A small black metal disk with a hole in the middle rolled along the thin, wooden tabletop. Accelerating, it made a tiny jump when it hit the newspaper page. It wobbled slightly when it landed, but continued rolling. It approached the pair of eyeglasses sitting on the Business section, and as if meaning to avoid them, swerved to the left. Unfortunately, it could not regain its roll, and fell on its side. For a few seconds it lay still on the paper, but then sprang to life again, this time sliding like a hockey puck, back the way it had come. It made a mad dash for the edge of the table, but a hand picked it up and held it, helpless, in the air.
Elena Thomas returned the magnet to the side of her refrigerator, as well as the several others which served as invisible albeit crude marionette strings. She picked up the metal-rimmed glasses from the table and placed them on her face. The face she placed them on was very attractive, though perhaps annoying from the point of view of the glasses, (which, had it been able to express any point of view whatsoever, aside from the view to which eyeglasses are generally attributed, would most likely have suggested that her nose could perhaps stand to be a bit longer and wider; a button-nose may look cute, but eyeglasses prefer a good solid schnoz to hold onto.)
Her eyes looked green to her friends, but the person in the mirror could have sported red eyes, for all she knew. She was red/green colorblind, which is a common form of the defect. "It may be common now," she often thought but never said, "but after a couple years of natural selection and those god-damned traffic lights, we'll see how common it is!" Her hair was dark brown, which was a color she could recognize, and correctly identify, but not one she much cared for. She often attempted to will her hair blonde, reasoning that the follicles are as close to the brain as one could hope for, and that maybe some short-range telepathy or telekinesis could do the trick. It never worked.
Her complexion was wonderfully clear and smooth, and had been for her entire life. This had almost seriously jeopardized her friendship with Connie Erks during high school, when Connie was often referred to by her classmates as Volcano Face. By contrast, Elena was voted Most Likely To Have Her Picture Plastered Up On Some Billboard Selling Soup Or Something. (Actually, Connie's face cleared up just nicely and she herself can be seen selling Extra Froot Gum along the Kronas Expressway. Elena doesn't even own a picture of herself. Not exactly bitter irony, but irony nonetheless.)
Sixty-five inches tall when standing, and significantly shorter when sitting, but one hundred ten pounds in either position, Elena would have scored somewhere above the 85th percentile in the nationwide Sexiest Chick to the Union of Men examination, or SCUM test. Unfortunately, the Union of Men was disbanded during the first meeting when the GrandMaster's wife came home and beat him to a bloody paste; the test never gained national popularity. Elena picked up a pen and began doodling on the newspaper.
A small woman with sticks for limbs materialized, running along the headline, "STAR CROSS, INC: ON THE RISE." She had just taken a step on the last letter in INC, and was bravely vaulting toward the next word. As it were, the jump was impossible. It was obviously her fate to clear the extra-long space narrowly (due to the colon) but slip backwards off the O and be dashed against the smaller, jagged text below. Fortunately, she was a cartoon sketch, and could hover between the two words forever. (Or, until the paper is incinerated.) Part of Elena's brain read the article to itself, while another part continued doodling.
The first paragraph claimed that Star Cross, Incorporated, manufacturer of various food products, had been close to bankruptcy due to poor sales. It seems that they were just about to be another statistic in Darwin's Theory of Business, when the change came. Their dog and cat food sales have picked up dramatically--almost exponentially, and are all but solely supporting the entire corporation. Apparently the credit goes to Vice President of Animal Meals, Satan Duffy. Correction: Stan Duffy. The section of Elena's mind controlling the pen had inserted an extra letter in his name, apparently with humorous intent. "I just saw some things that needed doing," quoth Satan. "When I took over this position, I made some changes, and well, we're doing okay now." Elena laughed mirthlessly. "Right. Changes," she said, aloud, at the newspaper, "You fired some good people for no apparent reason." She let herself draw all over the picture of Mr. Duffy to the right of the article. His eyes burst open, dripping blue blood all over his otherwise black-and-white face. She continued reading the article.
The CEO of Star Cross is considering the appointment of Mr. Duffy as Vice President of Infant Foods and the Confectionery Department as well. "What!? NO!" Elena dropped her pen, astonished and enraged. This was to be expected, since the current Vice President of Star Cross Infant Foods was Ms. Thomas herself. (This would also explain her knowledge of/obsession with this particularly boring and poorly written business article.) "SCIF always made a profit, even when the other sections were losing money!" she shouted at the paper. "Why?" Before it could reply, she continued. "That charlatan doesn't deserve my position! I don't want to be demoted or..." She crumpled the page up suddenly, evidently upset with the object's refusal to supply the complementary half of her conversation. Perhaps in remorse for the homicide of the defenseless publication, Elena began to cry, her hands marred with fresh newsprint.
