, trying to see the probable path of the impactor, and found several lines instead of one appearing in the sky, like silvery portents of doom. They were not wavering, there was no shifting or sliding, no alternate paths he might nudge things too - clearly, they were not scheduled to interact with any other heavenly bodies in any way that might have a material effect on their course.

He almost tried to push the probability lines, but held up just before, struck by another chance. Instead of trying to see the probability of the impact, he tried to see the probability of his successfully changing the probability of impact. That too was a probability, right? There was no nice line for this, no easy visualization, but he did get the sense of the answer, and it was not encouraging, especially when just considering it pinged the 'chance of dying' fear that lurked in the back of his mind. He stepped back one further step, and considered the probability of his dying from trying to shift the probability of the impactors striking the planet. Utter certainty.

It was a horrifying thing, to feel an utter certainty of your own demise, far worse than merely seeing his probable demise, and unfortunately, it confirmed for him his suspicion that the bastard's claim that he would be given a narrow slice of omnipotence was a sham. Whether his own claim to omnipotence was likewise a sham was not as certain, but clearly, what he had given to Thomas was not an all-powerful ability to manipulate probability.

Still, it was something very nearly prophetic in nature, and something that could, as he had just demonstrated, be potentially queried for information. Knowledge was a power in its own right, and a power that could grant knowledge could be leveraged. He did not necessarily have to alter the asteroid's path directly, or the probability of its path, if he could find alternatives, and he had five years.

Unfortunately, he also had to survive, and his glance back at the probability of his own demise sent him back to a panicked scramble through the undergrowth before the owner of his momentary dwelling returned. He had lingered too long, his scent would be too strong even as he left, and whenever he considered stopping, his mind filled with his looming death. One after another schemes ran through his head, and he considered his chances at each, until finally he hit upon a path, and swiftly followed it, guiding his hunter to an encounter with something scarier than itself, and sending it off his tail.

The sky was beginning to darken and Thomas was teary-eyed, his mouth dry in spite of the sweat that still poured uselessly down his skin, the air too moist and the wind too light to give him any cooling from evaporation, and his side stitched with pain, when he finally found another hiding place. Though he had not been able to rest, after losing the first predator from his trail his flight had become less panicked and he had been able to think and plan, and layering his thoughts of probabilities had confirmed one of his hopes.

His Philosophy of Science class had just a few days before had a discussion of Ludwig Boltzmann, and his peculiar and, Thomas had thought, somewhat ridiculous idea of Boltzmann Brains, the idea that in a genuinely infinite universe, a nearly infinite expanse of time lay beyond the heat death of the universe as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and that in that infinite expanse, purely random fluctuations must eventually produce any possible combination of particles, up to and including fully sentient beings with complete histories but no actual past. Whether that was true or meaningful Thomas had no idea, but he latched on now to the idea that however improbable, there was at least a tiny probability that the second law could be temporarily violated. It was a statistical law, not an absolute. It was infinitely more likely that things would become more disorganized, but there remained a tiny probability that they could become more organized instead.

It was partially this conversation that had caused him to latch on so strongly to the answer of probability when facing the Bastard's question, and partially the knowledge that Quantum Dynamics said that everything was probabilities at the bottom-most level, that there was no hidden reality, no hidden variables beneath the probability amplitudes that described quantum behavior, that had given him hope that he might have found an answer, a power that would not leave him missing something fundamentally necessary to escape.

Now, he had verified it by checking the probability that his attempt to manipulate probabilities would succeed, then that it would leave him alive, then whether it would leave him conscious, then whether it would lead to his imminent demise shortly thereafter, and when he reached his new temporary safety, even as he took the final step, he pushed as hard as he could on the likelihood that he would find a small bean plant in that space.

He very nearly blacked out from the strain of it, and he fell forward, but his hands became entangled in vines, something he had not seen anywhere thus far. Scrabbling at the vine, his fingers slid frantically across it until he found a pod, and thrust it into his mouth, crunching down. His movements slowed as darkness took him, chewing even as he collapsed.

His body finally swallowed reflexively, and a rush of energy ran through him. He sat up, his vision clearing and strength filling his tired limbs. He carefully combed through the bush, mentally blessing his appreciation of Japanese anime, and collected the senzu bean pods. Coming from the tales of Dragonball, where a single bean could feed a man for 10 days, and heal someone that was near death, he had hardly dared believe it when his power estimated his chances of succeeding in pushing the probability of their being randomly present in this spot as a certainty, though the probability of his remaining conscious enough to eat one had been poor. It had been well worth the chance, though, as without something like this, some real advantage, he would not likely have been able to continue to survive for very long anyway.

No longer tired to the point of collapsing, he slipped all the pods but one into his pockets, carefully peeling open the last pod, and extracting the two beans within it. In the anime, the beans were very hard to grow, and grew very slowly, but the mere fact that he was here in some random world so clearly not his own was enough to tell him that the multiverse hypothesis, at least one of them, must be true. Given that, and the fact that he knew multiversal travel was a possibility, well, that was yet another probable infinity, possibly even a larger infinity than the eternity that stretched beyond the heat death of the universe. That an omnipotent or nearly so being existed that could so strand him meant that effectively, something equivalent to what would in his world be considered supernatural or magical effects clearly existed as well.

Now, he pondered creating different things, and then the probability of his falling unconscious or dying, and discovered that, at least at the moment, there were definite limits on his ability to push the world, probability wise. Causing the probability that there was a Death Star currently in orbit in the path of the asteroids or comet to reach a certainty would kill him without ever reaching the goal. Pushing the probability that there was a Mars Bar hidden in the dirt at his feet to a certainty would kill him, but doing the same to a Mars Bar that he had stuffed in his pocket and forgotten about would hardly cause a strain, even though they were the same size, mass, and so forth.

So there was something about the prior probability of things that influenced the challenge of the act. Probability-warping a potato into his hand was prohibitive and would probably knock him out but not kill him, but an edible potato-like tuber in the ground nearby would be trivially easy.

Causing the sweat dripping down his face to slide towards and off the tip of his nose - easy. Causing it to flow backwards up his head, without tilting his head back? Hard.

Yet seeing the probability of something seemed nearly free, hardly a strain at all, and increasing the likelihood of something when there was already a possible path, by taking the paths likeliest to produce it was likewise nearly free.

There was a scale issue too, though. He could, if he chose, force that potato to appear, though it would knock him out to do it, while he could not force the Death Star, or even an airplane, to appear without the effort killing him before he succeeded. That was dreadfully important, because the next thing he wanted to appear was miniscule, sub-microscopic in fact, and could have been picked up from contact with the near-omnipotent being or in the transition, so was not inherently ridiculously improbable.

It was also taking a somewhat ridiculous chance, but then, what else was a power over probabilities good for? Thomas pushed the probability that he had inadvertently, at some point in the past most likely, though it was not important when, become infected with the nanite precursor to an end-of-tech-tree-type utility cloud to a certainty, then popped a bean in his mouth and crunched it as a defense against the probable unconsciousness that would follow. Conceptually, this would be a multi-nanometer scale machine capable of reproducing more machines like itself, and of various other similar patterned machines, that would reproduce without harming him, would maintain his health and once sufficient in number, would produce a utility cloud, an invisible cloud of connected nano-machines around him that could generate a variety of effects.

It was an idea from relatively hard science fiction exploring the possibilities of what was often termed Clark-tech, after Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Thomas thought it might have even been one of his Three Laws, but was not sure, as he might have been getting it confused with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

If he was wrong, it might just consume him utterly in making more of itself, but he had little enough hope of surviving if he did not come up with something to change the rules of his survival, that he was willing to take the chance. And push the chance to a minimum with his power, since eating the bean was indeed enough to stave off his collapse. Exploring the possibilities revealed that for his nanomachines to grow, he needed to provide them sufficient raw materials, since by the rules he set, they could only consume materials in him where such consumption would bring him no harm.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a result, they had settled in his gut, as the best place to get resources that were freely available. Eating dirt was unpalatable, but his power confirmed it would not kill him, and would greatly speed up the cloud's availability. Once the cloud extended beyond his body, they would be able to harvest needed materials from his surroundings, but in the meantime - fighting down his gorge, Thomas ate small bites of the spongy ground material, after pulling off the mossy top-growth.

After a couple of hours, Thomas felt an uncontrollable urge to throw up, and collapsed to his knees, retching. To his surprise, the fluid that came up bore little resemblance to the dirt he had eaten, being transparent, and he felt no acid bite to it. When in spite of that it seemed to eat into the soil, he pushed at his power, testing various probabilities until he determined that it had been a result of the nanites that caused him to throw up his stomach contents, and they were now actively consuming the ground matter in search of the elements they needed.

A fine dry powder began forming at the edges, as they processed the materials, and rejected what they could not use after rendering it inoffensive and harmless.

Realizing that this implied he might lose them entirely if he was forced to move, Thomas focused outward, searching for the probability of anything dangerous approaching his momentary sanctuary. Each such predator soon found itself the recipient of some form of distraction, as Thomas played the lines of probability to clear the area around himself.

When he began to yawn, he realized his mistake, and began focusing on the probability of something approaching him before he awakened, and pushed and pulled at these and their ancillary probabilities until he had reduced them to nearly nothing, and then finally allowed himself to sleep.

Though far from truly comfortable, the spongy ground, made up as best as he could tell by the mixed remains of mosses, dead ferns, and layer upon layer of conifer needles, was soft and supportive, and the beans had if anything cause him to feel more than satiated and full, and had also reduced the parched sensation in his mouth, though he was still conscious of a need to find safe water.

Sleep was quick in coming once he finally gave in to it, the energy the senzu beans had given fading resulting in a perhaps deeper sleep than he would have preferred. The nanites continued their busy growth without his attention, soon rather resembling the underground portion of a fungus, a mycelium as it were of branching threads reaching out and down, seeking needed minerals and other materials. They grew faster than any fungus, however.

The original nanite had contained construction plans for a variety of nanite cells, including ones made primarily from biological material, as they were designed for implantation into living organisms. Even though their initial source material had been mineral-poor, they were able to divide and grow mostly biologically until they reached deeper mineral deposits, at which point more substantive and powerful nanites could be built.

It was some time before the program reached a point where the first nanite itself had been successfully reproduced, but once that point was reached, things proceeded even faster. This was genuine Clark-tech, far beyond the limitations that Thomas' world would have assumed applied to nano-machines. The starting nanite had actually been merely an extrusion into the third dimension or normal space, if you will, of a probe unit from a far more complex structure in its own twisty little universe. The bio-cells lacked this multi-universal structure, and had far more limited energy requirements, as had the first few hundred generations of mineral-based units, but once the original nanite had sufficient materials to reproduce, things shifted into high gear.

Without realizing it, Thomas had created something that in a way, mimicked his own power. If there are genuinely infinite universes, and infinite possibilities, and a Clark-tech nanite like this is one of those possibilities, then a universe containing nothing but the raw materials and energy sources needed by a new nanite must also exist, and it is merely a matter of connecting a new nanite to that universe. But if that universe must exist, then surely a universe where all that raw material just happens to be already constructed and merely missing the third-dimensional extrusion must also exist! By abusing probability in this way, a tiny amount of construction in real-space effectively, magically one might say, connected to a pre-existing and yet brand new system of far greater complexity and power.

Once this limit had been reached, the combination of connecting nanites to completed universes, and to resource universes meant that growth limits vanished nearly instantly, and the nanites went from one to two to billions in only a few minutes. In his sleep, Thomas became the first host of a previously non-existent self-generating system that was nonetheless effectively the end-point of an immense technological development pyramid. In much the same way as a theoretical Boltzmann Brain would come into existence with knowledge of a complete history that it had never actually had, so Thomas moved from a moderate position on a technology tree to an apex, in his sleep.

Theoretically, the original single nanite could have triggered the cascade directly, using the resources it had in its own little universe, but to do so would have entailed a measurable risk of losing its connection to the universe of its new host entity, an unnecessary risk.

