Daniel paused. “I guess what I’m saying is that we could be somewhere inside that seed. Us, and a whole bunch of other species too.”

  Nala’s eyes went wide. “They took our DNA.”

  “The Surveyors?”

  “Yup. Think about it. Remember when that silver post popped up?”

  “The one with the handprint on it.”

  “Yeah. You didn’t want to touch it, so it went away. And what did they put up next?”

  “Uh… the telescope to view the bug.”

  “Right. It begged to get close and look through that first ring. I know my eyelid touched it. My breath too. They sampled our DNA.”

  Daniel nodded. “You’re right. They were testing us. Chitzas too. Leap over that bridge barrier to test our motor skills. See how we react when a lion takes a swipe at us… grab our DNA and encode it in a seed. Keep doing that over millions of years…”

  Nala finished. “And you encode a preference for the kind of people who arrive at your registration station.”

  “Exactly. Sprig and I talked about the humanoid thing on our way home. The Surveyors told us that the humanoid shape is trending. If so, then why are we unique in the Milky Way? We’ve been to Jheean. We’ve met every known intelligence in our galaxy, and none of them look like us.”

  “What did Sprig say about it?”

  “Not much, but he did seem annoyed. I had to tell him that I wasn’t arguing for the humanoid shape, only that in their zeal to establish a network of Sibyls, the Choreographers set up a system biased toward humanoids—just not in our galaxy. Then I realized that we’re conditioned to think of the Milky Way as being spectacularly vast, but it’s really just a tiny corner of the universe. It supports twenty-four intelligent species, including us.”

  Daniel flashed both hands in a so-what gesture. “Twenty-four. That’s nothing. It’s like looking at twenty-four pixels of a digital photo and trying to decide who is in the picture. It’s too small a sample. We’d need to explore Andromeda, Triangulum, Whirlpool, Pinwheel, and a bunch more galaxies. Find all of their space-faring species. Even then, it would be a small sample compared to the whole universe. If we keep searching, we might find the same bias.”

  “So, 1960s TV sci-fi was right. Aliens look like us but with pointy ears.”

  Daniel smiled. “Maybe TV writers were just wrong about the scale. Boldly going where no one has gone before requires getting outside our galaxy.”

  Their distinctly non-humanoid guest spoke up. “Is diversity in form and demeanor a good thing for biology?” A pointed question, delicately put.

  “Touché, mon ami,” Nala answered. “Diversity is most definitely a good thing for biology. Makes us stronger. More resistant to the dangers we face. So, why bias the Chaos Field toward anything? Just let it be random. I bet it was random before the Choreographers and their Surveyor dipshits started screwing around with it.”

  Nala pointed a finger at Daniel. “Brainstorm. What happens if somebody—maybe us—decides to firebomb their place?” She tapped the metal plate on the side of her head. “And trust me… I remember how to get there.”

  They often played the brainstorming game and usually to good effect. A mental exercise more than an action plan; she wasn’t necessarily suggesting they climb aboard the next Chitza flight to the cosmic horizon.

  Nala continued with enthusiasm. “So, we light the place up. Shred their web barrier with lasers, melt their silver orb with a few thermonuclear devices. We put a permanent end to the so-called fine tuning they’re doing to the Chaos Field seed. Eventually things go back to random, and we’re heroes. Fair?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Fair. But one minor point… for anything eternal, there’s no such thing as permanent. With unlimited time and constant fluctuations, you can’t expect any configuration to stick around forever, which means that the Choreographers’ manipulation will eventually end and something else will replace it. For that matter, who is to say the Choreographers were the first? Periods of manipulation could be cyclical. Ultimately, any mountain of solid granite wears away to sand. When time is unlimited, you have to expect an infinite number of permutations.”

  “Okay, I buy that. Is cyclical reality good or bad?”

  “Good, I’d say. It’s natural. Mountains become sand then erode to become sediment which later is uplifted into new mountains.”

  “Which requires underlying processes. Plate tectonics, rain, and rivers in the case of granite mountains.”

