Earth

Beauty rarely masks itself. Majestic sights generally stands ready for the awe of the trekker watching mountains, as, like a lover they slowly reveal their colorful sunrises. Bees see the most radiant flowers from a distance. Children recognize the beauty of their parents. To this day, no true greatness had ever hidden, silent, and dormant away from its beholder.

One true beauty was hidden from all, including its creator. This particular marvel was aptly named the God Virus; its name derived from the God Bias, which had been part of its inception and now stood in secret well above 4%. The number was pointless to all but a handful.

Takeda, from his lab deep below the streets of Paris, fathered a virus driven by a low probability bias favoring men. He figured if a virus could reshuffle RNA or DNA fast enough, maybe it could alter itself and in turn infect the host’s DNA, saving the host's life. The genius did not know about the Sixth Attraction or even the end of the world, he just wanted to redeem himself for releasing the abomination called the META. The META virus was able to delay cell replication . . . at a cost. For decades now, a whole society of the META-infected had been stigmatized as a handful of evil men had warped his virus, using it on themselves, with modifications, to prolong their lives for their personal gain. As the Sixth Attraction began, invisible to Takeda, the bias increased tenfold, and the power needed to shuffle the RNA into the most powerful weapon ever created by man was also increased multi-fold. His weapon was now simply redefining life.

Now that his secret was out, thanks to the President, he had returned to die in his favorite city. Takeda knew in his heart that he, alone, could save mankind from even the deadliest of threats. He looked up from a street terrace in downtown Paris, wine glass in hand at the darkening sun. He dramatically removed his large sunglasses. Fog had started to block its shine and the temperature here, while cooling, was still a comfortable one. He knew the virus had spread around the world. One thing only could stop his miracle, and that was the Multiverse. Even Marilyn seemed powerless to act. If the Multiverse had doomed the entire dimension, there would be no need to save these humans and his virus would become irrelevant. His virus simultaneously would and could not work. Maybe mankind, alive, simply on the day of the Sixth Attraction and like trash, could then be discarded. Irrespective, he had changed lives.

He was hopeful. His virus was primed to change the fabric of life itself. The tests in Spain had been conclusive. All he needed was to wait. So Takeda sat, watching the changing sun, and tested his own version of the virus.

“Can I buy a full bottle of vodka?” He asked the waiter in French.

“I do not see why not, just pay first.” Times we’re changing. Takeda took a party drug, deadly when mixed with alcohol and in the silence of the patio, he downed a dose sufficient to kill him several times over. He drank the bottle and waited.

He felt a buzz forming, his mind turning and in a matter of minutes, he was simply thirsty for water. His internal cell biology had changed him making him immune to the poison.

“Another bottle,” he asked proud of himself. Water would wait.

***

Athens

Annis walked home. He wasn’t a lucky man. All his life he had to walk faster, study harder, and be more patient than everyone else just to end up with an ordinary lot in life. He wasn’t stupid, only average. The poor man was non-exceptional in every way. Each morning after his long shift, he tried and failed to catch the 4:42 AM bus. Today was no exception as he began the long walk through the small capital streets. With his luck, he would spend an hour walking home. He knew the roads were dangerous, but he had no money and figured everything about him was unthreatening. Who would bother to rob him?

As he walked, the man was unable to know or feel that deep within his body brewed a virus. It was attached in his colon of all places. Deep in the wart's shell, the genetic code flipped and twisted like an electronic machine in Las Vegas forced to shuffle cards. The Greek man was unable to know the next sixty seconds in his future was a consequence fork. The Multiverse knew this man was walking into a trap. Around the next corner were six men looking to steal his wallet. The predetermined time-stream felt at least six paths ahead led to the same result — the death of this poor man.

Annis could act surprised and yell, he could turn sharply, or even insult the men, with all outcomes resulting in his departure from the world. He was more likely than not to die, and normally, this would be too bad. Today, thanks to the virologist, the Multiverse had been given a tool to directly alter and localize the Causes to Consequence. If she needed Annis’ face to turn purple, it now the power to change anything she wanted. Oh, Takeda knew not of such greater causes; he only felt there was power in letting the Bias express itself. The Multiverse needed this man to arrive at the Sixth Attraction. She also knew the robbers would never connect to Electoral 2072, their existences were pointless. The bias and the virus were given free rein to express itself. The Multiverse had been handed a simple tool on a silver platter to create change and chaos.

It did.

It — the Multiverse, that is — did.

There were thousands of combinations and solutions out of Annis’ predicament. All of them more creative than the next, but the miracles and beauty of the Multiverse were at the moment about a continuation of normalcy. The virus, once expressed, should not be needed again. The show was about Sophie and the Electoral game. The Multiverse wanted the world to stay its course, oblivious to the changes. So the code began to move. A body has about two trillion cells, and Annis was no exception. No one would ever know the reason why a certain consequence was ordered.