As he slept, the nanites went about their pre-programmed work, correcting defects in Thomas' body both minor and major, from skin damage from his long day in the sun, to a genetic defect that increased the likelihood of his children's children having a birth defect. That was far from the limit of their changes, however.

Exploration

He awoke with startling ease and comfort when the sun invaded his little sanctuary. Sitting up, he noticed that there was more grey dust about, but not as much as he had expected, and the clear liquid was gone. To his surprise, in spite of going to sleep with a need for water, and sleeping in the open, his mouth was not unpleasantly dry, nor did he awake with a full bladder, or a need for a bowel movement. He rubbed his teeth, and found them to be squeaky clean.

Glancing about, he poked at his power, and found to his surprise that his survival that day was a near certainty. He considered climbing one of the trees, and it remained high. He probed the probability of seeking out one of the maybe-tyrannosaurs, and found his probability of survival remained nearly certain. Afraid that his power had gone out of whack over night, he pushed forward five years, following his pattern from the previous day, and found that the impact event was still certain, but was now rated as probably survivable!

It took a bit of poking around with differing probability patterns before he managed to confirm to himself that it was the utility cloud's completion that was responsible for the massive increase in his probable survival. Free now of his existential turmoil, Thomas finally screamed.

He begged, he cried, he cursed the bastard that had left him here and begged God to take him home. He was finally brought out of it, when a curious dinosaur bleeped at him at point-blank range, as it tried to bite him. It was a comical sight, as if it were a cat or dog scrabbling at a glass door, its jaw gaping wide as it tried to push forward. He did not feel any pressure or strain, the utility cloud was effortlessly transferring the force to the ground behind him. It was not a tyrannosaur, he was fairly certain, or if it was, it was quite young, since it stood only about a meter taller than himself. It was definitely a raptor, very bird-like in its appearance and posture, something like a tailed, toothy and ridiculously oversized ostrich, except that its neck and tail were far thicker and its jaws substantially more muscular than any bird he knew.

Experimentally, he reached forward. Unlike the beast, his hand was unimpeded, and the beast was pushed away as he reached for it, kept at a minimum distance. Dropping his hand, he tested to see if he had the control he expected of the cloud. Could he use the cloud to push the dinosaur further back? He could indeed. He could even reach out and hold its jaw shut without moving, effortlessly, though once it jerked back and moved several yards away, he felt his control slip, and the beast bleeped at him again, before snorting and scratching at the ground, as if contemplating a charge. It was not, though, for it moved rapidly away, and he was reminded that it was more bird-like than mammal-like. Interpreting its actions and behaviors as those of a mammal could have gotten him in trouble, were he not now the possessor of a nearly magical technology that had been barely theoretical on his own world.

He played with the cloud a bit, his fit of despair and rage having passed for now, and he practiced pushing and pulling the ferns, then moving the dirt about where the cloud had removed the top layer. He could easily imagine a bulldozer blade as he effortlessly shoved dirt back and forth.

Finally, he tried pushing one of the trees - much to his shock, he was able to easily push down the massive conifer, its roots tearing from the ground and sending it crashing to the forest floor. It was sobering, watching it fall.

After that, he found he did not want to play with the cloud's ability to apply physical force anymore, and turned to the other functions he thought such a thing might be able to perform. Not the cloud itself, per se, but the nanite flood within his body, such a thing ought to be able to link to the nervous system, would presumably have already done so, and so he ought to be able to get basically a virtual heads up display, like a high-end augmented reality system.

It seemed obvious enough, since the system already seemed to be responding to his thoughts and intentions, and sure enough, he was able to place imaginary objects within his field of view, and see them as if they were perfectly real, from a cow, to a helicopter, to a hot dog stand. In fact, they were so real, that he was not at all certain whether they were images being fed to his brain, or actual objects made by the utility cloud. As soon as he had the thought though, they flickered, and occasional visible scan-lines of additional brightness ran down them, fulfilling his own internal expectations of something more like a hologram.

It did bring up the idea of conjuring real things though, and the first thing he attempted was a cup of water. He was not sure on the cup bit, though if they could stop the dinosaur, the cloud could probably hold water even if it had to feed him an illusion of a cup. And he was hopeful that capturing and distilling water from the air would be feasible. Much to his shock, something more akin to a Star Trek transporter effect happened, and a simple, solid cup filled with water appeared in his hand!

He played around a bit more, reshaping the cup on the fly, confirming that it had been dynamically created, and not just magically summoned from somewhere. He could imagine where the water could have come from, considering the intense humidity, but whence the cup itself, which appeared to be porcelain? What was it actually made of?

He attempted to create a block of gold, and to his astonishment, it materialized with no more effort than the cup. After that, he created a chair and sat and started working on the heads-up interface, trying to get a computer style interface to the nanites so he could find out something about their methods. It took some time, but eventually he managed to come up with a sort of query interface. The answers were more visions than words, but eventually he got the idea that this stuff was being pulled from other universes, that the obvious violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics he was seeing were accomplished Clarke-tech style by violating the underlying principle of a closed system.

Neither conservation of energy nor momentum were of much significance when you could simply exchange energy or momentum with other universes. Perhaps they were still being conserved, on some scale far larger than these multiple universes, but from the perspective of the universe he was sitting it, they were no longer conserved quantities. It was beyond him to understand the details, much less what all the implications might be, though he knew some of them.

He briefly considered trying now to find a way to prevent the impacts, but thought better of it. Five years was far too short a notice, based on his reading and science debates he had watched, for his own world's technology to perform such a course alteration, and since all he had changed so far was the creation of a local utility cloud, the only way it could come into play in altering probabilities was if he himself went into space. Being able to transfer momentum between universes did imply that he could alter the trajectory massively, so it was not out of the realms of possibility that he might be able to prevent the impact even a short time before it occurred, but the concomitant risks of simply being in space did not seem worth it at the moment.

Instead, since he was no longer in danger of immediate death, he turned his attention back to escape. He probed the possibilities, trying to find a likely path that could lead to his getting home, but quickly found himself stymied by the requirement that he think of the course of action to find the probability of it. With each method he did think of, he did double-check the probability of his surviving the attempt, not merely the probability of success, and determined that the probability of accidentally appearing back in his own home universe were so low that he would die well before he made even a noticeable impact in the likelihood, much less succeeded.

Apparently, whatever the nanites could do to keep his body alive and going would not succeed in the face of his pushing his power to the limits - he was still mortal, and could still kill himself if he was not careful. Likewise, checking the probability of his survival if the bastard returned and Thomas attacked him indicated that the cloud had not made any material changes to his chances there either. At the same time, checking the probability that the bastard would return gave a miniscule chance, so hopefully it would not be a concern.

The chances of any other multiversal traveler popping up were likewise dismal, though his chances of making an impact there were not quite so obviously impossible. Unfortunately, his probability of surviving if he did were basically non-existent. To have any chance, he had to basically accept any multiversal traveler at all, and apparently, most of them would consider this entire world a light snack. Luckily, without his interference, it seemed the probability of any such traveler coming here on their own were non-existent, probably due solely to the sheer infinite variety of universe out there, though that was merely a guess on his part.

Still, the existence of world-consuming entities and the simultaneous existence of the Earth for more than four billion years implied that something had to be in the equation making a visit substantially improbable.

Traveling on his own seemed likely to be doable. Somehow the tech in his nanites were connecting to universes of their own choosing--the fact that there seemed an unlimited number of universes matching their peculiar requirements likewise was a testament to the infinite variety in the multiverse--and so coming up with something that could transport him to a chosen universe was probably just a matter of time, tinkering, and understanding them.

Turning his focus back to the interface he was constructing for communicating with the nanites, he checked and confirmed that apparently they had successfully gained access to the knowledge in his own brain - at least, they appeared to understand degrees of Celsius, Farenheit, and Kelvin, distances in meters, yards, and feet, kilometers and miles, and what he meant when he requested water.

Pushing it a bit harder, he tried to create a glass of root beer at a pleasingly cool temperature, and found they had no problem with this, matching the taste of his favorite brand precisely. Attempting to have them create a gun failed, creating a vaguely gun shaped piece of metal with a spinning chamber and hollow barrel and a pullable trigger, but with nothing in it actually connected or working. He tried for a knife and got a perfectly serviceable blade matching his mental image, so it was not an inability to create weapons.

An attempt at a handheld can opener with a twisting handle confirmed that he could create working mechanical objects, or rather, that his utility cloud could. A few more tries at other items confirmed that it boiled down to whether it was simple enough that he actually understood how it worked. With no experience in taking apart or reassembling a gun, the mere knowledge that this bit and that bit moved, and that the bullet was propelled by expanding gases, was insufficient.

Duplicating a fern frond worked perfectly on the other hand, as far as he could tell after cutting both the original and duplicate with his knife and looking at the cut edges, so presumably, once he got his hands on guns, or automobiles, or computers, he would be able to duplicate them, probably even modify them to a degree.

Of course, he had not actually assumed he would need a gun, and a quick test confirmed that. Knowing that the nanites could manipulate momentum, even if he did not fully understand the mechanics, it was simple enough to create an iron pellet, and then mentally specify a velocity for it. It vanished into the distance with a painfully loud crack that was almost instantly dampened, the ringing barely registering before it was gone, but reminding him that movies and television aside, most people wore ear protection when firing guns.

Creating food was equally easy, and less stressful than trying to press his probability power to come up with food from nowhere. Anything he had eaten, or could reasonably imagine, he could eat, and he soon had a more comfortable chair and a nice table, set on a solid floor in the middle of the jungle, and was eating a pleasant meal while working mentally on his user interface with the nanites and the utility cloud.

It took a bit of doing to explain to and convince his nanites that he would be more comfortable with a virtual two dimensional display with something akin to a terminal. What he ended up with was actually a bit more like a Mathematica window than a terminal, in that whatever it was with the nanites that he was communicating with had a habit of interjecting pictures into his mentally typed stream of words, and finishing written out calculations before he could. Apparently his math skills were still up to snuff, and the nanites understood, through him, what PI and e meant, what trigonometric functions were, and were even quick to grasp two and three dimensional function graphs, though the utility of grid lines and marked points somewhat escaped them. He had a feeling that to them a function was a thing you experienced in its totality, not something that required viewing through windows and slices and point, value calculations.

The smell drew a few onlookers, but they could not reach the food nor him, and tended to drive each other off, and were therefore readily ignored, until one came up that was so vibrant, with a delightful sort of crest and crown of feathers, albeit all in differing shades of iridescent green, that he wanted to capture a photograph.

Explaining the concept, and trying to convince the nanites of the value of storing a flat plane of color values, proved a hopeless task, though he soon discovered that it was hardly necessary. All the available sensory input from his surroundings was, it turned out, being constantly stored, and the nanites retorted to his attempts to get a photograph with a life-size fully three-dimensional image of the beast, as if it had suddenly been cloned. Perhaps, Thomas considered, he would fare better when he could show them a collection of photographs.

Creating something similar to a computer-aided design (CAD) interface was easier than he anticipated. Visualization of three dimensional objects was closer to the way the nanites seemed to prefer to communicate in the first place, so getting a system where he could visualize and then manipulate objects and their interactions was basically no effort at all. The concept of taking a two dimensional object and extruding it along another two dimensional object, or spinning it around an axis to make a solid object, took a fair bit of explaining and visualizing before they accepted it as worthwhile, but it was then genuinely easy to do, and completely instantaneous in a way that put every computer system he had ever used to shame.

Procedural textures, and indeed, the very concept of texturing to begin with, was a painful idea to try to put across though. They seemed to think he should simply be able to visualize the texture's final appearance, and they could duplicate it. Procedural textures in three dimensions went over a little better. The concept of taking the pattern in three dimensional space of a rock or a plant, and applying it to a different object was fairly easily accepted, and that a pattern could be extended in kind even to areas where the original object had not existed was also fine. They were a dab hand at extrapolation, somehow understanding before he even tried to explain how to extend a texture without showing obvious duplication when the original did not, and preserving it when the original did. The difference between the randomness in a wood grain and the strict pattern of a checkerboard seemed to be something they grasped effortlessly.

