Chaos Theory: A Feel Good Story About the End of the World

by Colin Robertson

  The old woman's name was Eva Braun. She owed her notorious name to the fact that she was born Eva Klauss and had the misfortune to fall in love with a man whose last name was Braun. Consequently, Eva had spent much of her adult life answering the question, "Not the Eva Braun?", to which she would patiently reply that this was highly unlikely as the Eva Braun had met her end, along with her maniac husband, in a Berlin bunker in 1945. In the past ten years, Eva had clearly fallen on harder times. She had lost her husband, her sanity, and her home, although not necessarily in that order. All she had left were the possessions she'd piled into the shopping cart and her dog, Atom. Atom was so-named for his tiny size as a puppy. Even for a miniature schnauzer, he was small. He had been the runt of his litter.

  One of Eva's remaining possessions was a white transistor radio she'd duct-taped to the handle of her cart. She had been listening to a radio report about a massive police raid in Munich. According to the report, a small army of Landespolizei and helicopters had descended upon the mansion of a wealthy drug lord. The coverage included exciting sound bites of intense gunfire interspersed with questions of "How could this happen in such a respectable neighbourhood?", "Who exactly was this Mathias Boltzmann?" and "Is it true he's really Swiss?" As she walked between two tall buildings labeled 'Gebäude 16' and 'Gebäude 17', the radio descended into static. The old woman shrugged. It's becoming like the United States here, she thought. Thanks to Hollywood and American rap music, Germany was now a place where bad things could happen. She switched the stereo from radio to CD. Nina Hagen belted out a cover from her new collection of public domain classics, entitled Öffentliches Gut. The song she sang was The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. She sang it in English but with a thick German accent and, as always, the voice of an asthmatic chain-smoking angel.

  He'd smile from the bar on the people below

  And one night he smiled on my love.

  She wink'd back at him and she shouted "Bravo,"

  As he hung by his nose up above.

  The old woman drew alongside her current objective, a green dumpster on the back of Gebäude 16. The industrial park was a void of human activity at night. In the city proper there was the Landespolizei who would ask questions and possibly take her downtown. Worse, there were the roaming gangs of Burgessün, young thugs dressed in long johns and lederhosen, who would beat her half-to-death for fun and the other half out of a sense of German work ethic. Here the streets were empty, the dumpsters largely unplundered. It was a concrete garden, unspoilt by the presence of humanity. Eva climbed on top her shopping cart, in order to make herself tall enough, and peered inside.

  The interior was swallowed by darkness. Eva was forced to switch on the LED keychain flashlight she kept for such purposes. This served only to illuminate the largely disappointing contents. Inside were boxes of discarded sponges, an old office chair and tubs of liquid latex that had been thrown out for being the wrong colour. Atom sniffed about beneath the dumpster, then began scratching furiously.

  "What is that you've got there, Atty?" asked Eva. She climbed off of her perch and joined her dog on the cold ground. Aiming her flashlight into the shadow, she saw the object of Atom's interest. It was a discarded sandwich bag from Die Kaiser Kaiser. She pulled it out and opened it up. Inside were the remains of an apple strudel. She took a bite, then dumped the contents onto the pavement. Atom began to eat. She then noticed something else. The bright light of her keychain caught the glint of metal, shiny and flawless.

  Eva peered at the inscription on the side of the canister that read 'Property of the United States Government: Top Secret'. How peculiar, she thought. Its size and excellent condition ruled out the possibility of it being an unexploded bomb. Those were still popping up from time to time in farmers' fields, but were usually the size of a bathtub and rusting to bits. Eva considered the possibility that it had come from a US Army base. The nearest, however, was miles away, in Wiesbaden. Eva suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia, but she was far from stupid. Eva knew it was possibly a very bad idea to open the canister. She considered that it might be dangerous and that if she opened it, she might even be killed. Inside her head, however, a voice told her that she would not die. It told her that she would know 'the truth', whatever that was. Even before her life had disintegrated, Eva had always believed that everything happened for a reason. Since then, she told herself that her current bleak existence was simply a purgatory meant to prepare her for something better. She also believed that a super-intelligent hedgehog, named Hermann H, was sending her coded messages through discarded newspaper clippings. Eva gave the lid a twist. For a moment it refused to budge. Then, suddenly, it began to turn quite easily and came off in her hand.