  “And random—or nearly random—fluctuations in the case of the Chaos Field.”

  Nala judged. “I’ll accept that. So, firebombing might satisfy our urge to set things right, but in the grand, grand, grand scheme of things, it’s just another blip.”

  Daniel sighed. For such a colossal topic, it rested on a foundation of simplicity. Once something changeable was deemed eternal, then all else derived from eons of time.

  “Vastness on an unfathomable scale,” Daniel finally said. “A foundation that evolves, resets, and evolves again, over, and over.”

  “We’ve existed before.” Nala announced. It was another of her non sequiturs. Daniel gave her his best puzzled look.

  “We’re still brainstorming, right?” She smiled sweetly.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “Then we’ve existed before. Eternal ensures infinite. With time never ending, every combination of particles, energy, and events must repeat. Our universe, our world, us. We have to repeat in infinite variations.”

  Daniel nodded. “Got it. I agree. It implies we’ll exist again too. Professor Alosoni-eff pulled the plug on his current life likely believing that his consciousness will someday open different eyes to a new life. From his perspective, no time at all will pass between incarnations.”

  “Deep stuff,” Nala said.

  Theesah-ma rose slightly out of the water. “You two amaze me. Every time. Your exchanges are a delight. Your passion combined with intellect. Such a joy to observe. Please ignore comments we sometimes hear. Those who say Humans do not… measure up.”

  “Measure up to whooom?” Nala mocked Theesah-ma’s silky voice, but they’d become such good friends she could probably get away with it. “Toraks? We’ve got those grumpy centipedes beat easily. Chitzas? Hey, our buddies are fun, but their eyes would gloss over ten minutes into this conversation. How about Litian-nolos? Even there, I could make a good case for Humans.”

  Theesah-ma stared at Nala like she might be on the verge of mocking Americanized vowels. She didn’t. “You could make a case. You wouldn’t win, but you could try.”

  Daniel drifted across the pool to his wife’s side and settled onto the underwater ledge where warm jets provided a lower back massage.

  “Why don’t Litian-nolos brainstorm like we do?” Nala asked Theesah-ma.

  Daniel snuggled in close, resting his head against the pool deck. Nala’s hair fell around his face. Up close, the smooth brown skin of her slender neck stretched forever. A blue light twinkled at one end of the Arc, only an inch from Daniel’s eye. An indicator of her thoughts? Or a monitor, continuously sampling the trillions of quantum fields above, below, and inside her?

  While Nala and Theesah-ma continued their conversation, Daniel pulled inward. Perhaps it was the warm water, or the gentle gurgle of the pool jets. Perhaps a lingering buzz from the margaritas or the comfort of returning home after having been so far away.

  Daniel looked up, his view filtered through the strands of Nala’s hair. A cumulonimbus cloud hung in the sky. Its white puffs performed a slow motion explosion of condensation, defying gravity to reach ever higher in the sky. Above the cloud, blue sky would eventually give way to the blackness of space.

  Half a moon, easily visible in daylight, gave away the game. Stars were up there too—at this very moment—temporarily hidden by the blinding light of the nearest star among them. Once night fell, with the right optics, you could spot the dim yellow star where Theesah-ma’s home planet of Litia orbited. If you knew where to look, you could find several other home worlds too. Twenty-four space-faring species inhabited the Milky Way galaxy, separated by vast stretches of space.

  Andromeda would be up there too, another impossibly grand assembly of stars and planets just waiting to be explored. Further out, a hundred more galaxies in the local cluster, some named, some numbered, each unique. Every collection of stars, dust, and gas bore the marks of its own history spanning billions of years into the past. Some formed blobs, others slowly rotated in place. Islands of matter and energy within an immensity of emptiness.

  The Afeesh Tm were out there, too far away to be seen no matter how big the telescope, but they existed. Even the boundary of the universe didn’t mark the end. Reality continued far beyond, across infinite distances and an eternity of time.

