This world…it's dead.
The pen drummed impatiently against his desk, tapping out an endless tattoo on the dull wood.
Everywhere you look…death, destruction…decay…
His textbook lay open on his desk, all but covered by the morning's printouts. The crime reports were his paltry form of entertainment—how many cases could he solve, how many riddles could he break, before his attention wore thin? It was such a pity that there were no truly brilliant criminals at large. Light Yagami had to content himself with the common criminals, but it won him the admiration of his father's peers nonetheless.
Boredom.
Light's pen left off its drumming as he slid his fingers along the crisp sheets. Here was the murder of a common schoolteacher; there was the embezzling of thousands from a local business. A murder-suicide, a burglary, a recent gang fight; this morning's list was dull indeed. Where was the point? All of these criminals were so petty, so blind, and it wouldn't take the real police long to catch them. Longer than it would take him, certainly, but he had some time to go before he could actually join the force.
The world is crumbling around us, and no one sees. They're blind, all of them, cognizant of nothing but the two inches in front of their noses. The world should be an opportunity, a land of hopes and dreams and futures; instead, it's merely a smoldering cesspit filled with nothing but primitive squabbles and material concerns.
"Dystopia" is supposed to be a fictional concept.
Light allowed himself a faint sigh before half-returning his attention to the droning of his teacher. Appearances had to be kept up, after all.
A flutter of black passed by the window—silent, but certainly out of the ordinary.
The odds of that flutter catching Light's eye at that moment were fifty-fifty: even odds. After all, Light Yagami was an alert young boy, but he wasn't paying particular attention to the dull world outside the window. We all know what happened next, of course—but do you know what happens?
Schrödinger's cat was locked up in a box with a fifty-fifty chance of dying. The thought-exercise demonstrated the bizarre nature of superposition: according to the laws of quantum physics, the cat was alive and dead at the same time—until the act of observation forced it into one state of being. At this moment in time, Light Yagami is, in essence, a prime example of the quantum measurement problem…
And here is where our story diverges.
When the bell rang, Light walked past the courtyard without so much as noticing the slim black notebook lying abandoned on the ground.
This story is quite different from the one familiar to us all. Unfortunately, Schrödinger's ludicrous demonstration of superposition was a mere thought-exercise. He never did figure out what happened to the other cat—the possibility that vanished from the box, so to speak. Was it the same cat, I wonder? Did it cease to exist?
Our story opens—for real, this time—two years later…
I cannot promise you frequent updates. I cannot promise you a story that makes sense.
What I can promise: that each and every review will thrill me, no matter how simple; that I will attend to this when I can; and that I'm going to try and Write Well. We'll see if it works. I've missed FFnet, I really have--life has been utterly crazy over this past year, and I'm so, so tired. But I love to write, and I'm breaking from original fic...with this.
Tell me what you think after the next chapter.
Fly, 11/20