Finally, in an attempt to get them to be more accepting of lower dimensional patterns, he demonstrated the Koch curve, showing them a line segment, and then the result of replacing that segment with four, so that it became a line with a triangular dent in it, and then repeating that replacement with every subsequent line segment.

Then he showed them the two-dimensional Mandelbrot fractal, produced by simply asking for each point in the complex plane the question of whether repeatedly squaring the prior answer and adding the point back to it escaped to infinity or not. It took a couple of tries before he had them rendering the simple black and white many-bulbed outline of the set--he had to convince them of the need to set a cut-off for the decision of whether the point had escaped, and of the need to consider only a grid of discrete points, to complete the calculations in a workable time--and a bit more after that before he got across the idea that various rules could be applied to the escaping values to color points by how quickly they were escaping, and then they were off, variants flashing in his view as they explored different regions of the set, different and related formulas, various ways of discretizing the complex plane, and came up with their own algorithms for increasing the speed and efficiency of the calculations.

He saw too when they first found the set basically repeated within itself, and then as they began to explore three dimensional variations, and failed to easily find a set that showed the same degree of deep complexity and self-similarity.

It was a curious thing, that it took demonstrating the existence and behavior of fractional dimensions before these entities, which knew and employed the existence of multiple universes, would be bothered to accept any validity or usefulness in a two dimensional image or pattern.

When they prodded him for more fractals, for the first time Thomas began to feel like he was really communicating with another mind or minds, and not just a computer. He demonstrated the Hilbert space-filling curve, a linear one-dimensional curve that somehow managed in the limit to fill an entire two dimensional plane, and then he showed them the Sierpinski triangle, demonstrating the few different ways he knew of that it could be produced, first via line replacement, by drawing a triangle, then successively adding an upside down triangle to the center of each upright triangle, then repeating with each newly formed upright triangle. He showed them the iterated function systems method in the simple limit form of marking three points on an equilateral triangle, marking a random point within, then successively randomly choosing one of the corners, and marking the point halfway between the last point and that corner. He showed how to make it by a variant of the Koch curve, then how it could be generated by taking any shape, creating three copies of that shape and placing them two side-by-side and one on top halfway between, and then repeating that with the shape thus formed, and how all of these methods in the limit of infinite repetitions produced the same final form.

He remembered, and mentioned, that there were mathematical ways that it showed up as well, but he could not remember them off hand. He could show them L-systems, though, how the line transformations he had already demonstrated were able to be described and operated on by simple text processing, replacing bits of strings of characters with other sets of characters in a repeated, rules-based way.

That seemed to have given them enough to go on that they were able to locate the rest of what he knew of them by reference, and they stopped questioning him, so he turned his attention back to the outside, satisfied with the work he had done on the UI for now, and wanting to give them plenty of time to digest the points he had made.

In the interests of seeing to his own comfort, he checked the probability of his cloud being able to adjust the humidity and temperature of his immediate environs, which his power rated as a certainty. Figuring he could set up a visual interface for it later, he simply mentally nudged the humidity and temperature down until he felt more comfortable, and then considered what else to do with the rest of his day.

Simple survival was no longer much of a concern. He could produce cooked food and chilled beverages of excellent quality directly, so there was no need for trying to scavenge or hunt, and given that he could control his immediate environment now, there was likewise no particular concern about finding shelter or building a home.

Taking one of the senzu beans out of his pocket and staring at it, Thomas stood up and had the cloud get rid of the table and chair, giving him room to pace. Was there anything else that might feasibly exist that was this small that would give him a substantial edge? Trying to play with the chances that a djinni's ring had been buried somewhere around came briefly to mind, but a quick check of the probabilities showed that it was out of his reach, at least for this world or this time, though interestingly non-zero. He was not sure he would have tried it even so, knowing the stories of djinni's and how frequently such wishing devices turned out ill for their users.

Simple bacterial cells, and viruses even more so, were plenty small enough for his power to chance into existence, but he had no intention of releasing a plague, and could only hope that he had not already spread the seeds of a mass die-off in the bacteria and viruses that he may have already shed before the utility cloud took hold. He was fairly sure that he would not be leaving any detritus behind in the way of cells, living or otherwise, any more. Any non-living material, and anything that was leaving his body, would be fair game for the cloud to process for raw materials.

It did bring up the question of whether the beans were at risk of being processed, and he had the cloud scan and duplicate the bean he was holding, before the cloud spontaneously informed him that it was perfectly capable of determining what should be processed, else he would have been unclothed already. He was a bit startled, but also pleased at the implications, though he did wonder whether the duplicate senzu bean in his hand would actually have the full nearly, or possibly actually, magical effects of the original beans.

That reminded him of the original plant, and he went searching for it, only to discover that it had been processed for ingredients, though his cloud was happy enough to recreate it for him, already planted in the soil. Of course, that told him nothing regarding whether it would have its full effect, and unfortunately, he could not see any way of verifying it aside from somehow becoming injured and taking another one.

Eating multiple senzu beans when there was no direct injury or weakness for them to heal was the equivalent of 10 days worth of meals, or would keep one full for that long at least, from what he recalled of the show's claims regarding them, and eating more than that might well cause unpleasant side-effects. Since he had already had two in the last twenty-four hours, it did not seem to be worth the risk.

Playing with his sense of the probabilities as he considered various directions and thought about traveling for some time in each did give him some information about what lay in those directions, including which direction led to the coast, and which to a not too distant river, but nothing more specific without his checking individually, for example, the probability of his encountering a building in a specific direction after a certain amount of travel, and the like.

He did not come up with any buildings, nor any real feel of why any direction would be better than any other, so he picked one at random, and started running through the ferns. It was freeing, not having to worry about making no noise, or fearing a broken limb or sudden attack. Even better, he found that his breathing was not getting heavier. He began pushing the pace up a little at a time, until he was running faster than he could ever recall running, and his breathing was still fine. His body was suffused with the nanites, and apparently they were somehow ensuring that he did not go into oxygen debt.

It felt genuinely as though he could run forever, and when he burst out of the forest's edge and right off a bluff carved out by the river flowing past below, he whooped aloud for sheer joy. All of the panic indicators that should have fired, the dump of adrenaline, the heightened heartrate and jolt of fear, he felt none of them as he fell tumbling through the air, feeling rather like a kid letting go off the swings knowing a large pile of leaves or a parent's gentle hands were waiting to catch him.

He almost expected to bounce off the water, but instead, he landed lightly upon it, the momentum of his mass moving at a considerable velocity falling away almost unnoticed. It was not like braking in a car, it was just suddenly as if he had not been moving at all, and was simply resting on the surface of the water. He rolled over and pulled himself to his feet, standing on the surface of the water, staring down in bemusement.

Had he been asked if someone possessing a utility cloud ought to be able to stand on water, he would probably have said, "Yes, by spreading the weight over a much larger surface to use surface tension." That the same effect could be accomplished by exchanging momentum was something he had never considered, but he could clearly see the water still rippling and flowing beneath him, so it was obvious that the cloud was not pressing down on a large patch of the surface.

Experimentally, he formed a mental image, lifted his foot, and stepped forward onto thin air about six inches above the water's surface. He was flying, effectively, or at least airborne, as he lifted his other foot and stood, if that word even meant anything in this case, in the air. A mental push sent him rising into the air, but his focus on his feet turned out to be a bit of a mistake; it sent him tumbling as he lost his balance and tipped backwards, until he was hanging upside down from his feet. He plopped back down onto the water and rolled across to the bank to sit up and get his bearings.

He sat for a minute, holding his head in his hands as he recovered from the rush of blood, as he considered the fun of the sudden fall from the bluff and the possibilities of flight, and wondered how far from his body the cloud extended. A mental image of a sphere around him came from the nanites, demonstrating against his own body scale what looked like a bit more than a twelve foot or three meter diameter boundary. The image reminded him of a hamster in a hamster ball and he suddenly recalled a video he had seen once of a person rolling down a hill in a large balloon-like sphere, like a soft, blown up hamster ball.

A bit of prodding and cajoling and a lot of explanatory imaginings finally saw him running once more, about six inches off the ground, in a massive transparent sphere, his running propelling it across the lightly wooded fields on the far side of the river. He deliberately ran the sphere full speed into one of the odd trees and the ball glowed red as with a loud bong, it bounced away as if from an inelastic collision, a billiard ball striking the side wall.

He was spun about automatically to face the sphere's new direction of travel, and he quickly began running in place again, building up speed for the next impact. The tree he had hit had been totally unaffected, because he had not actually hit it. Instead, just before impact his momentum had its vector altered instantly, as a reflection off of a plane intersecting the largest percentage possible of the face he would have otherwise hit. Basically, he had turned his cloud and his surroundings into a real-life fully-immersive pinball machine.

He was laughing as he bounced off another tree, reflected again. The nanites had been mining his memories focusing on pinball, and proper pinball bumpers and paddles were popping up here and there amongst the trees. He hit a paddle and it flipped, sending him zooming across the ground to hit a small dip that catapulted him up into the air, as a high-score reading appeared in his field of vision, clicking upwards until it hit twenty thousand.

The sphere fell and rolled swiftly until he willed it to a stop, staring wide-eyed at the massive dinosaurs before him, the first he had seen that truly looked like the dinosaurs he had seen from his childhood. Featherless, with scaly hide, their heads towered four or five stories above him, he estimated. Apart from being a mottled green and brown, and having tails held out straight for quite a ways before drooping into a whip-like end that oscillated back and forth, occasionally arching forward and sweeping the thin edge across the long backs, they were brontosaurs or brachiasaurs straight from his childhood picture books.

He was sure that an actual paleontologist would promptly correct him, and list seventeen differences that meant they weren't, or simply point out that he was in the wrong hemisphere or some such. He did not care. The feathery carnosaurs he had previously seen could have been mistaken for oddly shaped birds - pretty, to be sure, and frightening when he knew they could have so easily been the death of him, but far from the visceral fear inducing beasts they had been in the days of the movies, when they had looked like these, scaly thunder beasts of such an alien mien. These were those terrible lizards from his story books, and he was dumbstruck with awe at the sight of them.

And then he was struck with a thought from a different piece of childhood. "Brontosaurus burgers!" Did he dare try to hunt these beasts? Perhaps other, safer prey first, but he quickly pulled his probability power into play, checking his chances of surviving consuming dinosaur flesh. As anticipated, given his body was flooded with nanites capable of targeting and eliminating any pathogens his body lacked inherent defences to, his safety in eating the beasties was confirmed.

He considered how he might go about hunting them, then realized that it should in fact be ridiculously simple. He focused on one of them, considering the probability of it having a fatal heart failure, and then the probability of his being able to nudge that probability higher, and confirmed that it was movable, and since he could evaluate each animal and pick the one with the highest probability to begin with, he ought to be able to find one he could kill without having to get close to them at all.

That when he returned home he could do the same in any crowd of people likewise occurred to him, a sobering and frightening thought, but then he reminded himself that it likewise meant that he could push the likelihood of a fatal event down, and for that matter, merely knowing who was likely to die could be of use in many medical fields.

He shied away from thinking further of what he would do when he got home, after he tried to see the probability of someone finding that he was missing and getting in to take care of his cat, Persha, and failed to see anything. Apparently he could not see the probabilities of his old world, hopefully that would change when he got home.

He shifted to one side and the movement of the ball around him reminded him that he was still hamster-balled, and he grinned, beginning to run again, this time engaging his probability power to predict and tweak his path. Soon he was bouncing between the trees and off of ringers and buzzers and bumpers, being flung about by paddles, deliberately pushing thoughts of home and what he was missing away with determined fun.

When his path took him to the beach on the edge of a massive body of water--not, he thought, the Gulf of Mexico in this time period, but probably the shallow sea that had split North America in two, which he thought had existed in the time of the dinosaurs, though he had no way of knowing for sure, or even whether the sea had persisted to the end of the dinosaur's time--he stilled the sphere's motion and considered it. He checked with both his probabilities and the nanite query interface, confirming that they could produce oxygen, prevent pressure from being an issue, and defend him against whatever monsters might lurk in those depths, and then he rolled his ball out onto the waters.