  He reeled his thoughts in, pulling distant locales and colossal spans of time back to one place and one time. Here and now. Daniel reset, then drifted once more, this time in the opposite direction.

  One lock of Nala’s silky brown hair cascaded across his eye. If he tried, he could focus on a single strand. The infinitesimal width of one hair could only be measured against other microscopic objects: a fiber of cotton, a spec of pollen. Yet, it would take a dozen red blood cells stitched together end to end to wrap around a single hair’s circumference. Going further down into the microscopic world, that red blood cell would look like a baseball stadium next to the average virus, which in turn would appear mountainous next to a proton.

  There would be little point in going further. Down at the quantum level, a proton would appear fuzzy, certainly not like a ball. It’s position would be indistinct, its movements hard to judge. The closer you got to picking out where it could be found, the more difficultly you’d have in measuring its motion. Uncertainty could be counted on; quantum particles refused to be pinned down. Scientists had a name for it, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a concept built upon a foundational idea at the heart of quantum physics.

  Random.

  Daniel reset once more, returning to the here and now. He lifted his head, stared at his beautiful wife, and slowly pulled her hair back to fully expose the metal arc embedded in her head.

  Her conversation with Theesah-ma stopped. “It’s still there, Daniel,” Nala said without moving. “Not going anywhere. No plans to rip it out.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  The alien device stored a random number seed of unfathomable complexity. Far more than a navigation tool, the seed applied to any quantum particle. Every proton, every neutrino, every photon. Inside her head, Nala held the key to unlocking the universe.

  “What’s up? You’ve been awfully quiet over there. Spill it.”

  Daniel let go of her hair and spoke barely above a whisper. “It’s not random. Nothing is, and you hold the key. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle doesn’t apply to you.”

  “Mmm.” Nala tilted her head back and forth. “Yeah, I suppose I could compute an electron’s path around an atom. That’d be cool. I’ll have to try that sometime.”

  Daniel floated around to face her. “It’s more than that. Think about it. With enough input and enough computing power, you could examine every particle. Every synapse firing in your brain and mine. Every atom moving around us. You could turn chaos into determinism. You could know what is going to happen before it happens.”

  Nala scrunched up her nose. “I… really doubt it. But I see your point. It’s a deterministic universe, not random. Assuming you have access to the key.”

  “Which you do.”

  “Yes, I do.” She leaned forward and kissed Daniel on the lips. “Don’t worry, I won’t go all Quantum Goddess on you. No pulling your thoughts out of your mind. But I have to admit, knowing what’s going to happen before it happens would be handy when we head back to the Surveyors and firebomb their registration station.”

  Daniel gave his wife a cold stare.

  Nala lifted her eyebrows. “We are rebels.”

  Theesah-ma floated over. Her flexible head curled at its edges. “Quite dangerous too.”

  Nala nudged Daniel. “TM’s getting the hang of sarcasm. It’s going to be downhill from here.”

  Daniel smiled, wrapping his arms around her neck, and pulling her tight. “I wouldn’t miss it for all of the worlds in all of the universes.”

  THE END

  Afterword

  Excuse me while I ponder how many worlds there might be out there. Too many to count, but numbers are overrated. I’m confident—even more confident than I was when I started writing this story—that there are enough worlds out there to fill every niche in my imagination and yours too. Enough worlds that there will certainly be another world to experience when I’m done with this one. You too. The probabilities are in our favor. Eternity is on our side. With eternity, everything must occur, repeatedly.

  Unless, of course, reality isn’t random. In that case, all bets are off.

  Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the story and the colorful characters who played their parts in it. Once again, I had fun writing it. Shall we dive into science for a few more pages?

  First up, the cosmic horizon (also called the cosmological horizon, or the visible universe) is a spherical boundary with Earth at the center. Its radius is a ridiculous 46 billion light-years. Every photon that we see with our eyes or through a telescope exists within that sphere. There are more photons emitted by stars outside that sphere, but we’ll never see them. The distance between us and any star over the horizon is increasing faster than light can cross it. The universe is expanding, every chunk of space is swelling, every day, every year. No one knows why. There’s something called dark energy, but that’s just a name. No one knows what it really is.