  There was a faint pop! like the sound one's ears make when changing altitude in an airplane. Eva peered inside and was surprised to see what appeared to be a splotch of floating television static. 'Snow', her father used to call it. She lowered the canister to get a better look and found that the static remained where it was, hanging in the air like a scratch in reality. It confounded her eyes. Its surface was simply black and white noise. Walking around it, Eva could see that it clearly occupied three-dimensional space, yet seemed to have no surface and appeared flat from every angle. Despite looking like static, it made no such sound. It wasn't silent, but the sound it did make was a B-flat too low for the human ear. It was the same exact tone that a black hole makes, were anyone there to hear it. Atom began to bark at the static, just as he did the vacuum cleaner.

  Eva was both alarmed and intrigued. Here was something she simply could not explain. Once more, her curiosity got the better of her. The voice spoke with slurred S's. "Ssssstick it," the voice said, "sssstick it!" At the very least she should have known to use an actual stick or some other object to prod it. Instead, she reached out and touched it with her finger. "Yessss..." said the voice.

  The tip of her finger instantly turned to static. Eva didn't feel any pain, thanks to the wonder of endorphins. Instead, she simply stared in shock and tried to withdraw her finger. She found that she could not. She found that her finger was stuck, as if in a Chinese finger trap. What's more, the static appeared to be creeping slowly up over her knuckle. She watched in horror as it reached her hand. In a panic, she leaned backwards with all of her weight, but could no more break free than tear off her own arm. Atom, in an effort to protect his mistress, leapt up and bit the static. His head instantly vanished, and the dog was left dangling dead in midair. Eva screamed.

  Eva continued screaming, unheard, for the next twenty-five minutes, as the static slowly spread up her arm until she passed out from blood loss. Without clotting to protect her, her circulatory system ensured that all of the blood in her body was soon pumped into the static. By this time, Atom was completely consumed while Eva, now dead, hung there for over an hour, until her corpse too collapsed into chaos.

  Chapter 26

  "Numbers are meaningless, but they're better than nothing."

  – Ed Platzberg

  Firstring, Virginia, Winter, six months prior.

  The world had already ended when Charlie awoke that morning, he just didn't know it. Lisa's side of the bed was empty, but there was nothing odd about that. She was always an early riser. He got up, showered, shaved, and headed downstairs.

  Downstairs there was no sign of either Lisa or Faith. He tried to remember if there was something 'on' that morning. He didn't think so, but, truth be told, he frequently didn't listen when Lisa was talking. It's not that I don't care, he told himself. Still, he couldn't explain it otherwise. Why don't I listen? Maybe I don't care, he thought. He then immediately banished the idea. It's probably something to do with Brownies, he decided. The Girl Guides were always doing some sort of fundraiser or event. He was somewhat sad to not see Faith but, truth be told, it was nice to have the house to himself.

  He dropped some bread into the toaster and filled a glass with orange juice. He then stood at the counter, reading the New York Times on
his iPad, waiting for his toast. The timer on the appliance was broken, so if he didn't watch it constantly the bread would burn. It was also a relief not to see Lisa because of the night before. It had been one of their loudest fights ever. The yelling had ended only when Lisa had flung a crystal fruit bowl at the kitchen floor. Charlie instinctively glanced down to make sure there were no more shards of glass. The bowl had been a wedding gift from his uncle who thought that people still cared about crystal. As usual, the fight was over something stupid. Charlie commented that Lisa was spending so much time at her Yoga classes that it was amazing Faith even knew who she was. It was a cheap shot and didn't even make sense. Charlie spent far more time in his office at Langely, and bringing their daughter into it was just wrong. He would apologize eventually, but he hadn't last night. He didn't even know why he was so mad. They'd been drifting apart for a long while, but it was hard to say who was the boat and who was the shore. Perhaps they were both boats. Charlie smelled burnt toast. "Damn it!"