The nanites seemed to recognize that the game was over, as the scoring system faded from his view, and he saw no more game elements out in the world. What he did see along the shore line, and which probably would have made reaching the water a hazardous proposition were he not protected in his ball, was an amazing array of what looked like pipes rising in the waters all along the edge, almost like someone had lost a shipload of pipe organs that had then been encrusted with barnacles or clams.

In the water below him, as the sphere settled slightly into the waves, flattening a hemispherical shape into the water and creating an excellently clear surface to see into the depths through, he saw fishes, almost normal looking in appearance, and what looked sort of like half-snail, half squid creatures - nautiluses, maybe? He was not sure, but they were in surprising profusion and variety, and as he rolled out to deeper waters, the forms he saw grew massive, both in fishes and the cephalopods. A massive but otherwise fairly ordinary looking crocodile or alligator swam up to him, jaws longer than he was tall by half again gaping wide as it tried and failed to encompass his sphere, then swam around him nudging and prodding, as if searching for a way in before wandering off.

He moved about for a while longer, hoping for a mosasaur, plesiosaur, or ichthyosaur. Instead of these monsters of the sea, his eye was attracted to a swift moving shadow on the waters, and he looked up to see the soaring shape of a pterosaur or similar creature, like a great reptilian bat, but with a long-jawed, pointy head and a longer tail. It was fast moving and hard to see clearly, but almost the instant he considered this, he beheld it suddenly before him, still flying at a considerable rate and yet as large as life holding its position in front of him. His first thought was that it looked nearly large enough to ride.

He watched it for a brief time and then allowed the sphere to submerge into the blue green waters. The sphere became backlit, lighting the waters around him without casting glare into his eyes. It was on odd experience, as there was no water in the sphere and as fish approached they seemed to expand in size, then shrink again when they got closer still, reversing the process as they swam away again. The swirling schools were mesmerizing, but watching the coiled shelled cephalopods drift lazily along until a fish came within range and then send tentacles shooting out, harpooning the fish and drawing it into a nest of tentacles, when performed by a cephalopod as big as he was, on a fish that was also nearly his size was sobering. The schools of fishes were themselves quite distinct from the nature documentaries he had watched through his computer. They were not large shoals of tiny fish, no these schools often had fish a meter or more in length. Throwing out a line into these waters would easily get a fish that could have won any fishing competition back home.

The sky was beginning to darken when he rose from the waters and returned to the land. As night fell, Thomas beheld for the first time in his life the awe inspiring sight of the Milky Way rising, rotating into view along with so many millions of stars he was once more left breathless. He had known about light pollution, known that it was a problem vexing astronomers and pushing observatories out into the far reaches in search of greater visibility, but there was oh, such a vast distance between knowing such a thing and actually experiencing it. Staring up at the glorious vastness and uncountable beauty of an untainted night sky, he felt he could finally understand why the sky was so often seen as a god or a source of gods by ancient peoples.

Beautiful and inspiring as it was, it intensified his recognition of his utter loneliness, and he cried bitter tears as he lay and waited for sleep to come. As he drifted of to sleep he seemed to briefly see the likely end of each of the stars in billions of slow fadings, of explosive novas and supernovas, of eternal falls into the swirling storms around invisible hungry maws, but in the morning he recalled none of it.

When he woke up, he found a number of predator tracks around where he had slept, from the massively out-of-scale bird tracks left by the carnosaurs, to the more splay toed wide tracks of a giant crocodilian with the massive central drag marks from its body where it had rested while it investigated him. There were a variety of smaller tracks as well, and three of the turkey sized almost birds that had made them were still there, watching him with toothy hungry faces and hard shining eyes. They cocked their heads to one side and then the other to peer at him with either eye, reminding him of nothing so much as crows, examining a bit of refuse before pecking it to bits in a supermarket parking lot.

He wondered if their eggs would taste like chicken eggs. Maybe they would taste like turkeys? They were not large or dangerous. Almost without thought, Thomas reached out and felt the three, selected the one with the greatest likelihood of death, and pressed it up until the bird like creature fell over dead. The other two chirped and nudged it add if trying to rouse it, awakening his sense of shame. He had never killed an animal to eat it before, though he had eaten meat often enough, and while it had intellectually seemed simple, when faced with the visceral reality of it he found it stomach-turning. Finally the two living dinosaurs moved away, chasing a distant noise, and Thomas decided not to let the turkey lizard go to waste.

The utility cloud made short work stripping the animal of its feathery plumage, then he began to delve into the probabilities of cooking. Would he be more likely to enjoy it boiled or roasted? Roasted or fried? Cooked whole or in pieces?

Guided by an unceasing series of probability queries, and implemented in a hands off way by the utility cloud, he soon had the head and neck cut away and the internal organs removed. A single peanut was easily chanced into having been left in his pocket, cleaned of lint, replicated many thousands of times, and the oils extracted. Producing and igniting a steady stream of hydrogen and oxygen turned out to be well within the abilities of the cloud, and with the probability power guiding him, he soon had deep fried dinosaur cooked at the perfect temperature throughout and removed at the exact right time.

He had not even had to fight with unwieldy skewers or hooks to draw the beast out of the hot oil. Neither did he have to work out how to dispose of the oil afterward. He did have to deal with the clamor of fights between the various predators and scavengers lured to the vicinity by the enticing smells, but unable to approach close enough to steal or attack, held at bay by the utility cloud, but again, once he requested it, the utility cloud was easily able to muffle the noise. He had thrown the offal to them, but those small bits had been fought over and consumed in mere moments.

Surprisingly to him, none of the tussling animals had yet been killed. The one tyrannosaur-ish beastie, whose arrival he had expected would precipitate a slaughter, had acted rather more like a lion from a safari documentary. Oh, not in so much the physical mannerisms; it acted in that sense much more like a large bird, bobbing its head and torso about; but in that while it offered deep sort of barking bugle calls and snapping of jaws to encroaching scavengers, it had not gone on an all-out instant attack, as they generally did in the movies. It was much more reserved. Indeed, all the critters were, sort of wary and going through cycles of getting too close and showing off threat displays, leaning forward holding their heads low and looking up while hissing or bleeping, winglets out and tails held high, and a sort of more respectful posture when happier with the distance between them, almost just a waiting anticipation.

Since he was doing this as much for flavor as anything else, Thomas separated a few cuts of meat, basically half of a wing and thigh and a bit of breast meat, to compare them to cuts of turkey, then had the cloud duplicate the remainder a dozen times and cast the duplicates out of the protected area. A turkey sized dino was well more than he could eat at a sitting anyway, and he wanted to see if the cloud could duplicate the cooked food. He was amused, as he sat in a cloud-made seat and set his food on a like-constructed table, to watch the very bird-like way the tyrannosaur snapped the closest cooked bit from the air, and the similarly birdy behaviors of the smaller raptors as they sort of peck-and-pulled their chosen bits away from the scrum.

A large crocodilian surged up from the water's edge, Thomas having not yet moved away from the beach, and caught one of the smaller raptors and its prize of cooked meat in one fatal lunge, and swiftly withdrew.

Thomas had his cloud create a plate to place the bits of meat he had kept on, and a knife and fork, and sliced the bit of breast meat. It was darker than he had expected, have been comparing it to a turkey. He had never had wild turkey, and so the meat he was comparing it to was the meat of a factory turkey that had probably been overfed and under-exercised, forced to grow fast, and killed young, and far from the life of a wild animals. At the same time, it was not as dark or tough as a wild bird might have been - these were not flying dinosaurs, and these breast muscles had never been forced to beat fast or effectively bear the beasties weight in the air.

He wondered at the difference to the food he had created for himself the day before from his memories. It had tasted well enough, but thinking logically, surely it could not have actually been real at its core. Oh, it probably had all the right amino acids and nutrients he needed, but to suppose it had contained the DNA, the information, the genuine cellular structure and deep patterns of the original seemed ridiculous. Where could the system had pulled that information from? Probably it was simply composed to provide the visual and taste experience he recalled; copies of this beast, though, would be taken from an actual scan of the real thing. They would be as real the original in every respect but history.

In the absence of any herbs or seasonings, the cooking in peanut oil had suffused the meat with an excellent flavor and crisped the skin to perfection. For breast meat, which he recalled was often dry and needing the cranberry sauce his mother made, or mayonnaise on a sandwich, to really be palatable, the deep frying had kept it moist and delicious. The skin on the wing/arm and thigh was crispy and delicious, the flesh much closer to the turkey legs he remembered from fairs and festivals.

Finishing his first bit of dinosaur, Thomas finally allowed his mind to wander back to his situation. Five years to impact. He had time to work on a finding a way off this planet, or to prevent the blast, but in the long term, he needed to find a way back to his own universe. Traveling between universes was almost certainly possible with a combination of his probability power and the universe linking Clark-tech of the nanomachines--the probability powers would be relevant in finding universes safe enough to travel to, and hopefully in confirming whether he was approaching his own universe or not.

He also had to hope that there was someway to reach the right time in his world, and not end up there but in the same time period, just before that big impact! He was reasonably certain this world was not merely the past of his own world, not merely because it would imply the bastard was sufficiently omnipotent to be unconcerned about causing a paradox, but because considering the probability that it was gave a blessedly low chance. If that tiny chance turned out to be true, then it was probably already far too late to avoid destroying his own world. He understood the theory of non-linear dynamical systems, and their sensitivity to small changes. A small change now could mean the difference between one species or another dying out, especially given that he must have left microbes behind before he had the utility cloud in place, and effectively, those bacteria would have had sixty-five million years or so more to evolve than their nearest competitors. Of course, if the probabilities had said it was likely that he was in his own past, he would have discarded any plans to prevent the impact event entirely.

Unfortunately, what he understood of the nanite connection, their targeting was for a universe fulfilling certain parameters, not locating a specific universe. More to the point, their method involved connecting a nanomachine on this side to a universe in a permanent link, where he wanted a travel method. So he was looking at a period of experimentation, but he needed a way to experiment that did not involve risking himself. He did not at all understand whatever it was that allowed them to have a permanent connection on a nanometer scale and not have to worry about that connection closing or expanding suddenly. The thought of those connections existing within him all the time was frankly frightening, and had he realized that this was the form a Clark-tech utility cloud would take he would have sought a different solution, but it was far too late now.

If he could improve his UI and query system sufficiently, he might be able to gain access to whatever information the nanites had stored from the civilization that built them--whether it had ever existed, or had its history created from nothing like the memories of a Boltzmann Brain--and see if they had the means for creating probes that he could send through to other universes to test the transit method until he had a way of making that jump that would not turn him inside out or otherwise discombobulate him.

In the worst case, he supposed, he would simply have to work with their ability to create the things he visualized to make something from his own memory. While there was no way he could remember or explain enough to make a programmable microprocessor, it was just vaguely possible that he could create something that they could integrate themselves to in place of a processor.

Of course, that all rather presumed he would be able to find a way for them to transport something in the first place, beyond what they had built in to their programming. He shifted the form of the chair about into something more like a beach chair, that he could sit on and rest while working with the nanite query interface. This was quickly followed by creating the world's first beach umbrella to shield him from the sun.

Finally, he dove back into the UI. His efforts the day before in introducing the nanites to fractals had paid off, and they were much more amenable to providing him with the ability to create and store flat images, which they had independently devised fractal based compression methods for. He checked, and confirmed they already had a concept equivalent to Fourier transforms, the decomposition of a waveform into multiple pure waves, as he knew it was also often used in image and audio compression algorithms. After that interlude, he refocused on creating a head's-up display concept that would allow the nanites to succinctly and clearly communicate vital information with him without it being obtrusive, as well as giving him an easy access to something more like the computer interfaces he was familiar with.

