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.