"Well," she said to herself, at the same time regaining composure, "we'll just see about this lowlife's little career move." Something about Stan Duffy always made her skin crawl, and the current occupational conflict seemed like a good enough outlet for her antipathy. She walked over to the kitchen sink and washed off her hands. Glancing at her watch, Elena realized it was just about time to embark upon her daily journey to work. "It's a good thing I decided to read yesterday's paper before I went in this morning; I would hate to have missed that little tidbit of information." Elena's conversation with herself continued for the next several minutes, while she searched for her car keys, smudged her glasses, found the car keys near the glass cleaner, left the glasses on the counter, picked up her briefcase, and searched for her glasses. Finally she was ready to leave, and got into her car.
She adjusted the mirrors in the Hyundai. Because Elena was the only person who ever drove her car, this consisted of fiddling with their positions until they were finally just the way they had been to begin with. Of course, she didn't realize this, and it became a daily practice. She began telling herself about how unfair this was, how the old coot had better think twice before appointing that bastard, and all sorts of other scathing opinions which were confined to the interior of the car. Elena herself was the only person whom she talked to in the mornings, except for the "Hi, Connie!" with which she greeted a certain billboard on the expressway. The little car backed out of the driveway, shifted gears, and drove toward Star Cross, Incorporated with Elena inside it.
Everyone understands that the universe is a vast wealth of information, but few realize just how true this is. The entire macrocosm is represented as coded data on a sort of database in hyperspace. Every speck of dust, every atom, every probability distribution, and every event in space-time is stored in a huge file, if you will. If the idea of God's Personal Computer or the Heavenly Lotus Document is a bit odd, it can be rephrased; computer memory is just an analogy. What is important is the that the universe, like a database, contains a finite amount of information. And, like a computer, there is a maximum amount of information it can store.
The universe? Finite? No; never! Why, there is infinity everywhere you look! There are uncountable worlds! Time and space extend forever and wherever around us! There is an infinite number of points in even the shortest line segment! How could a clearly boundless universe be stored in a finite file?
The fact that the word "infinity" itself even exists is a clue. The word contains eight letters in the English language. It would take exactly eight bytes of information to store on any reasonable computer on Earth. Yet, these letters represent an infinite concept. Anything seemingly immeasurable can be represented in a finite manner. Here is an example: There is a number, which represented in decimal format, begins 3.14159265 and never ends. That's not the correct way to store such a number. It has several finite definitions: It is the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. It is the mathematical concept of pi. Or, a computer algorithm that slowly but surely cranks out the decimal representation could be written out here, and, whereas it would no doubt be quite lengthy, it would by no means be infinite. The definition of something, that when viewed from certain vantage-points extends forever, can be seen from other points as being quite bounded.
Without further proof of this concept, we take the hyperspatial data file as given. Now, one would think that this file would be huge, and one would be right. But exactly how huge? Surely, such a file could not be stored on even the biggest hard drive in the world. Or all the hard drives in the world put together. Is the size of this file inconceivable? Possibly. But even inconceivability has its limits. Large enough to be unimaginable, but quite finite. How? There seems to be too much information!
Repetition. Redundancies abound within the universe. Coincidences direct all events, and range from funny little daily parallelisms to colossal yet intricate and wonderfully obscure duplications. It's a cosmic data compression scheme. For example, the precise number of human beings alive on Earth at any given instant is even. This saves one bit of information. Every forty-seventh breath taken by a certain farmer in Iowa coincides exactly with the death of one of a certain species of insect in South America. Popular music from several hundred years ago is reflected in certain aspects of sunspot activity today. Every time a certain being on a planet four thousand light years away crushes a small slimy object in its powerful talons, somebody wins the Florida State Lottery.
In general, the more apparent the coincidence, the less meaningful. And vice versa. Within a small span of time you may notice several occurrences of the same obscure word, and think nothing of it. Or a certain number will surface again and again throughout your life. Or someone will wear the same outfit as you. Still, more important and impossibly obscure repetitions exist. The next several Stephen King novels could be constructed before he writes them, if one is willing (and knows how) to compile and convert stock market data and weather reports between 1900 and 1953. In actuality, every action of every human being that has ever lived and will ever live is disguised in a wallpaper pattern belonging to certain elderly couple in Arizona, but nobody will ever find that out, because the wallpaper says so.
And so the universe goes on, full of cryptic reproductions and copies, conserving universal memory. And somewhere in a petri dish, twelve bacteria die, signaling that someone has just stepped on to Old Harelip Street in Kronas Hill, New York.