Canned Coffee of the Multiverse
"What if I had made a different choice back then?" A man wandering through parallel worlds in search of an ideal world finds his "true place" at the edge of the universe. This is a poignant and heartwarming multiverse novel that, at the end of an epic sci-fi journey, 100% affirms the tiny, everyday life.
Chapter 3: Theory of Everything
After a sensation like the world being torn apart, the first things Ren perceived were the intense smell of chemicals and the metallic electronic sound persistently beating against his eardrums.
"--Chi, chi, chi, chi..."
The night view from the high-rise apartment and Todo's cold, calculating voice had vanished in an instant. Ren was crawling on a linoleum floor blackened by oil and dust. He scrambled to his feet, and before him lay an overwhelming number of electronic devices, exposed wiring, and a blackboard covered in a maddening amount of scribbled equations.
"Hey, Kiryu. Did you collapse again? I know you've been pulling all-nighters, but if you die, this research stops."
Hearing a voice from behind, Ren spun around as if flicked. A white-haired, elderly professor he didn't recognize, wearing a lab coat, was looking at him with a puzzled expression, holding a coffee cup in one hand.
(Where... am I?)
A cold, muddy stream of memories slowly seeped out from the depths of his brain. In this timeline, he hadn't chosen to start a business with Todo, nor had he chosen to work at a home improvement store. Ren had gone on to graduate school, becoming a perpetually broke postdoc researcher obsessively pursuing the "proof of the existence of the multiverse."
The glamour of Todo's company was nowhere to be found here. All that existed was the reality of a run-down physics lab, its budget slashed, mocked by the public as a "delusional shut-in's" hideout.
"Professor... how far has our research progressed?" "What are you talking about? You discovered it yesterday. The equation for the 'distortion' of space-time that occurs when parallel worlds interfere with each other."
Ren looked at the blackboard the professor pointed to. The moment he saw the equation written in the center, a cold shiver ran down his spine. It was inscribed with a mathematical model that perfectly explained the geometric noise he always saw the moment he shifted world lines.
(This is it. The bug occurring in my brain isn't a hallucination or just some superpower. It's the very 'law of physics' of this world.)
At that moment, the Geiger counter and gravity meter installed in the room began to emit a frantic alert sound.
"Chi-chi-chi-chi-chi-ma-ma-ma-ma...!" "W-what is this!? The gravitational field of space is distorting rapidly...! Kiryu, what on earth did you do?!"
The professor screamed. The fluorescent lights in the room flickered violently, scattering sparks. Ren knew what this was. It was the aftermath of a local space-time error check that occurred immediately after he 'shifted' into this world line. Ren's very existence was being repelled as a 'foreign object' by the physical system of this world.
Amidst the flickering light, Ren stared intently at the equations on the blackboard. His heart, once wounded by Todo's coldness, was now being repainted with a completely different, cold sense of exhilaration.
"Sympathy, betrayal, life's failures..."
Ren touched the screen of his smartphone with trembling fingertips. In this world line, too, Todo's company was successful. But for Ren now, that no longer mattered.
"No matter how much money Todo makes, or who that complainer yells at... in the face of the probability theory of this equation (multiverse), they are nothing more than fractions (noise)."
Ren's eyes began to glow with a light of unhinged madness.
He had finally found a way to escape the messy hell of human relationships. People despair because they cling to uncertain things like emotions. If he could completely unravel the 'structure (system)' of the world itself and become its master, no one would ever be able to hurt him again.
"Professor. I am going to hack the truth of this world. To do that... I will collect data from other world lines."
"Kiryu? What are you saying—"
As if to cut off the professor's voice, all the glassware in the room shattered simultaneously.
Vivid blue and red moiré patterns raced across the space.
Amidst the dizziness of intense gravity inversion, Ren reached out voluntarily toward the rift of light. The journey to find an ideal life was over. From here, his lonely hacking to expose the world itself would begin.
(Continues to Episode 4)
📖 Back Issues
You can read the previous stories here.
[Episode 1] Probability Bughttps://note.com/natty_llama5121/n/n4e1e144c7c74
[Episode 2] Reversal of Causalityhttps://note.com/natty_llama5121/n/nfa1e49142a8c
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