The paper was entitled "Acausal Signalling In Quantum Entanglement". I'd read through it four times already today. It was after the fourth time that the lab door finally opened, and John Doe, the professor under whom I was doing my doctorate, stepped in. He sighed on seeing me. "Lock yourself in again?" he asked. "What happened to that spare key I gave you?"

"It's currently stuck behind the radiator." I explained. "Just a little too far to reach. And my cell battery's dead. Not sure what happened to the landline."

"Oh, that line that keeps getting knocked down every time there's a storm got knocked down again. Why do these things always happen whe you get locked in overnight?"

I shrugged. "Listen," I said, "you remember those experiments on quantum entanglement that I asked you if I could run last year?"

He nodded. "Yes. A very elegant theory. Pity it turned out to be false; it would have really put our tiny little university on the map had it been true. Time travel confirmed on the micro scale."

I cleared my throat. "Technically, if my theory was false, the results I got were just really, really unlikely."

"Yes, once in the history of the universe unlikely." agreed John. "And very, very expensive to run. The odds are several thousand times higher that you were wrong than that that would have happened, and I can't justify the expense -"

I waved away the objection; it was irrelevant. "Yes yes yes. Someone else did the same experiment." I turned my laptop around to show him the paper. "They got the results I'd predicted and have advanced precisely the same theory to explain them."

He read through the paper, and then sat back and stared at it. "Well." he said, after a few moments. "Well. You know, the chances of that happening are a few million times less likely than winning the lottery? Have you ever entered the lottery?"

"Yes." I replied. "My ticket won, but a gust of wind took it out of my hand on the way to claim it. A sparrow grabbed it and - well, to make a long story short, by sunset all I had left was a handful of ashes."

"Oh dear." said John. "At the very least, you can find your old papers, can't you? Prove you'd thought of it first, maybe they'll let you share credit?"

I shook my head. "You remember that storm last night?" I asked. "Took out out document server and our backup document server with a single lightning bolt."

"We've got it on paper." pointed out John. "In the form of the original lab notes."

"Caught fire. Same lightning bolt. I managed to salvage most of our work, but anything with my name on it is burnt to a crisp."

"Do you have the faintest idea what the odds against that are?" asked John, after some thought.

"Staggeringly against. But aren't the odds against any specific sequence of events as dauntingly against, when you think of the vast plethora of other options that could possibly have happened?" I asked.

"What about your quantum hypothesis?" enquired John. "That alone would imply that the universe hates you."

"The thought has crossed my mind." I agree. "But why? Why would the universe hate me, specifically? It's not even as if I've done anything particularly dramatic."

John leaned back on his chair. "No, but… you're one of the sharpest doctoral students that I've ever had the pleasure to work with. You invented a new quantum theory that's going to revolutionise the world even if it doesn't have your name on it, including at least theoretical possibility of time travel. If the universe really hates you -" he waited a moment, for effect - "maybe it's for something you're still going to do."

This hadn't yet occurred to me. I stared out the window. "I wonder what it will be?"

The Great Organizational Design Association (G.O.D.A.) inserted him. Everything Harry Right did, he did in a proper and correct manner. That's why HE was sent to this place, Earth. The scientific understanding is now to a level that allowed for a Harry.

G.O.D.A. affirmed, "It's time to try again. You're to fit in with the humans and become an accepted part of the planet. You can answer the worlds' desires making it a much better place to live."

"Just do it Harry Right. Get the ball rolling." And do it right, Harry did.

The first major desire he granted was the wish for world peace. Harry contemplated the issues and came up with a bright idea. Delete any word relating to war, violence and associated concepts from the vocabulary.

Equality was the next globally demanded prayer he approached. Harry leveled the planetary playing field so everybody had a fair share of everything.

Harry reported back to G.O.D.A. "What, with the educational levels, socially connected technologies, the instant translations, world-wide communications, this is a cake walk! They love it and LOVE me."

Maybe that's what Harry thought. The mob outside the World Court Building thinks differently and lets him know it:

"HARRY HARRY go away,
Keep your mind games, we won't play.
Bla, Bla, Bla, what we hear.
Kiss our butts… HARRY DEAR.

HARRY, HARRY, the old way.

UP YOURS HARRY. NOW GO AWAY."

HARRY had a few things to clean up. "That wasn't quite right. I'll fix that soon," he says to no one in particular.

Harry is summoned into the World Court. He assumes he's getting some type of award. He's all smiles as he enters the court room. He ignores the mob outside.

He stands before a judge. Two officials take positions on either side.

This is rather impressive, he thinks.

"Bailiff read the complaint."

"You are hereby charged with the following," The bailiff clears his throat.