Soon, he had a HUD that was completely absent most of the time, but appeared as soon as he looked for it, and showed his heart rate (complete with a little EKG-style meter - it took him a while to test and verify different way of sensing the heart before he found one that looked enough like the EKG for him to believe he had found what the electrocardiogram measured, though he could not be at all certain of that), his pulse rate, the outside temperature, his core temperature, and the percentage difference in terms of the number of atoms per mol between the air he was breathing, and the air coming in from outside, now that the cloud was adjusting the air to match more closely his bodies requirements. He would have had his blood pressure, but while it was simple enough to describe the process of taking a blood pressure reading, he had no clue what the systolic and diastolic pressures actually were, nor did his actual blood pressure in terms of millimeters of mercury or pounds per square inch look meaningful enough to him as it bounced up and down to be worth including.

More importantly, he had a status board showing various effects, such as whether the atmospheric compensation was on, whether he was currently approachable, whether he was hamster-balled, and the like, with the intention that he would add more as time went on.

He let the cloud disassemble the chair and umbrella. The crowd of animals had dispersed, though he saw a floating darkness in the water that he presumed was one of the crocodiles. Remembering his few flights the day before in the hamster ball, Thomas decided to try proper flight today. Momentum control via his nanites should, based on his tentative experiments the day before, be able to emulate real flight. It took the barest of instructions to the utility cloud before he was airborne, floating about ten feet above the ground.

He tried sliding back and forth while standing up, which worked perfectly well, and in his imagination he thought must surely look something akin to Magneto's effortless floating. He rolled his body forward so he was floating with his stomach down, and tried moving forward that way, but found that trying to mentally move himself about when lying down was too confusing, though it did show the need to set up a wind buffer, which was again easily done through the utility cloud, basically automatically redirecting the airflow around him so that he never felt the rush too badly against his face, and keeping the noise from overwhelming his hearing.

He needed a better way of interfacing his thoughts. He played with a couple of ideas, and found that having the nanites reduce his relative weight by counterbalancing a percentage of the constant downward acceleration of gravity, and then applying a second variable force to him as a whole, in the direction of his outstretched hand let him fly fairly comfortably in a Superman pose, changing direction with the slightest movement of his hand, but it quickly grew tiring.

Maybe Superman could hold his hand above his head for hours at a time, but the human body did not find it nearly so comfortable. Finally, he moved on to trying something more like swimming, if you could swim with little propellers on your feet. His direction was left basically up to his interactions with the air, except that the utility cloud basically magnified the effects of the air to emulate the effects of a fluid with the density of water.

This! This was comfortable, and fun, and exhilarating. Finally, he had found a style of flight that made it easy to roll, to dive and pull up, to turn smoothly and easily. He soared around the fields, heedless of the danger of the trees, exercising his ability to predict when he needed to turn to avoid impacts to weave at high speed amongst the trees. When the speed overcame his reflexes, the utility cloud prevented him from harming himself or the trees. After a while, the utility cloud began to anticipate when he would miss the turns, and adjust his direction itself, allowing him to increase his speed still further.

He stalled out and drifted for a while over a herd of triceratops, admiring their size and their awesome horns. They had obvious young animals in the mix, mostly towards the center of the herd, too many together to be from a single parent, so he supposed they had either recently fended off some predators, or it was their normal herding pattern. Certainly there were too many young ones together to be the offspring of only the adults closest to them, unless they had far larger litters than similar herd animals on his Earth. Thinking on it, he realized that the larger litters might actually be the answer, given that if he recalled correctly, basically all of the dinosaurs were assumed to lay eggs rather than have live births, which would be conducive to larger hatchings.

Drifting back up into the sky, he sailed towards a pleasantly fluffy looking cloud, and zipped through it, then rolled over to look back at it, enjoying the way the air disturbance of his passage had stretched a long slender cylinder of the cloud out towards him, as if it were a piece of cotton candy being tugged upon.

He got a bit moist, but less so than he had expected, which reminded him that the utility cloud was modifying his atmosphere. Not being able to get wet was a pleasant perk, but one he would need to make sure he could turn off once he ended up back on his world, at least in the sight of others, to avoid being caught out. Still lying on his back, soaring through the air still under propulsion, he dove into his UI and set up an interface for displaying and disabling the behavior of the utility cloud that was keeping him from becoming soaked.

The topic brought up another idea, and he flipped back over, and twiddled with his nanite interface, and moments later, the air behind his feet as they passed became heavy with water vapor, and he zoomed and twisted around, drawing in the sky with clouds. He could not count it as the world's earliest sky-writing, though, as he had not managed to get the hang of thinking in three dimensions well enough to be able to draw legible words. It was fun, though, drawing in the sky, and he was able to draw a few spirals.

After a while, he abandoned it and started pushing for altitude, watching the meter in his HUD that showed the difference in his internal and exterior atmospheres. A bit of tinkering gave him a speedometer marked in miles and kilometers an hour, that dynamically adjusted to keep his current speed below the three-quarter of top end mark, and above the one eighth mark until the top end dropped to one hundred kph. An altimeter was next, denoting his height above sea level in kilometers and miles, and a barometer to go with the temperature reading. He added a tertiary setting to allow him to adjust what he wanted his external environmental temperature to be as well. A compass went in next, once he determined that his cloud could detect the planet's overall magnetic field direction. He would have liked a GPS of course, but since he lacked both maps and the satellites, not to mention any idea of how the math to correct for General Relativity worked, that was not going to happen.

Looking down again, he saw a much broader swath of the land beneath him, the animals no longer clearly visible anywhere. He dove back down towards the north, following the line of the inland sea toward its northern edge, thinking to explore a somewhat different environment, since he had nothing particular tying him to any location. As he sped downward through the sky, now assisted by instead of fighting gravity, though its assistance was still a dampened one, he was startled when a sudden massive cloud appeared right in front of him, followed by an ear-splitting crack. Had he not had his hearing somewhat protected by the air buffer the utility cloud was employing, he thought he probably would have burst both his eardrums. Had he just broken the sound barrier? He glanced at the speedometer on his head's up display, but realized that he had no real memory of what the speed of sound was, and anyway, wasn't it affected by temperature or pressure or altitude or something like that? Regardless, he was fairly sure he had gone supersonic, and realized he had put in variable speed control that changed the amount of speed added in a particular direction, but not any way of braking!

He quickly grabbed the speed control mentally, and pushed it to zero and then with relief, on into negative values. Had it not accepted negatives, he would have needed to try to set up a braking system on the fly, but thankfully, it had, and as he pushed the negative value still lower, he saw his speedometer begin dropping. He pulled up a little more, to give himself more time to slow before he reached the current cloud layer, and then punched through it. This time, the effect was far more dramatic, triggering a cascade of droplet formation that opened a vast and perfectly circular hole in the cloud as the moisture in that region coalesced and fell as rain. He did not notice, focused as he was on bleeding speed as he approached the water below. The inland sea was quite narrow here, looking more like a river and he pulled up still further, as the water was approaching rather more rapidly than he liked. He reached a nearly flat horizontal only a few meters above the water and glancing back, saw that his passing had raised a glorious spray of water up behind him, a rooster tail arcing high into the air.

Finally bleeding off enough speed to stop, he settled onto the ground, the northernmost bit of the inland sea a few miles behind him. He ran through a quick check of the probabilities to make sure that nothing had changed in terms of the likelihood of his survival, then brought up another beach chair and plopped down, stretching out with a sigh. Somehow, he still needed to figure out what to do about the nanites universe linking methods, or else figure out an alternative that he could somehow chance into existence. No similar tiny objects had come to mind that would be similarly useful. He had briefly considered a Green Lantern ring, but even if he could somehow arrange for the probability of it being here on this world to be certain, and the chance of it choosing him to somehow rise to a sufficient level, there was still the problem that they were based on charging off of a central battery in a different universe entirely.

For that matter, they were end-of-tech-tree Clark-tech just as much as his utility cloud was, so they might not get along. Of greater concern, though, was the idea that Lanterns were part of a Corps, and someone might come looking if one of their rings went missing. Assuming, of course, that it was even possible to obtain truly fictional things. He had generated the senzu bean, but was it actually the same as the senzu bean from Dragonball? Or was it merely a bean from somewhere in the multiverse that had enough similarities? Likewise, his utility cloud might be from an actual civilization or have been Boltzmanned into existence, but either way, it was self-replicating and therefore not the sort of thing that would be missed. Lantern rings, as he recalled, came in a fixed number - though from what little he remembered, he thought they rather arbitrarily hand-waved whether they were galactic or universal in scale.

Nothing came to mind that was similarly versatile and small, though he did consider Capsules, also from Dragonball. They were merely compact storage of ordinary items, though, and while possibly chanceable, they would not really assist, unless perhaps he could chance one into being that contained a universal portal generator. Something to leave until he had convinced himself that working with his nanites was a no-go.

After all, he actually knew that his nanites could connect to carefully chosen universes, so he had good reason to hope that they could be his means of travel, once he figured out how to change the way they used the connection they made.

Having had his fun for the day, he settled in for a long session with the query interface, trying to tease out the knowledge the nanites held, to find the answers to how he could move himself between universes. It was slow and frustrating going, as not only did he lack the physics knowledge to understand the key elements of what the nanites were doing, they themselves lacked knowledge of the physical and theoretical underpinnings of what they were doing. They knew what to do, that is, but not why it worked.

He did not even understand enough to comprehend what sort of multiverse it was that they were accessing. He knew that on his world there had been multiple theories that reference a multiverse, from the multiverse as a possible answer to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, to infinite big bangs as part of an anthropic explanation for the fine-tuning of universal constants, to earlier theories of parallel universes in a higher dimension, to bubble universes chaining from each other infinitely where each black hole in one universe was the start of a big bang and a whole new universe, to the alternate sort of bubble universes that were really D-branes where a circle in the universal microwave background radiation might be evidence of universal contacts, to the concept of a literally unbounded cosmos, wherein multiple universes might exist where each was merely the limit of visibility, and a matter of perspective in one single truly unlimited universal expanse. Were the universes the nanites were linking to really tiny circumscribed universes only large enough for the necessary contents? Or were they merely linking to some impossibly far off bit of the universe that had what they needed?

Pressing his probability power with the right questions might answer some of his concerns, but given that many of the answers had come in terms of visions or visualizations, he was rather afraid that any explanation or response to the probability of one form of multiverse or another might literally be too complex for his brain to handle. More to the point, though, his probability power did not seem to care about truth statements, only about events. He could ask about the probability of someone checking on his cat, though it had failed to give him any satisfactory answers, but asking whether a dinosaur he saw was a dog gave no answer at all, even though he knew up front that it was patently false. Twisting his brain into a pretzel trying to come up with the right way to phrase a question about an event so that it would answer a question about which multiversal theory was true was not something he felt like attempting just yet, though when events drew closer to impact time, who knew?

He eventually fell asleep in the chair, the nanites withdrawing the interface from his vision as he began to dream. Though he had no idea of it at this point, the nanites were recording and analyzing his thought processes continually, which is why they seemed to be in mental communication with him, and as a consequence, his dreams were also being analyzed and recorded.

Defusing Armageddon

He awoke the next morning feeling stiff and achy from sleeping on the wooden chair, which he promptly dissolved as he tried to stretch. A rippling warmth and vibration spread through his back and shoulders, and down his arms and legs, and the pain and aching gradually eased and vanished as he groaned in pleasure. He queried the nanites and received a confirmatory impulse, but their picture based communication was as ill-suited to explaining what they had done as it was to explaining the details of multiversal dynamics. In much the same vein, it was obvious that they were manipulating his hunger, but whether they were feeding him by adding food particles to his stomach to be digested, or satiating all his cells directly in the manner of an IV drip, their communication had left unclear. Well, at least, it had been unclear to him. Doubtless from their own perspective the matter had been made perfectly obvious.

He turned his attention to his dreams, for this time, he had remembered them, or at least, the last dregs of the dream just before he had awakened. It had been about an anime he had enjoyed, Bubblegum Crisis, a rather fanciful name for a darker futuristic science fiction anime about a team of four women who used hardsuits similar to an Iron Man style armor to combat nanotechnology based robots called boomers. The particular element that stuck in his memory was the way that boomers would swell out of their unassuming human forms, substantially increasing in size, and sometimes extending massive tentacles whose mass surely could not have fit in the space available to them.