  He flicked the switch and up popped two smouldering briquets of bread. "Damn! Damn! Damn!" he muttered as he plucked them out quickly but carefully, to avoid burning his fingers. He then spent several seconds scraping off the top layer before concealing the damage under a smear of marmalade. "Damn."

  Charlie sat at the table with his iPad, juice and burnt offerings that would have to serve as breakfast. In another life he might have eaten at the kitchen counter, but years of domesticity had taught him to sit at the table 'like a civilized person' to avoid spilling crumbs on the floor. For some reason, he appeased Lisa best when she wasn't around. He bit into his toast and perused an article about a man in Yonkers who'd murdered his newlywed wife. The man had disposed of the body over the course of several days by feeding her in bite-size pieces to the pigeons of Central Park. He'd have gotten away with it too, had one of the birds not choked to death on her wedding ring. Upon being arrested, he'd confessed to his crimes. He stated that at least he had proven once and for all that the pigeons of New York would eat anything, even "bride crumbs." Charlie moved onto the sports section to see how the Washington Capitals were doing. It was only then that he noticed the envelope in the middle of the breakfast table. On it was his name, in Lisa's handwriting. Putting down his toast, he reached for the envelope and tore it open. As he unfolded the handwritten note inside, the doorbell rang.

  Charlie put down the letter, brushed the crumbs from his palms and headed for the door. He decided it was Jehovah's Witnesses. He imagined them mistaking the smell of burnt toast for Brimstone and fleeing in a panic. The thought made him smirk. Through the glass, he saw a police officer waiting. The officer was fidgeting, looking oddly nervous. It was then that Charlie felt the first pang of alarm. What happened next was a contradiction; stark reality with every detail ingrained into Charlie's brain and, at the same time, a kind of dream. The young man, no more than twenty-five, explained that there had been an automobile accident, involving Charlie's car, wife, and daughter. The officer then explained that his wife had been taken to a hospital where she had died almost immediately. His daughter was dead at the scene. The car was in surprisingly good shape.

  On the drive down to the morgue, he convinced himself that there was some sort of mistake. They can't be dead, he thought, it's not possible. He continued this line of denial while sitting the waiting room, waiting. He told himself this right up to the point where they lifted the sheet from his daughter's face. She looked as small and fragile as a china doll. The only external sign of injury was a purple bruise on the side of her temple. He reached out to touch her cheek. Instead of being warm and soft, it felt tensile and refrigerator cold. For Charlie, it was at that moment the world ended.

  Chapter 27

  "You complete me." – A. Turing

  The sky above the Highlands was suitably stormy. Still, no actual rain fell. Instead, torrid clouds hung over the darkened landscape like a mantle of black wool. Occasional flashes of veiled lightning infused the gloom with light, turning the clouds diaphanous, followed by the distant rumble of thunder. The air crackled. The normally green grass of the Scottish hills appeared cerulean and undulated with an unnatural wind. It appeared to presage the end of the world, and that's because it did.

  Charlie and Alex drove once more over the rolling, once idyllic, landscape. The atmosphere was wholly different now and everything felt wrong both inside and out. It had been two weeks since a woman in Germany had somehow obtained and opened the Loose Thread device. With it's cosmic cord yanked, the fabric of space time itself was beginning to unravel and there was no stopping it. No one really cared what Charlie and Alex, or anyone else, did now. Of course, for many, life continued as it was. Most people on Earth still went to work and carried on as if nothing had changed. Some of these people lived in denial, while others lived in hope that somehow it would all be fixed. Most simply didn't know what else to do. In some parts of the world, people didn't know anything had happened at all. In North Korea, it was business-as-usual; the trains ran on time and executions continued to be executed. Charlie and Alex were still able to board a flight to Scotland. At the start of the flight they were told to fasten their seat belts, and what to do in the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure. They landed safely and were able to rent a car. The rental was even discounted, owing to the impending global economic collapse. It was a good time for bargain hunters.