  “But wait!” you exclaim, “the universe is only 13.8 billion years old! Shouldn’t the horizon be 13.8 billion light years?” Surprisingly, the answer is no.

  Think of space as a grid of squares. Then imagine that each square grows by 1% over some period of time, say, a million years. That means the square next to us is 1% further away after a million years. But the next square over is 2% further away, then 3%, etc. A square that is 100 squares away becomes twice as far away as it used to be. A 1000 squares away, becomes 20 times further. It’s multiplicative. The further out you go, the greater the multiplier. Eventually, you’ll get to a square that is expanding away from us faster than light could travel the distance—even though nothing has really traveled that distance. The grid has simply grown larger.

  Here's a good video from Physics Girl (Dianna Cowern) that superbly explains the cosmic horizon: https://fb.watch/l6hcf1Ak1v/ (As I write, Dianna is still bedridden, six months after getting sick from Covid. Best wishes to Dianna and her husband. We miss her enthusiasm for science and the wonders around us.)

  One more thought on astronomical distances: we commonly use the poorest measure, light-years. It feels like a speed, not a distance, and it gets confused with the speed of light. It shouldn’t. We should all switch to parsecs. Astronomers have. One parsec equals 3.26 light-years. Don’t worry about where the parsec unit came from, it almost doesn’t matter. A parsec is simply a convenient distance measure for stars and galaxies. For example, Alpha Centauri, Procyon, Sirius, Altair, and other nearby stars are between one and ten parsecs away. The center of the Milky Way is 34 kiloparsecs away. Andromeda galaxy, 780 kiloparsecs. The cosmic horizon is 14 gigaparsecs away. A gigaparsec is as big a unit as you’ll ever need.

  Okay… more fun stuff! Lithium! Where is our lithium? We sometimes read news items about running out of lithium for batteries. It’s true, Earth is in short supply of element number three, but there’s something even stranger: our whole universe seems to be short on lithium. Nonsense, you might say (and you might be right)! But cosmologists (astronomers who specialize in the Big Bang) have long wondered why measures of lithium don’t match theory. This graph shows the measured abundance of each element in our universe:

  Hydrogen is first, at the upper left. Quite abundant. Then helium. But then a big dip down to lithium, beryllium, and boron. Then back up to carbon, where things settle into a smooth drop all the way to uranium. Cosmologists have a good explanation for why beryllium and boron weren’t manufactured in larger quantities at the birth of our universe, but their explanation doesn’t work for lithium. According to well-established Big Bang theory, there should be three to four times more lithium than we measure! Earth should be smothered with lithium. It should be more common than carbon. But it isn’t.

  Over the past several years, astronomers have come up with various explanations for why stars consume lithium in their furnaces and why it isn’t released back into space through supernovae explosions. These explanations might be right; the jury is still out. Being a rebel, I decided to have some fun with it. And so, I described our universe as “lithium deficient” from birth. It’s just who we are within the grand scale of the multiverse! Other universes were better behaved children.

  Next topic: words. This is, after all, a book of 90,000 words. In Chapter 23, Aussik rattles off words in Chitza, ending with a question, “Bo?” Nala answers him with, “Bo, my ass!” It’s Chitza, so it could mean anything. But I’ll confess. Bo is actually a Korean word. It means “what?”, and for Koreans, it seems to be a particularly strong form of surprise, like “What!?!?!”

  When I lived in Manila in 2012, my wife and I regularly watched Korean soap operas on TV with English subtitles. Fun shows, but they inevitably include scenes where one character says something startling—like admitting his father is actually the CEO of some mega corporation—then three other characters go wide-eyed and chime in together with a resounding, “Bo?!?!” The English subtitle would appear below, “What?”, and my wife and I would be rolling across the couch, laughing hysterically. Korean soap operas seem to include a “Bo?!?!” scene in every episode, every show.