Something akin to that might well be feasible for him, as after all, his nanites apparently had a near-infinite supply of resources for building more of themselves. Could he, then, employ coherent swarms of nanites as extensions of himself? A quick check of his probability power confirmed that it was substantially probable that he could achieve something along these lines with his nanites, so he dove into trying it.

The first step was to see if he could form a visible scale object from the nanites and control it more directly than by simply telling it to do this or that. If he had tentacles or something similar, he would prefer to be able to control them fluidly, as if they were an extension of himself. He started as simply as possible, just trying to get a sufficient accumulation of nanites in one spot to form a visible sphere, without depleting his utility cloud.

To do that, he needed to be able to see his utility cloud, or at least have an idea of where and how many there were. Having them mark each cloud element in his field of view with a glowing blue dot seemed to simply form a solid blue dome around him. Toning that down to every hundredth, and then thousandth, and then ten-thousandth finally reached a point where he could visually assess the field without it obscuring his vision too completely.

He focused on a particular spot, and encouraged the nanites there to double and redouble and simultaneously aggregate, until a small gleaming sphere had formed. Confirming that his utility cloud was not noticeably reduced, he let the glow lapse. Somewhat to his surprise, the aggregation of the innumerable nanite points did not form a pretty silver sphere, as he had half expected, but something that seemed more like a sphere of water or glass, bending the light that passed through it, and having an obvious surface, but still basically transparent. Almost as soon as he thought it, the sphere turned perfectly silvery, then thin depressions formed on it, following odd intersecting but also jogging paths, where they formed short pairs of opposite right angles, causing it to look like a piece of high technology carefully fitting together.

After checking with the nanites to confirm that this was an actual appearance change that anyone looking at it would see and not merely an illusion directly introduced to his visual cortex, he played for several minutes, challenging the sphere to take on different appearances. Forming a crystalline ball of spikes in a translucent purple with a glow emanating from within was perhaps the most visually impressive look, along with a dark metal where the lines from the first sphere were glowing in bright colors, like something straight out of Tron, but the sphere proved itself capable of looking like a variety of different metals, of emulating rivets, connection ports, screw threads, wooden and stone textures, and even taking on the appearance of a simple ball of yarn.

Returning it with a simple thought to the high-tech silvery appearance, Thomas began to practice controlling its movements. At the same time, the nanites themselves began to practice trying to give him a mental feel for the sphere and its location. Sliding it back and forth as if on a fixed axis came first, followed by trying to get it to follow visualized paths in space, and then as the nanites began to succeed in giving him a feeling for the ball, guiding it with thought directly, as if he was holding it in his hand.

A short time later he had it reshaped into a rounded cylinder split in the middle, bouncing around like a Yo-Yo with a virtual string showing only to his eyes, extending from his finger. Later still, it had grown substantially, and was in the shape of a boomerang, whipping through the air, as he worked on guiding it without affecting its spin simultaneously.

The clouds having begun to darken, he took his play up above them, allowing the utility cloud to simply maintain his position above the cloud layer, after they and his probability power had both assured him that even a series of direct lightning strikes posed no danger. Apparently every single nanite was effectively connected to ground from the perspective of electricity, meaning that not only would it not get past his cloud, but even if somehow it did, it would never travel through his flesh, and therefore would cause no damage.

Having followed him into the sky, the boomerang began to thin and lengthen, the number of nanites composing it doubling and redoubling as it stretched out into a long whip-like shape. He grasped one end of it, and practiced whipping it back and forth as the nanites adjusted their pattern of connections at his suggestion, until it finally moved with the free flowing motion of a proper lariat. He did not know the trick to cracking a whip, and could certainly not do it every time, but after nearly a dozen tries, he got a good crack out of it.

A target formed several meters away, a vertical cylindrical column like a bollard. He practiced trying to hit it and wrap around it with the whip, then he moved further away, and tried to get the whip to lengthen to make the strike and then shorten back up afterward. This took a number of tries, as the nanites played with different arrangements of the threads they had formed internally when trying to mimic a whip's motion, before obtaining a satisfying result.

The end of the whip twirled about his hand, meeting and melding with itself, so that it was more like a bracer at the end, extending out in a long cord or tendril. Now finally he was at the point of trying to treat them as tentacles, as extensions of his own body. Instead of holding the end and whipping the rest out at the bollard, he tried to reach out with the tentacle as a whole and wrap around it. It took some time to get the feel for moving the whole, and at first, while he could sort of feel where the tentacle was, he could not feel its contact with the bollard and so continually failed to properly grapple it.

As soon as he became aware of the deficiency though, the nanites in his brain went to work trying to resolve it, and shortly thereafter, he began to feel sensations beyond mere position through the tentacle. It was fairly obvious that improving the plasticity of the brain, and training it in new sensations was one of the tasks the nanites actually knew about, and they proved quite skillful at it. Barely a quarter of an hour later, he was reaching out and crushing bollards with a constricting wrap of his dynamically extending tentacle, feeling the pressure, feeling the tentacle sliding against itself, the texture of the surface of the cylinder, the way it crumpled, the temperature of the air, the movement of wind, the warmth of the sun upon it, he could feel it all.

A pair of arm extending tentacles with an optional fully articulated hand on the end went on to his abilities HUD, to allow him to activate and deactivate them quickly. He could form such things manually, as he had done now, but once he had settled on a design, this served as a way to have the nanites remember the patterns he preferred and restore them quickly.

The clouds below him had grown into a storm, and he had been forced to rise above their reaching grasp several times. Now, desiring to test another form of comic-book motion playing with tentacles reminded him of, he flew swiftly in the direction opposite the clouds' path, until he was beyond the storm, and returned to land. His tentacle shifted towards his back, thickening swiftly, then dividing, thickening, and dividing again, until he had four substantial tentacles coming out of his back, in the style of Doc Ock.

Pressing into the ground, the lower pair of tentacles pushed him up into the air, as he swayed drunkenly back and forth, trying to integrate them into his sense of balance. Slowly, he steadied, then tried to lift one tentacle to move it forward, before promptly dropping it back down. The internals of the tentacles twisted and shifted, the fibrous pattern so suitable for behaving like a whip doing little to help with providing proper support. He tried again, then again a few minutes later, noticing already a substantial improvement.

His first successful step came a short time later, and soon he was striding across the prehistoric fields, as he practiced reaching out and removing leaves from trees with his upper tentacles. A visual reminder from his nanites had him creating a length of string to practice making cat's cradles with his hands while manipulating his tentacles, to try and expand beyond manipulating only four extremities at once.

The Doc Ock backpack tentacles went on his HUD beside the arm tentacles, then he activated both. At first he was nearly constantly realizing that one set of limbs had gone quiescent, and concentrating on moving them, only to realize a different set was now motionless. As time passed, things began to get a little more fluid, however. From the speed of the improvement, he knew that the nanites were obviously actively working on his brain.

The transition between the arm tentacles and the backpack had been slow, restoring the tentacles had likewise been slow, so when he grew weary of practicing and turned them off, and they nearly instantly vanished, he was startled. Experimentally, he turned the arm tentacles back on, and they reappeared on his arms in the blink of an eye. Confused, he tried to query the nanites about what the source of the difference was, and got a deeply confusing series of images and visions back. He tried to make sense of them, and finally got a sense of approval from the nanites when he pictured half the nanites being pulled within the other half's connected universe, and the process repeating in like steps of half the number at a time.

A full-body shiver ran over him once he understood what was going on. It was a Matryoshka doll of universes, and apparently there was no prohibition here against putting a bag of holding into a portable hole. Or perhaps they were able to drop their connection to their universe and pick it back up? Frightening as it was to realize that they seemed to have been doing the sort of things that in most of the science fiction he had read that touched on it would have lead to tearing great holes in spacetime, especially within his own body, it also gave him hope that they would likewise not interfere with him passing through such a connection, something that had been a fear he had been holding ever since he realized that each nanite was connected to its own universe or dimension or whatever it was.

The two tentacle styles he had, well, not invented or created so much as cribbed from comics, were versatile and useful, but he did still want to see if he could do a more Genom boomer style tentacle. He tried to remember how they looked and operated. Sort of muscles on muscles on muscles? He imagined a hollow core and a single muscle on one side, able to contract and cause the core to bend towards it, then another muscle next to and a little below the first, torquing the core in a slightly different direction a little layer, then progressing his wrapping all the way around and down the length.

Forming muscles, unlike a whip, was easy for the nanites, having his own muscles as a pattern to work from. Rather than trying to support such a large tentacle from himself, he imagined it being anchored into the ground nearby to give it a firm basis for leverage. Barely had he pictured it, than the expanding rope of muscled banded steel erupted from the ground, racing forward at remarkable speed, extending forward from the tip at the same time that it was being wholly pushed forward by expansion at the base. He lashed it around a tree and crushed it effortlessly to pulp.

The sheer strength afforded by the mass of mechanical muscles was intense. He formed a solid core at the very tip, and sharp bladed edges, and it thrust readily through the tree's trunk where it had not been pulped, not seeming to be slowed at all by the dense fibrous tissue. It made him a bit nervous about getting it near anything that shouldn't be destroyed, so he had the nanites festoon the area with a variety of positive and negative targets, and spent some time practicing with the massively powerful tentacle, trying to strike the positive targets without brushing the negative ones.

The immense speed with which the tip could move when the muscles near the base flexed made things quite challenging, as it was an undifferentiated blur much of the time. To be sure, he could move it very slowly and carefully, and hit only the positive ones that way, but the point was to be able to actually make use of that strength and speed without turning any innocents nearby into a pile of organic mush.

It was a fair while before the discordant tone of hitting a negative target began to lessen, and then eventually cease sounding except for the occasional misstep.

Once he was satisfied, and retracted the tentacle, leaving a gash in the ground where it had burst forth, he noticed that evening was quickly approaching. He had not eaten breakfast nor lunch, nor was he now hungry, but the time did put him in mind of the meal he had consumed the day before. If it had been so easy for the nanomachines to replicate muscle tissue, far easier than creating a workable replacement for rope or braided leather, could he create a nano-replica of a dinosaur? Not using his nanomachines to simply make an organic duplicate, he knew from duplicating the cooked beast from the previous morning that he could do that quite simply, but to make one out of pure nanomachines, duplicating it on a functional basis?

He lifted off the ground and began drifting along, hunting for a critter to try it on. The noise and vibrations of his practicing had emptied his immediate surroundings, but he could hear the sonorous calls of what he had heard termed the duck-billed dinosaurs previously. Tro-something, he thought, perhaps, though to him they were just noisy. He was not really interested in them directly, as they were quite large and noisy, rather cow-like though there was not really anything he would consider grass for them to be chewing on.

Lurking near them though, observing them, were a band of raptors, larger than the turkey sized ones near the beach. He was not sure they were really hunting, exactly. More like lounging, but watchful for opportunities, they were feathered and a few had a deep blue wattle hanging beneath their jaws. He formed a sphere of nanites and sent it zipping through the air towards them, only to have it stop part way.

He was able to draw it back, but not send it further out. What was most perplexing about it was that he was fairly sure he had sent the tentacles out much further than the sphere was willing to go. After a bit of puzzling, he finally realized that he was having a communications issue. The sphere was not leaving the extent of his utility cloud. All of his tentacular work had been a long string of nanites all still linked to the cloud.

He briefly considered trying to extend an invisibly thin tentacle to the sphere, but discarded it as ridiculous. There had to be some way to get remote communications going. After poking and prodding at the idea for a short time, he hit upon a key question. Could his nanites support more than one three-dimensional protrusion into another realm? Yes, they could, and that instantly gave him the solution.

One nanite in the sphere needed to have an extrusion into the universe of one of the nanites remaining with him, and the communication lines could be as long as he liked in this world, while being in actual terms of distance of signal only a few nanometers. The sphere whipped back out again, this time not hindered at all by reaching the edge of the utility cloud, and zipped over to where the raptors were, dissolving into invisibly fine particles as it settled on to one of the wattle-less beasts.

