Author's Note:
This will be my first fiction published in this sort of medium, so it will be interesting to see how this goes over. This idea won't leave me alone, and is fueled completely by my irritation with horrible pop culture usage of the Chaos Theory phenomenon "The Butterfly Effect". In essence, every movie or fictional work I have ever read gets this concept entirely backwards, save perhaps the 2000 film "Frequency" and, freakishly enough, the second "Back to the Future" installment. 2004's "The Butterfly Effect" was actually one of the worst.
But I digress in my rantings, darlings. This piece will be a rather long work based on the actual rudiments of chaos theory with a little supernatural intervention thrown in due to the fandom at hand. Possible warnings for this fiction in the future include violence, sexual situations, homosexuality, language, murder, mayhem, and the mention of math. "The Butterfly Effect" was first posited by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1972 to explain the proportional response of a minute change in start point of a function or of a small perturbation in a complex system (like the weather).
Prologue: The Butterfly Effect
Life is a complex system. Its myriad interconnected parts display behavior that, taken as a whole, is not predictable from the behavior of each individual piece. Though this system is so large that its variations seem infinite and random, a structure exists within those variations. Multiple interactions between its pieces evolve the system constantly, unfolding over time to a seemingly incomprehensible pattern.
This system is highly sensitive to small disruptions, leaving multiple pathways for life to evolve. However, complex systems also have memory and past states of evolution often have an effect on present ones, particularly where humans are involved. This adaptivity to changing conditions might lead an observer of the system to conclude that its future is linear. Planned. Predictable.
In truth, life is nonlinear and a single perturbation may cause a proportional response throughout the system as a whole, drastically changing its shape forever.
If a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, will it cause a tornado in England?
Light Yagami is about to become the pivot in the evolution of the system. And the butterfly? A single letter on a television screen.