"Nasty things against humanity, the leveling of all playing fields of the human race and finally, you, Harry Right, are charged with Mass Cultural Loss. We have no art or literature." The Bailiff shrugs and continues, "You mucked with our language and… The planet is "not happy" at all."

"Bailiff, enough," demands the judge.

Somewhere in the back of the judges' mind sits concepts like, Crimes Against Humanity, Cultural Genocide, and Destruction of the Human Race. These were the words and concepts he would have used, if he was able. Harry had taken care of that.

There was no war, combat or violence, so no need. Those ideas and activities were deleted from the lexicon of the human race. The language and therefore minds had been altered. "Not happy," was the best they could muster.

And Harry didn't get it.

"Harry Right, HOW DO YOU PLEAD?" Orders the Judge.

"Plead?"

"PLEAD?"

"What! Are you all crazy?

"I gave you everything, EVERYTHING, as wished for. Peace, equality, food, shelter, balanced use of your resources, AND, a better living standard for everyone. Sure a few of you had to give some things back, but in the long run, LOOK!

And you hate me? You're all insane."

"Harry," his court appointed lawyer said trying to establish calm. "Everything is sort homogenized, no differences, no special who, or superlative this. You gave us equality, but, the place is boring, boring. God, it's boring!"

"BUT THAT'S what you ALL have been praying for ever since you could walk upright! Harry is at a loss. "What do you mean crimes? What are you talking about? You have this technology and I have the power to grant anything. I granted you your wishes. Yes I deleted a few things, like your vocabulary and ability to conceptualize a few items that were, how should I put it, disruptive to peace and harmony."

"And now you want me gone? You all hate me?" Harry is incredulous.

"Harry, WE, most of us, like what we were. It was messy but it was fun. Well, not for everyone, but someone has to lose. That's what makes it life."

"No it doesn't, it what makes it strife. Oh shit I've just added that back in to the lexicon. I'll have to take it out."

"OH NO, No you don't. Just leave it where it is. We want it. No, just go home and don't ever come back. If we EVER want you we know where to look."

"I can't leave until I'm finished with…"

"Oh you're finished all right. If you stay here you must have some idea what will happen."

Harry, proud of his accomplishments states, "Nothing really bad. Ha! I took those word and concepts and stripped them from your brains. I effaced them from your history. This is a fine place. It's a pleasant place to live. Everything is well ordered."

"Shit Harry. It's fucking boring. It's not worth living. How would you like living like this?"

"I think it's just fine."

The lawyer looks at Harry. "Harry, you had better ask to be let go and promise to leave our planet. Go back to your world and tell them 'Thanks but no thanks.' You had better do this. I can get you out for that. Have your people come pick you up."

Harry paces around the plush suite he was given as his cell. "Well, at least they're not putting nails in my hands, or burning me or who knows what they would think of had I not straightened things out."

Harry gives a universal salute and disappears.

EPILOG:

Harry's monumental failure forced the Association to scrub his memory of most, but not all that had passed. His talents were stripped away. He was returned to Earth with only human skills and ordered to work the rest of his life.

From time to time, people would point and laugh.

Harry would carry the burden never believing he failed. No one likes to be reminded, but living here, he most certainly was. Sometimes he would cry.

Neville and William were going across the square, accompanied by bodyguards--tall muscular guys in grey, guns on show and a fierce look--surrounded by the usual crowd of fans, trying to keep off the more insistent ones, while dodging the flashes of the press reporters digicameras all around.

Whatever they did became noteworthy, and whenever they moved, their activities proved interesting for the general viewers. Neville's good looking, blonde-haired face and William's glowing complexion and red thatch had become well known worldwide, because they were Immortals. They were members of the group of individuals that had taken the entire world over, the new dictators, keepers of the destiny of the best corporations, capable of deciding about the life and death of the rest of the common population, the poor mortals.

Only three hundred years earlier, a well-known Indian scientist, Professor Kumar, had found a way to prolong indefinitely the average life span, by stopping the deterioration of several tissues and removing completely the gene for aging. Such a great achievement had been made possible cause of some natural ingredients (herbs, medicinal plants, etc.) mixed with very rare particles taken out from a precious mineral found only in the underground of a few neglected recesses in northern China.

Mankind was going to reach immortality, finally, but even if the scientist looked eager to release this treatment for the benefit of everyone, the way to obtain it was very expensive. Only some pharmaceutical companies were able to sustain such a valuable research: as ordinarily happens, some men of power who already possessed some huge riches managed to increase their own goods and wealth in the end. A group of important people (bloody tycoons and many corrupt politicians) decided to invest some considerable money in it.