  Not that this meant life was anywhere near normal. The news continued to be filled with horror stories of murder and mayhem as those who had simply been waiting for an opportunity to destroy without fear of reprisal got to work. Mostly, however, people appeared to be lost. Mount Everest was said to be littered with bucket loads of bodies from people rushing to complete their 'bucket lists'. As Charlie and Alex passed through the quiet town of Cockwaddle, they could see graffiti on the walls that read, "The End is Nigh". The town's long abandoned, dark satanic mills, appeared as quaint relics of a simpler time. Every church they passed was packed. The faithful and the lapsed now prayed to be saved either before the world's end or shortly thereafter.

  Charlie had the radio tuned to BBC1 where an announcer had pledged to report right up until the end. "... Missiles, lasers and all sorts of other armaments have been fired into the cloud to no effect. The cloud, which now measures 1.2 miles in diameter, simply absorbs everything that is thrown at it and continues to spread." Journalists had taken to referring to the chaos as a 'cloud', even though this was scientifically ridiculous. It wasn't a cloud, it just happened to look like one. "We have with us here, Dr. Malcolm McBreigh, physicist with the University of Edinburgh. Dr. McBreigh, welcome."

  "Thank-you fur havin' me," said the professor, "and please, call me Malcolm."

  As Charlie and Alex exited the town, they drove past a fallow field. A dozen locals ran naked through the clover, clutching bottles of wine, and laughing. They were clearly drunk and appeared to be happy. At least the towns and villages are less scary than the cities, thought Alex. "So then, Malcolm," the interviewer continued, "we have now learned that NATO intends to drop a nuclear bomb on the cloud. What effect you expect this to have?"

  "None."

  "None? A nuclear bomb will have no effect at all?"

  "Nay. It's the nature of chaos, tha knows. Everything you throw at it, whether it be matter or energy, wull simply become part of it. It'll take awhile, but eventually this cloud will consume the earth, the soon, the galaxy, black holes, stars, light, heat and even dork matter."

  "I'm sorry, did you say dork matter?"

  "Yes, exactly, dork matter and dork energy. Proportionally speaking, you know, the universe is mostly dork."

  "I see."

  "Anyhoo, as I was saying, simply put, this chaos will consume all of existence. So, when you consider what's on its menu, a nuclear weapon's naught more than what a French scientist would call an 'amuse bouche'."

  They passed a farmer, on the road, dressed in drag. He was leading a cart horse. The horse was wearing a man's necktie.
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  "Of course, we'll all be dead long before that," the professor added. "In the next few weeks, the cloud, as you call it, will burn a hole right through the earth's crust. That's when things'll get a right bit nasty."

  They rounded a hilltop and a lone tree came into view. Four bodies dangled in nooses from a single, large outstretched branch. "Don't look," said Charlie, although he knew it was far too late for that.

  "Is there nothing we can do?" asked the announcer.

  There was a long pause. The professor then said in a near whisper, "Go home. Go home to your wife, your kids, your parents... whomever. Go home and tell 'em that you love 'em. In the end, it's the best any of us can do."

  * * *

  Mrs. MacGuffin had sent a message that read simply, "I've fixed it" and invited them to come. The plan was to step through the portal and go back to a previous time. Charlie had called to confirm. "Oh aye," she said, "Yur more than welcome. I've invited all manner o' kith'n kin to do the same, so there'll be others as well."

  They saw the line even before they saw the tower. It wound along the side of the road, down the gully, across a small bridge, and up the next hill towards the valley where Mrs. MacGuffin's cottage lay. The narrow road itself was now clogged with discarded cars, trucks, and even a few bicycles. The people in the line were almost entirely local, but from every walk of life. They included farmers, policemen, firemen, road workers, doctors, nurses and more. There were individuals and whole families. Station and class clearly played no role; you simply took your place at the end of the queue. Seeing no other option, Charlie pulled the rental car to the side of the road, next to an abandoned glazier's truck, its racks still full of plate glass. "What do we do now?" asked Alex.