Tinkering with Fate
By
Faerie Knight
Disclaimer:I don't own Worm. And since there's a sly reference to it in chapter one, I don't own Eurika either. I make no money on this story. Nor do I plan to try doing so. It's written for the sheer joy of writing.
In this great cosmos there are worlds without end. Realities not dreamed of by mortal nor magic. And one of these innumerable places is a blue and green planet called Earth. There isn't just one earth hanging in the expanse of forever as a shining jewel though. There are Earths uncounted, each separated by a barrier both infinite and thin. The history of these Earths varied.
Some were similar to others in their quantum strata. The same people, the same places, identical in nearly all ways except how events play out. Others were wildly different. They contained people who were unique to that shard of reality. It was on one such Earth that she lived. Her name was Susan Swan, and she was an inventor. She also was possibly the smartest person on her Earth. Maybe the smartest in her entire universe, although that was difficult to assess
The reason for this difficulty was simple. Once one's intellect reached a certain point, there was no standard test which could differentiate between various levels. In a set of realities known as "The Fifty-Two" exceptional minds were given classifications such as "twelfth level intellect". But if one was honest there was little functional difference between someone with a twelfth level intellect vs someone with a tenth level intellect. Either way they were staggeringly intelligent.
This was the problem Swan had when growing up. She was simply too damn smart. She learned extremely easily, and thus school was boring to her. The fact she never graduated high school and got grades of D average in grade school might have been taken to mean she was dumb. That would be a mistake. For a grade school science fair project she built a radio transceiver from scratch using some rather unusual parts. It not only worked, but she accidentally tapped into a nearby military base's comm channels.
As she grew older Susan Swan's mind grew keener too. And she studied. She studied anything that struck her interest. Math, physics, geology, history, if it struck her fancy she researched the subject. Often in such depth that one think her obsessive. By the time she was twelve Swan had become disenfranchised with mainstream scientists and engineers What others saw as immutable and unchanging laws that governed the world, she saw as restrictive and arbitrary limits imposed by man.
By the time she was twenty five Susan Swan was well on her way to proving that she'd been right all along and the "laws of physics" were really the "guidelines of physics". Sure she'd found many constants, but she'd found many more ways to surpass main stream science's stated limits. What was more, she'd published many papers on such subjects. And her findings were verifiable. Granted, few could actually follow her math well enough to understand her theories.
It should be noted that Swan considered herself to be a quantum mechanic, not a scientist or engineer. She was quite happy to spend her days tinkering with an invention which would cause physicists around the world to cry for mercy when activated. From a hand held cellular regenerator that caused more then one scientist who'd examined it to have a breakdown while muttering "radiation doesn't work like that" to pesticides which made chemists scratch their head at how she got those particular reactions.
This was true of all such individuals as her. Every hyper intelligent inventor tended to cause an uproar whenever they published a paper. But there was one area she was different then her colleagues. She asked two questions in regards to any idea for an invention or before publishing a paper. The first question all of the other 'super' inventors asked too. This question was "Is this possible?" The second question was less frequently posed, but Swan always asked it before going any further then thought exercise. This question was "Should I do this?"
It was this second question which lead to preforming a cost vs benefit analysis before publishing any paper or writing down any of the theoretical mechanics on an idea. It was also why whenever possible she preferred to do virtual reality testing long before building a physical prototype. Swan liked to have the potential drawbacks limited to "I may die if this goes wrong" at the worst before building a prototype. Some of her failed designs had contained potentially catastrophic flaws which got revealed in the initial virtual tests.
Unfortunately, as mentioned her caution was not shared by all her compatriots. Which was why she was connecting the final wires to a one way dimensional gate that would self destruct thirty seconds after anything organic passed through the event horizon. In a small town that served as a government think tank the scientists living there had screwed up enough to doom her world. And it all started with a mnemonic inducement program which was accidentally uploaded into a wireless jukebox.
Looking out the window showed that she was running out of time. The time distortion field was only a couple blocks away. Glad I hard coded the shutdown and self destruct to occur even in stasis. The portal formed, and Swan dove into it head first. There wasn't time to grab anything, meaning all she had was the cloths she'd been wearing to a nightclub when news of the distortion had broken. That, and her tool belt. Five seconds later the portal shut down. Ten seconds after she entered the portal her workshop was engulfed. Twenty seconds after that the generator imploded, although the actual implosion would take a few centuries to finish.
This was how the world ended. Not with a bang, or a whimper. But with a line from a song which would echo for a thousand years: "I'll stop the world and melt with you".