Originally, they were meant only to be the first ones to benefit from such a procedure by becoming immortals, but afterward, something occurred which turned human history towards an unpredictable direction… All the known repositories of the mineral necessary for the process were contaminated cause of several radioactive explosions that made them unusable. Initially, a famous terrorist group acting for political reasons was held responsible, but the truth became evident eventually: one of the rich men --already an immortal-- had moved so to prevent anyone else from achieving immortality…

He was taken in custody and punished, as people decisively asked, but the damage looked unsolvable… apparently, there was no mineral left. So only the ones who had financed such a project at first, got immortality and everything would have to stay that way until some new repositories had been discovered elsewhere, maybe in space, when mankind had reached the stars…

Of course, the new immortals took immediately advantage of their enviable position and in a matter of years turned upside down the world itself. The structure of the states changed, the power of the new Masters rose and the globe was wrapped in a sort of web controlled by those oligarchs only, the immortals, the final dictators .

There was a deep debate among the ordinary humans. In a way, the immortals had personal opinions very different from the mortal way of thinking and a few people thought that having such individuals in the lead (likely forever…) was the same that putting in charge a child prodigy: if he was faster at calculating than any other man, capable of keeping in memory a book only by reading it once and so on, how would he ever been able to comprehend the common needs of ordinary population, the human hopes and limits? Probably, he would have considered all mankind only as inferior…

That's exactly what happened on Earth.

The Immortals soon became the most important personalities on the planet, they walked the streets as movie stars, sort of saints, kings, or queens, they were living gods, full of admirers around (or of enemies their huge army of bodyguards used to take care of in an unpleasant way…) While proceeding along, the two oligarchs greeted the people, waving benevolently. When they came near the entrance of the building chosen for the next ceremony they were to attend, a young man, getting out of the crowd, succeeded in going past the mounted police heading for the two big names, then stretched out the arm touching the wrist of one of the immortal with his hand…

The policemen soon came to help, but the man didn't take heed. He looked simply satisfied.

"Everything ok?" William asked.

"Yes… that guy just wanted to touch me!"

As one man touches a god William sneered.

In the following days, when Neville began falling ill and eventually died (and almost all the other immortals, too, soon after him), things became clearer: that young man had infected Neville with a new virus he was carrying, something that a resistance group had secretly worked out just for this purpose. There was no treatment against such an infection.

William was one of the last ones to get sick. During the last ceremony he attended, while sitting on the armchair in the public hall of his palace, he considered that since their circle had taken the world over all the others--still mortals--had started to envy them, wishing to oust the new gods who would have never ceased to be their Masters. While trembling cause of the illness, he felt watched by the many onlookers in there. All of them had been waiting so long for his fall. Today they would be able to see the death of the last of the immortal oligarchs of the world, whose existence offended the laws of nature…

Finally, it occurred to William that wise old saying by Palahniuk:

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, but to create something that will."

Dr. Gerald Haslow was stressed.

He was down $1000 in the office pool when the New York Yankees lost the World Series to Toronto when Brett Cecil apparently charmed the Clotho aspect of fate into giving him a Magic Arm in 2011. Yankees? Losing to Toronto? What kind of fluke is that?

Packing it up at the end of the workday, for the first time when it really counted the stupid proximity beeper on his truck also apparently decided not to go off, and he backed into an executive's BMW. The executive decided to be "nice" and only asked for Damages, and didn't bother with the emotional pain and distress BS. The damages to the BMW came to $4,400 (American). His own deductible was another $1500. Grumbling loudly, Gerry called the tow service to take his truck to the mechanic near his apartment, and he hitched a cab ride home.

The cabbie was one of those too-talkative types, smarter than he looked and wouldn't shut the hell up.

"Corner of Spruce and Wimple, please."

The Cabbie fiddled with his custom GPS and read off, "You got $17.50 on you?"

Gerry was by now really pissed. He made his living with math, as he'd been born with a flair for figures.

"Come off it, you know it shouldn't be more than $10 even. I'm no tourist".

The Cabbie replied affably, "Left on Margunning, 4 blocks, right on Hollander, 3 miles on Hollander, right on Dakota, quick left on Isling Drive, 4 miles on MLK Boulevard, and junction with Whimple."

That sounded like a Cabbie Scam route if he had ever heard one. "What kind of horseshit is that? Everyone knows you take the freeway 5 exits on a straight shot for 6 exists and get off at Spruce."

"Sure Mac, that would have worked yesterday. Didn't you hear an oil tanker crashed and wrecked the freeway for 50 miles of toxic sludge when the rainstorm hit?"

Gerry blanched. Sure there had been a crappy goddamn rainstorm, but that just meant stupid puddles to him. He wasn't in the habit of checking local news, so he hadn't heard about the now infamous oil spill. "Fine, just get me home."

"Sure Mac."