The body had mere moments to act. One by one, the life blocks began to lock to a one-mile-long sequence. A body had limitations, and organic life was complex. The Multiverse needed something which allowed the man to live after a bullet destroyed his heart. The simplest solution was a mutation to red blood cells, but that took time. They processed air and oxygen in the lungs and with a small variation, they could be made to metabolize oxygen from a different source. Fish had fins. The same way mankind had skin, it was in direct contact with air and with a lot of the blood. If those cells could be transformed to process oxygen . . . but again, that required time.

“Dude, hand over your cash.” A cat jumped in the alley behind the gun-holder who nervously discharged his weapon. The bullet went in, began tumbling, and tore through Annis' chest cavity. The other five men knew their friend had screwed up. They got up. “Let’s go,” said one. They bolted, leaving Annis to bleed out in the street.

The man’s hands were covered in blood. He had been shot directly where his heart should stand. Unknown even to Annis, the virus was working.

Without being too technical, the body was looking frantically to keep the man alive. There was oxygen that could be extracted from urine, but the Multiverse rejected this solution as the resulting compound would damage the human. Changing the chemical transformation of oxygen was too hard. Then a solution was found. Every fat cell in his body had been slightly altered moments ago in his entire body. The small cells were now able to change the distance between different groups like a worm moves on the ground. The movement was imperceptible from a distance. Outside of each artery and vein, the fat cells squeezed oh-so-gently on the arteries and veins moving and pushing the blood.

The heart was a pump, it pushed the blood but there wasn’t only one way to move blood in a body. Instead of one powerful pump, what if every portion of the body was able to move the blood. Someone was able to grab his phone and dial 911 before he passed out. Annis just lie there, vaguely caught between sheer terror and pain.

The ambulance rushed to emergency care with the dying patient. All traffic lights turned to green on the way thanks to the God Bias, but this would really not be relevant. The driver had never seen such luck. When it arrived, the doors were quickly opened, and the body rolled in on a stretcher. The Emergency room was completely empty of patients. The doctors and the nurses were all watching the television and genuinely fought to help the night’s first patient. The God Bias was so strong few people’s misfortune led them here on this day.

The bleeding body was lifted and put on a bed. The doctor immediately listened for a pulse and was unable to find one. “We have cardiac arrest,” he yelled as he reached out for the automated external defibrillator. Annis’ shirt was clipped away to expose his chest, making the entrance wound from the bullet directly above the chest area visible. He flipped the body to see the exit wound. The bullet was most likely out, most likely whatever cloth it had taken in with it, as well. He knew immediately what this meant. Using the handheld MRI was probably pointless, but there was no downside in trying. “Just in case,” he said.

A quick inspection showed the heart was destroyed. As he was about to pronounce him dead, the Doctor saw the patient’s eyes open. Annis grabbed the wrist of the Doctor above the defibrillator pad.

“Wait,” he said as if he was waking from a long slumber. The doctor put a sensor on his body. There was no pulse. He tried again and again at different places to get a pulse. Finally, an odd reading came back. The doctor’s expression was priceless.

“The patient has blood pressure but no heartbeat. How is that even possible.”

Annis stood up in the bed. “I feel fine, big headache. Do you have pain medicine?”

“We do,” volunteered a nurse in the back.

The miracle was pure beauty. Each vein in his body had turned partly into a muscle, like a snake, the veins and arteries now moved blood along. Closing the holes would suffice.

One man, Takeda, saved this poor man’s life. He would never know it. Today alone, Takeda saved hundreds.

***

When the caffeinated Takeda worked in the Ghost’s lab, he secretly dreamed of what would come next. He was old and lived on borrowed time even under the illusionary impulses of the young body. In his heart, he knew the old buzzard, the META ghost Nicholas Schmidbauer had placed some type of self-destruct mechanism in his new body. Nothing short of a miracle could save him. He had infected himself and no longer feared.

As any given genius might logically conclude, a solution able to save mankind should also save him. Most cells in the human body, past a very young age, no longer split or replicated frequently, which limited the power of the God Virus. The frog he released was only the first host; Takeda himself had been the second. Then again, he figured some violent viruses could create toxins and those killed in minutes.

The young centenarian understood the true power of genetics paired with time and favorable probabilities. He created the God Virus under the watchful eye of Marilyn Monroe. His theory was correct: given sufficient time to mutate, a virus could become a weapon to alter its host. A frog’s skin had been made heat resistant in less than an hour, but skin cells liked to replicate. Whatever was brewing in his own body was surely neutralized by the God Virus. He smiled to himself, making a private joke of his own arrogance.

