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Malik had never been proud of his intellect He considered it a gift fro dealt a pair of aces in a hand of poker He hadn’t done anything to deserve it, it was not the result of effort, so he wasn’t proud But he was grateful

What about you, Dark ones? Do you feel pride?

Till now Malik had used his brain prih school had required very little effort, and even his all-too-brief start at Northwestern had not felt very challenging

But nowwell, now he needed every last IQ point and wished he had more He had Cruz’s phone and from time to time would scan articles on topics that were at the limits of his mental capacity Physics Quantum physics Multiple universe theories, of which there were several versions The fanciful theory that our universe is a siame of the Sims

Easy for you, isn’t it? You’re the top of the food chain and I’ to understand you?

Many had speculated on multiple universes and sims, especially since the Perdido Beach Anomaly, the FAYZ But physicists and sci-fi authors and the like had long played with the notion that our universe ht have thrown off many, many universes

Soht universes were like foam, like a handful of soap bubbles scooped froainst and deformed by others Others preferred flat universes, piled up like a ream of paper

Do you know the answers? Or are you still figuring it out?

When speculation turned to simulations, the questions centered on whether the si all on its own Others i actively played It was very like a belief in God—not the benign God of Judais closer to the ancient Greek gods: capricious, emotional, needy

All these ideas had long been dismissed for one simple reason: there was no proof None Until

Until the FAYZ had proven that the laws of physics, the supposedly unbreakable laws of the one and only universe, had been broken Broken, shattered, and stomped upon

That shouldn’t have been possible

And yetAht, you invisible intruders? Would you tell me?

For four years many physicists had hidden their heads in the sand, stuck their fingers in their ears, and yelled la la la la, so as to shut out the seely impossible Others had rushed to concoct theories that treated the PBA as a strange, localized warping of space-time But now that, too, was a dead end, because now the whole world was the FAYZ

Still, the vast rips with the new reality Fear was a big part of it But also the limits of the human brain, a brain that could not visualize a universe that had forward, back, left, right, up and down, past and future, but no elsewhere