Going for a non-destructive scan instead of simply taking the beast apart at a molecular level took a bit to get across, but the basic point that he only needed the large scale muscular, bone, tendon, and skin structure was eventually communicated to the nanites, and they replicated in swift doublings throughout the animal, then as swiftly retracted. Another sphere of nanites appeared near him, and swiftly swelled and expanded, billowing out in rushes as they duplicated the animal, bone here, muscle group there, until a silvery dinosaur stood next to him. A moment later it shimmered, feathers burst forth, and the color settled to a perfect duplicate of the original animal, aside from its unnatural stillness.

Controlling it, on the other hand, turned out to be a tricky proposition. He could manipulate it as a sort of mannequin, adjusting the position of one limb at a time, even moving the head around and operating the jaws, though it felt more like he was moving his arm and opening and closing his hand, as though it were a hand puppet. At no point, even while being moved, did it look alive.

Thomas spent the next hour or so explaining the basic concept of motion capture and replay to the nanites, and the robotics concept of compliance. It was made more difficult by the fact that all the memories he had regarding motion capture were of videos he had seen, which were of course two dimensional. The nanites captured three dimensional video as a matter of course, and had no experience in regenerating three dimensional models from two dimensional video. His own imaginings were more effective, but were also more fragmentary and incoherent. Eventually they seemed to get the idea, and he moved back to watch the living raptors for a time. When the nanites indicated they were ready, he returned to the raptor statue. As soon as he was close enough for his utility cloud to touch it, it seemed to come to life. The little repetitive shifting of balance, the breathing, the flicking of the tail, the movements of the eye and head as it seemed to track his movements, all projected a definite feeling of life. He reached out with his own hand and pressed against the side of the raptor's head, and it turned easily under light pressure. He pushed at the shoulder, and it took a natural seeming step to the side. Stepping back, he reached for it mentally, and shifted the bulk of the body forward, and it obligingly stepped forward. Slipping his mental hand into the head, he turned it from side to side, made it yawn widely, then snap its jaws shut. Attempting to move the head around beyond where it could reach had the nanite construct moving its body in a natural way to enable the attempted motion.

Satisfied with the results, Thomas considered how lifelike it was, and had it reshape into a copy of himself. Here there turned out to be no need for an extended period of observations. The nanites had plenty of records of his motions, and even before the colors had settled his doppelganger was breathing and shifting about in a lifeline fashion. There was something subtly unsettling about it that he could not quite put his finger on, and he returned it to the raptor form.

Seeing it looking so like himself had brought up a different idea, even if he felt more comfortable experimenting on a raptor to test it. It took barely a thought for him to swap his vision for that of the raptor, probably, he assumed, because the nanites were already used to overriding his visual cortex to show him visions. Trying to move while looking out through its eyes have him an intense and unpleasant sense of dizziness and nausea, however. To overcome it, he had to switch his vision back, sit his body down, and have the nanites switch all his sensory inputs over. Even that took several tries to get right, as overriding the sensation of his breathing and the involuntary sense of his heart beating left him panicked and claustrophobic.

Once he got it dialed in though, it actually felt as though he had become a raptor. It could run like the wind, turn on a dime with the help of the long tail acting like a rudder, and leap an impressive distance. He considered trying to infiltrate the little raptor - what? Flock? Pride? But he decided against it. Emulating the smell of an animal had not been part of his instructions, and he had no doubt that he smelled nothing like the other raptors.

Seeing his body lying on the ground, basically defenceless aside from the automatic defenses provided by the utility cloud also warned against attempting to go too far. He supposed he could try to set his body up on this form's back, jockey-style, but while he had considered trying to ride dinosaurs when he had seen the triceratops, having his own body hanging around on his back lurching about as he moved like a sack of potatoes sounded like a miserable time.

What about a larger animal form though? He had to replicate the musculature of the animal, but its body cavity was essentially empty, there were no lungs behind the apparent breathing, nor a heart pumping, nor a digestive system. Perhaps if the animal was sufficiently larger than he, he could effectively ride along inside it, protected there. It would like a dinosaur mecha.

He abandoned the raptor body, restoring his senses, and vanished it, then went hunting for a larger dinosaur. He hunted down and scanned a triceratops, then a massive sauropod, and finally found one of the larger tyrannosaur types feeding on a carcass and scanned it as well. Moving away, he materialized a tyrannosaur form, which took only a little longer than the raptor, since most of the needed nanites already existed, just folded within themselves like nesting dolls. There were a few more doublings needed to get the full size, but then he was able to step up to the beast and it sort of melted and flowed over him, drawing him up into itself until he was wearing it, and seeing through it, a gigantic T-rex costume better than any ever built before. Well, except for being feathered, and lacking a roar. The duplication of the auditory mechanisms of the real animal had supported the sounds it made, less varied than birds but not dissimilar, if much deeper in tone, bleeps as he thought of them rather than chirps, but it was hard for him to work it. It had a larynx just as he did, but it was not shaped the same and did not have the muscles to move and manipulate it. Apparently the sound was produced by a different organ, and he could not quite find the controls for it, leaving him able to sort of hiss and moan with the air the nanites forced out of his trachea in imitation of lungs, but roaring or even bleeping were out of his reach.

He had thought the raptors could run, but they were nothing to the speed of running on four meter long legs. He had some doubts whether the living beasts jumped, since similarly sized animals in his time did not do much of that, but with his more solid structure, he gave it a try, and found that at speed, he could leap a prodigious height and distance, but landing when you were used to using your arms to correct your balance in a body where those arms were nearly vestigial in nature left one massive trench. His body was undamaged, both the false one and his real one, the momentum canceling powers of the nanites preventing his body from experiencing the full impact of the acceleration, especially since they had his body fully cradled inside, not just sitting in an open area as he had first pictured.

He made sure the three bodies were recorded in his HUD options and let it vanish, returning his senses to his body and dropping to the ground, landing lightly and easily as the utility cloud absorbed the impact for him.

Night had fully fallen and he considered finding somewhere to sleep, but realized that he was actually not feeling at all tired. A quick test with the nanites confirmed that they could effectively increase the area of his pupils so as to give him full color vision at night, as if it were full day. He did not like the idea of losing track of day and night, though, so he had them tone it down a little, as if it were twilight.

Having determined that alternate universes could be used as a communications medium for his nanites, he brought up the query interface, and began attempting once more to interrogate them about it, this time focusing on what existing functions the universal spaces were intended to provide. After all, while he could understand that it might be difficult to fit sufficient complexity in a small nanomachine to actually accomplish complete programmable self-replication, and multiple other ancillary jobs besides, surely a universe per nanite was immense overkill. It must have some additional purpose beyond the obvious ones he had already thought of or triggered.

As before, many of the images he was shown were from his perspective incoherent or simply incomprehensible, but one of them the nanites did a particularly good job of getting across. They recognized he valued the senzu beans he had, that were currently stored in a pocket in a fabric that was, by their standards, ephemeral. The image of him holding the pile of senzu beans in his hand and their vanishing, followed by a single bean reappearing, was repeated in the mix several times.

Unwilling to risk his beans on his understanding of the often confusing and multi-layered images - part of the confusion of three dimensional imagery versus two dimensional was simply that functionally speaking, the nanites always had multiple perspectives on something, but for him, seeing more than one perspective at a time was almost always too confusing to understand what he was being shown - he picked up a stick and pictured it simply vanishing, at which point, it promptly vanished. There was no flash of light or special effects, it was simply there and then gone, quite unlike the fading out effect of the nanites disassembling something.

He held out his hand and imagined the stick in it, and it reappeared. As far as he could tell, it was the same stick. "Subspace storage pocket? Or at least, a reasonable fascimile." He tried to query the nanites, sending them images of him touching a tree and it vanishing and then reappearing, and the same with a small dinosaur. They corrected him, the tree vanishing and reappearing mostly sans leaves, wilting, and crushed, the dinosaur vanishing and reappearing only to collapse to the ground, not even struggling. Well, that put paid to any ideas of testing that as a transportation method for himself, to be sure. Was it a lack of oxygen? Inhospitable environment? Maybe there was a difference in the passage of time? He wondered if it was the transportation that was harming them, or the storage facility, but attempts to clarify it were not terribly helpful. He could not work out the right images to send to get them to show him what it looked like where the objects were stored. Checking with his probability power confirmed that his understanding that if he stored a raptor, it would be dead when retrieved, so he had at least interpreted that visual correctly.

While it would have been easy to simply set it aside with the intention to only store inanimate objects, this was too important to ignore. He was planning on understanding and expanding the universe-linking powers of the nanites to get off this world, so if it was somehow merely traveling through their link that was killing things, he needed to know that before he made the attempt himself.

Trying to explain what he wanted to the nanites would be problematic, if indeed he could manage it at all, but the inter-universal communications method he had come across for handling remotes had the genesis of a solution. This was easier to get across to the nanites, and after only a few minutes of back and forth, his nanitic doppelganger formed in the largest available enclosed open space in one of the other universe extensions of one of his nanites. A moment later, as far as he could tell, he was in utter darkness.

Lights began to appear, flicking into long arcing lines across a ceiling of ridiculous complexity. It was not designed to give room for men to get into spaces to repair them, or to construct them in the first place. There were no panels to cover and conceal the complexity, as there would normally never be eyes to see it. Even as he watched, sheets of metal formed, sealing away the complexity above him, and beneath his feet. The room itself was not large enough to store one of the larger dinosaurs, but the smaller raptors would fit without trouble.

The nanite he was within migrated to the utility cloud, and began drawing in air from the atmosphere where his living body still was, and filling the space. The very first bit of air rushing in was instantly visible, as the intense humidity he was familiar with for the last several days, when the gas it was in expanded into what was formerly near vacuum conditions, appeared as a spreading fog. Theoretically, lower pressure air could hold more water than higher pressure at the same temperature, but of course, the rapid expansion of the air had simultaneously dropped the temperature drastically. As the air pressure began to equalize, the fog stopped appearing, and what had already condensed settled and clung to the ground.

Satisfied that with the space now lit and air-filled, it ought to be survivable, he returned his focus to his body, and rose into the air. A test with his probability power indicated that storing and retrieving a raptor would not kill it, but he had to be sure. He found the shoreline of the inland sea again, and swept along it, until he located another small group of the turkey sized raptors. A sphere of nanites shot around, zipping down and evaporating into a cloud of particles when it reached the raptor, and it vanished.

He flipped his focus back to his doppelganger back in the other universe, and looked around. The raptor was chirping curiously, scratching at the metal floor, but seemed fine. He flipped his view back again, and returned the raptor to confirm that there was not any particular danger from a second transfer. Unwilling to leave it at that, he flipped the animal back and forth a dozen times more before accepting that he had found and corrected the cause of the death the utility cloud had warned against.

Tempted though he was to immediately start trying to find a world to travel to, he reminded himself that he had five years here where there was basically nothing that could kill him. As soon as he started traveling, he upped the odds substantially that he would meet something that could ignore his nanites. The bastard that gave him his powers would probably think nothing simply causing all his nanites to vanish, or to be in some other universe without him, or stop working, or the like.

He also had some philosophical issues to work out, and he took to the sky again, flying above the cloud layer so that he could look at the unending sea of stars while he pondered. The implications of infinite universes existing, to the extent that anything that could exist did exist, probably millions of times over, was both promising and frightening. It promised great things, worlds of peace and high ideals, worlds of unspoiled beauty, realms of beauty and light - but equally is promised worlds of war and death, worlds crushed under conquering tyrants or endless plagues, worlds where humanity was enslaved, or destroyed, worlds where humanity never existed, or where humanity was the conquering tyrant enslaving everyone else. It threatened, deeply, the ability of a man to truly care, to be a good man.

What was the point in fighting a dictator if there must be unending worlds where he was already defeated? What was the harm if a million worlds fell to Hitler, or Genghis Khan established a ten thousand year reign of rape and conquest, if there were a million more where they were never born? Or what was the point in fighting to save another world when it was only one of millions equally devastated?

How easy might it become to look at human suffering, and simply move on to another world where the suffering was less?