Surely, alcohol was no longer a problem.

Ironically, the computer goddess served as both his assistant and his jailor. No creature trying to manipulate the future could allow his bug to replicate. In her mind, the digital creature helped him thinking she could prevent the release of the virus into the environment in one of a thousand ways. She was, on any other day, completely correct. But in a twist of fate, the digital creature failed to anticipate how Sophie had moved Marilyn's entire consciousness to the Underworlds. As if the Multiverse itself had coordinated things, the ten seconds Marilyn was unavailable were also the same seconds Takeda was free to let his mutated frog and himself in Paris.

By the time Marilyn had returned, the airborne virus was on the loose. Nothing short of a nuclear salvo would suffice to cleanse Paris and it's outlying areas and she was unable of that. Even such a drastic method failed to take into consideration this virus was a mutating horror. No, once that frog had taken its first leap outside of the lab, the proverbial genie was out of the bottle. Takeda went to the airport and purchased five dozen roses. One by one, he handed them over to senior citizens stranded in wheelchairs awaiting a long international commute. The cold term for what he'd done was "multiply infection vectors," but he liked to think of it as penance for his earlier life.

The Multiverse had spoken, and Marilyn could only do what she was designed to do: she incorporated this new variable and mapped the new future with this fact in hand. The last time statisticians quantified the amount of Bias floating in the Cold, the Multiverse was at a reasonable degree of hurt. Today, her pain was worse.

In her suffering, she bent locally at the midpoint over this part of the Cold. The statistical curvature once biased probabilities in favor of man by a small fraction of one percent. With such a small bias to fuel his virus, Takeda created a bug which still needed a couple of days to really work. That was fine as most cells in the body had long delays in replication. Takeda, in the lab, assumed the Bias would stay around 0.035% and took as a starting point that thousands of cycles of reproduction were needed to mutate the code of an infected target favorably. But the fabric of the Multiverse had recently changed in one important way: that the favorable percentage of the God Bias was increasing drastically. In other words, had Takeda been attempting to build a rowboat, he'd ended up constructing a warship.

“Hello Sweet one,” she said in his ear over the music.

As the apocalypse pointed its face in the sky, the world change in its deepest fabric. These small changes of the Multiverse were imperceptible unless someone tested probabilities. It was impossible to see what a person could never predict. The police stopped having to interfere as no crimes were now reported. All casinos closed as slot machines kept paying generously. Dealers, in less than a hundred hands of blackjack, lost trays of chips to lucky players.

Said bluntly, instead of hours, the God Virus now needed minutes to mutate. The more time given to a host before an unfavorable event, the more profound the genetic structure could be altered. The God Virus was designed to spread quickly, and it had. Takeda had changed the world, a world that would become entirely new in two weeks.

“I said hello,” she said. He was trying to ignore her.

“Me?” He asked out loud at his table in the coffee shop.

“Yes dummy.”

“Last time we spoke, I warned you I would be able to release the virus, I have. You must be upset?”

“Not actually. You had nothing to do with it. The girl on mars did something...”

“Unpredictable?”

“Very funny,” she answered. “You are a rare human I cherish.”

“Trying to save me from an overdose? You are too late. The Multiverse for some reason still wants me around. Trying to change that?”

“No.”

Takeda appeared to be was talking to himself, earbuds in. “What can I do for you now? The first time I had to talk to your President, the second entertain you. Not sure why others like you so much. Was I just warned of being locked for life in my lab? That’s how it felt to me.”

“Well, I am here to gloat and I think you alone can fully appreciate what’s about to happen in India. Your little time-bomb of a virus has mutated beyond recognition and is about to truly do a miracle that I am sure will warm your heart. Care to see it happen live?”

“I have nothing better to do I guess.”

“Put the glasses scotched under your table.”

He reached out of the table and there it was. A pair of expensive Orbison glasses attached the day before under the wood. Anyone else would have been impressed by the magic trick. He wasn’t. The computer had shown him since their first encounter in the sauna she could foresee things.

“Do you mind, we are now playing Round 30 of my game. Earlier this year, I played Round 7 with a hundred million people. The story was medieval and Emilio won. Take a quick look at the highlights.”

Began playing a small clip of the round. Emilio played a wizard loaded with magic. He charged himself and as the villain of the story jumped at him with a deadly blow, the pair was sent in the past of the General. The old warrior was shown images of himself, as a boy caught in an alley by a butcher ready to rape him for having stolen a mere loaf of bread. General Verdu whispered courage and determination in the ear of the boy who finally found the courage to stab the older rapist. Logic, the wizard altered time and doing so, drained the General of an unhealthy desire to conquer.

“Not sure why I watched this, but very well done. No wonder your game is addictive.”

“Let me show you what’s going on right now half way across the globe.”