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. 




Exploration


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Defusing Armageddon


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Moving On

Not yet posted. 



London

Not yet posted. 



Street Rats

Not yet posted. 



Setting Up House

Not yet posted. 



Building a Household

Not yet posted. 



Charles

Not yet posted. 



Tobias

Not yet posted. 



Not yet posted. 



Emma

Not yet posted.