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.