For that matter, what of the inhabitants of this world? Was he condemning humanity if he stopped the meteor or comet or whatever was coming? Or would humanity even have developed here? He might be able to answer that with his power over probability, but should he? Who knew if left alone the dinosaurs might have evolved an even greater civilization - though perhaps it was already ethnocentric just to think that it would somehow be better so? If no civilization ever developed, what if that was better for the world as a whole?

He had taken only a single Introduction to Philosophy course in college, and he was certainly not prepared to argue his thoughts one way or another. One thing he was fairly certain of, was that he had better not allow his power to dictate his actions. If he killed a child because his power told him the child would commit horrendous actions when grown, he would have abdicated his responsibility as a person and might as well be replaced by a machine following the power's dictates. Above all, he desired to remain a good man, a good person.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." He could not recall who had said it, nor would he have known who Lord Acton was if he had remembered, but he recalled the sentiment, and thought it had more than a kernel of truth to it. Already he had killed a dinosaur without need, only to satisfy his curiosity. He did not even need to eat anymore, so he did not have the excuse of survival needs.

Frustrated at his inability to think his way through the problem without tying himself in mental knots, Thomas abandoned the attempt and sought to sleep instead. His dreams were warped and disturbing, his sleep light and troubled, but he remembered little of it on waking some five hours later when the sun rose high enough to shine on him where he was sleeping above the clouds.

When he awoke, he found that his thoughts the previous day about various human dictators had reminded him of their various uniforms. When he got travel working, he would want to fit in smoothly wherever he went, so perhaps it would be worthwhile to work on various sets of clothing. He suspected that the nanites would be able to basically fabricate clothing in situ.

He was about to carefully empty his pockets out and have the nanites destructively scan his clothing, when he froze. If he did that, if he completely emptied his pockets, then he would know, without a doubt, that nothing had been left in them, and it would at the very least become much harder to chance something like the peanut into existence. Instead, he switched his mind to his doppelganger.

The fact that it was dressed was confirmation he had previously not considered that the nanites could of course produce clothing. Taking this as another opportunity to show the nanites the value in two-dimensional images by showing them clothing with embroidery, he tried to get them to make several polo shirts, examining the results and making adjustments. After confirming they could create a workable shirt, he moved on to getting the nanites to swap his clothing while it was worn. He could not really move much further on designing clothing until he had more samples to work from.

Storing and restoring the clothing did not work well, since it turned out, now that he could watch it, that the items stored simply fell to the floor of the storage area. When transported to his hand this was fine, but trying to transport rumpled flat clothing into place on his person was a losing proposition from the start. Having them build the clothing in place from nanites, rather than creating clothing from the actual original substances worked far better, so in the end, he abandoned the idea of storing outfits to be swapped into place. He could store store changes of clothing, but could only employ them if he was somewhere he could dress and undress. In any other case, he would have to use nanitic clothing, which could intelligently form itself in place on the fly.

Satisfied that he had a handle on it, he returned his view to himself, then formed a second doppelganger of himself, set up with the same remote connections that allowed his spheres to exit his utility cloud. In this case though, he wanted some redundancy, and so he set up twenty such communications paths, then moved away, and hamster-balled himself again, sealing himself away from external influences while his mentality was elsewhere, then switched his view into the duplicate.

Trying out the new clothing thing, he had the nanites replace the duplicates of his existing clothing with more tightly fitted shorts and undergarments so that he would have nothing getting in the way atmospherically. This body should have no issue with experiencing extreme acceleration, or lack of oxygen or food, or physical damage. In this body, he could experience space. If anything would give him the perspective to get past his philosophical issues, this would be it.

Glancing over at his hamster-balled living body, he lifted into the air. Adjusting his upward momentum, he shattered the sound barrier only a few hundred feet above the ground, and reached ten thousand kph on his odometer a few moments later. He was not sure what escape velocity was, but then, he did not actually want to get out of Earth's gravity well, at least not at this point, just get into space actual. That was what, something like a hundred miles up?

Knowing that he could negate the pull of gravity meant that he did not need to build up horizontal velocity so as to get into an orbit, he just kept pushing straight up, 20,000 kph... 30,000 kph... when his altimeter hit a hundred miles up he stopped cold. It barely seemed like any time had passed at all, as he looked down at the Earth. He was up high enough that he could see the curvature of the Earth. Looking down at the planet, he tried to see the probable path of the impactor, but saw nothing. Flipping back to his physical body, he saw the glowing line in the sky marking the path, and realized that when his view was with the nanites, it was because they were overriding his senses, which meant he could not use any of the visual aspects of his power while he was controlling a remote body.

He flipped back to the remote and turned to look up into the sky, staring at the unobstructed view of the stars, then slowly spun so that the Earth came slowly into view. As he gazed at the land far below, he realized that the answer was actually simple. Now that he knew what was coming for the animals below, he could not just abandon them to their fate. Had he been able to leave before learning it, it would have been fine, even though he knew what eventually happened to them in his world. There was no inherent reason why that would happen to them in every world.

Now that he knew, though, if he left without doing anything, he would feel responsible, whether he was right to do so or not, for all the death that would follow. If he tried his best and failed, he might still feel some guilt, but not as much as leaving them callously to their fate.

Having decided that settled some of his worries, and gave him a goal for the next while - figure out how to change the outcome. He knew that the simplest course was simply to get some remote of his to the impactors, since with contact, he could simply have his nanites exchange their momentum, altering the course of the asteroid or comet or whatever. To actually locate them before they hit, though, would require he either figure out a way to get these remotes to be able to see using his power, or get into outerspace himself. Or he could wait until they were in orbit on their way down, and hope he could get to them fast enough to reverse them. He briefly considered trying to expand his nanite network around the entire planet, but he knew the planet plowed through billions of tons of space debris continually. Putting the nanites in place densely enough to catch the impactor would have a material impact either on the space debris if the nanites blocked it to prevent damage, or on the nanite swarm as they continually destroyed it.

He did not want to take any action that could potentially cause the utility cloud to reject him as a user, and setting it up for continual destruction seemed likely to do that if anything could.

Of course, there might be a way that he could parlay his power into something workable with his remote bodies even so. The first step was to convince the nanites to give him something akin to a picture-in-picture view of what his actual body was seeing. That might be tricky, since technically, what he was seeing right now literally was what his actual body was seeing. They would need to tap into and process the signals coming in the optic nerves somewhere prior to the point they were overriding them.

He worked at it for a while with no success, then switched to trying to get them to take a snapshot of what his body was seeing. He had managed to convince them of the value of two dimensional imagery by this point, but the pictures they took were still of he was seeing right now, in space. Flipping back to his actual body, he focused on the path of the impactor, then tried to get them to take a photo of what he was seeing. To his surprise, the glowing line of probability was not on their picture, and when he complained, he got only incomprehension.

He flipped back to the space version of himself, and decided to try a different course. Sometimes he saw probable paths, sometimes he just got a sense of the likelihood of something, a feeling for what the odds were of it happening. If he could tweak his questions to be that sort, where it did not use the visual system the nanites were hijacking, it might just work out for him. Looking straight ahead, he applied a small forward impetus, then tried to consider the likelihood that he would encounter the asteroid along this path. Of course the chance was nil, unsurprising for a random selection, but the fact that he got the sense it was nil told him this would work.

Now, instead of looking for the likelihood that he would encounter the impactor, he tried to find the likelihood that he would pass within five astronomical units (five times the distance between the Earth and the Sun) of the impactor, just to verify whether it was a comet or not. An asteroid impactor would probably be a near-Earth object. and therefore somewhere around the Earth's orbit, which logically would be within one to three AU, depending on whether it was on the same or the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth or not. A cometary impactor five years out could be much further out. Certainty.

"So it was an asteroid that took out the dinos," he thought. "That settles that old argument, for this universe, at least."

He narrowed the distance he was checking for until the probability dropped suddenly from a certainty to nil, then altered his trajectory slightly until it returned to a certainty. Boosting his speed, he cycled his checking back and forth, widening it whenever he lost the track of the object, narrowing it to tighten his course as he ramped up the speed.

Eventually he gave up that night, dropping his speed drastically and flipping back to his body to sleep. When he woke in the morning and returned to the space doppelganger and looked around, he was a little surprised that he could not find the Earth or Moon in sight anywhere. The Sun was clearly visible, and the automatic safeties in the visual override meant he could actually look at it and see it as a dully gleaming disk with visible sunspots, instead of a retina searing ball of painful light. No other recognizable objects were in sight, so before he tried to focus in on the asteroid again, he took a minute to narrow down the Earth the same way, confirming its direction. Even knowing basically where it was in the sky, he could not differentiate the points of light to say this one or that was the Earth.

Did that mean that he was further from Earth than any human had ever been, at least on his world? As soon as he thought it, he realized it was not true in a meaningful way. While his thought was right, as least in that he recalled pictures of the Earth from the Moon showing the Earth clearly still visible as a giant orb in the sky, and that was the furthest that humans had been from the Earth, it was likewise true that he was actually still on Earth, and what was in space was a robot probe. Humanity had sent robot probes out beyond the outer planets when he left, the Voyager probes as he recalled were approaching the outer edge of the Solar System.

That did bring up a momentary thought that perhaps this shape was not ideal for space travel, before rejecting the concern as ridiculous. He was setting his velocity directly, and there was no atmosphere for him to be insufficiently aerodynamic in. Besides, what were his other options? It was not like he had scanned a spacecraft, and even if he had, having a larger cross section would not gain him any additional abilities, it would just expose him to more micrometeoroid impacts, and a dinosaur form would certainly not add any benefit.

Refocusing, he narrowed down the direction to the asteroid. He ended up wasting a bit of time when getting within a certain range caused his power to behave erratically, which he eventually determined was because there were multiple asteroids, something he had already known but had disregarded.

It took him most of that day to locate the largest object, helped greatly several hours in when the nanites finally were able to detect an object at the target they extrapolated him to be aiming for. They could not detect the signals he was getting from his power, but they had apparently been able to process all of his movements, and use them to deduce an intercept curve. Once they had it, they were able to give him a course heading and speed.

The asteroid was massive, peculiarly shaped, and quite dark. Without the nanites highlighting its angular contours, he doubted he would have been able to find it even with his probability power, at least not without several more days of trying to narrow it down. Much longer in one dimension than the others, it vaguely resembled a bullet, but dimpled in deeply on one side, and not flattened on the back. The nanites detected and highlighted another massive asteroid a short distance away, only a little smaller than the one he was at, and doubtless another of the impactors. His power indicated there were several more too far from the grouping to be seen with the naked eye.

Almost, he merely did what he had come to do, to simply change their momentum so that they would not impact, but thought better of it at the last minute. It would work, it was within his nanites' ability to do, he had no doubt of that, but what of Murphy? If he simply redirected them, how could he be certain he was not just setting them up to hit around the time that civilisation developed? Better, he thought, to remove them from the field completely, and now that he was here, he thought he saw how to do it.

He drifted slowly closer, until he touched down on the surface, sinking slightly into the crumbly surface. His nanites were telling him this was carbon heavy, and so possibly a life-seeding asteroid, had it not hit where life already existed, but also heavy with iron and other metals. Remembering something from his readings, he asked about iridium, and they confirmed it was present in levels substantially higher than were present on the surface of the Earth. He thought he had recalled something about there being an Iridium-rich layer of clay or sediment that had first brought up the dinosaur-killing asteroid hypothesis, and here was a bit of confirmation.

The asteroid vanished utterly and instantly, and he grinned. He had directed the nanites to connect a nanite to a resource universe large enough to contain all the asteroids, and store the asteroid in it, and it had worked. "No more dinosaur killer," he thought, boosting his velocity a bit to line up with and land on the smaller of the two big ones. It too vanished, following the first. One after another, he tracked down the smaller pieces and vanished them all, storing them away. "And someday," he said aloud, though he heard no sound, "I'll need One, at Sufficient Velocity, and now I have it."

Moving On

Not yet posted.

London

Not yet posted.

Street Rats

Not yet posted.

Setting Up House

Not yet posted.

Building a Household

Not yet posted.

Charles

Not yet posted.

Tobias

Not yet posted.

Not yet posted.

Emma

Not yet posted.