Undeserved


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.