Back at home, Gerry poured himself a heavy drink and sunk into his well worn armchair, but left the TV off. He was past being furious and now just completely depressed. Life sucked. No, that's what everyone said. Way at the back of his mind, his scientific instincts began to clamor for attention. Wrong phrase. Not "Life Sucked", but "The World was not fair". He was supposed to be merely wallowing in pity, but with a jolt, he got that "Bing" sensation when he was on the path to a theorem. Dr. Gerald Haslow was an Information Modeler. He called another cab and headed for the Bald Squirrel Bar, where he did his best work. Lenny Luhan, the local seatwarmer, was present on cue.

Calling for a Vodka OJ, he inserted himself into Lenny's always hazy field of attention.

"Listen Lenny, I got a crazy notion to shoot the shit about. Listen, you know that old Cat paradox, where the world is full of choices, and you only find out once you look?"

"Yeah, like when you don't know when you get up that morning whether your girl is going to be nice or be a bitch?"

"Uh… aw hell, sure. Kinda. Anyway, it's a question in fundamental Quantum Theory - whatever the answer will be, will be, and he user looking at something decides the indeterminate state right?"

"Will all that mumbo jumbo get me a refill?"

"Sure, tonight, it's on me. Anyway, what if the user doesn't choose the state? What if the forces of the universe choose for you?"

"What does that mean?"

"It means… uh… hang on dammit, you and your lucky questions. That's really hard!"

Gerry pondered that one. Putting all the wierd paradoxes aside, that meant life wasn't just a random collection of stupid shit. If some force, some intelligence was making decsions…

"Well, explains a few things, but what makes the world pissed at you, and how do you get it to back off?"

Lenny whistled and stared into his drink. "Jesus Almighty on a Kabob, that really is bad shit huh?"

"Hard to say. Rough guess is anywhere starting with World War I, 'cuz that's then the bad shit really kicked in. But why me? Forget that. Now what?"

Lenny grinned. "You could try to bet against yourself, like your own walking Short Market."

Gerry needed the light moment. "I thought of that, but then that's back to being Good Fortune, just with atypical events. You see how wild it gets?"

"What's the most miserable you could get?"

"Well, somehow I don't think it's on life support with a broken leg and crushed organs or something. I think it's closer to what the French thinkers of the 50's were after, a bleak desolate uselessness of life."

Lenny grinned evilly and flashed a Serpent's Smile through his vodka. "Now I know why it's all over in 2012. Fate has decided to quit playing with her toys."

My next appointment announced himself with a bang…or at least a crash. Something had been T-boned by a cement truck just outside the small clinic where I was interviewing test subjects for my experiment. We all rushed to the front and watched as the driver and the few passengers staggered-off the mangled remains of what appeared to have once been a city bus. Miraculously, it seemed nobody had been killed. I was close enough to hear the driver of the cement truck on his cell phone, telling his boss that his brakes had failed. He was pretty shaken, but seemed okay.

The last passenger to limp away looked like a homeless man. He was bedraggled, with unkempt hair and a scruffy beard. He was dressed in a mismatched wardrobe of apparent Salvation Army discards, but he moved with surprising nimbleness, and not the beaten shuffle one normally associates with the homeless. It took me a moment to realize that his limp wasn't from an injury, he was wearing one old boot and what appeared to be a brand new, white sneaker.

He paused in the street once he was clear of the wreckage, and looked up at the sky. Shaking his fist at the heavens, he shouted, "Missed me again! You'll have to do better than that!" The police car that came screeching around the corner almost nailed him where he stood, but I mentioned that he was pretty nimble. It missed him with whole inches to spare.

After an entrance like that, it was hard to doubt his story—as ridiculous as it sounded.

He brushed through the niceties of the interview, signed both the consent and nondisclosure forms without much more than a glance, and then started with the questions. Real questions, good questions.

"How will you balance the alpha interphase transposition with the sodium/potassium ionic wobble?" Somehow, he almost seemed to know more about brain function transfer than I did. Some of the problems I'd faced had never made it into any journal. Not yet, anyway. He asked about how the lasers were tuned as his brain was mapped, and about the storage capacity of my mainframe, where his brain functions would be stored for a few microseconds prior to electromagnetic overlay in the 'new' brain. He seemed very concerned that the recipient brain wasn't physically damaged by whatever trauma had caused the vegetative comatose state. He insisted that he be allowed to review the entire medical history of the 'donor.'

His questions had left me a little dazed, but all-in-all, he seemed satisfied with my answers. Now it was my turn.

"You understand that this is a very dangerous procedure, Mr. Alvara. If you're chosen for this, it can't be reversed. Your brain will be completely destroyed by the mapping lasers."

"You've got all the problems solved, Doctor. It's going to work. Your technology is barely there, but it's good enough."

"You sound pretty confident. How do you know? You don't seem to have a death wish."

"Just the opposite, actually. I need a mental function transfer, it's my only hope of survival. You see, your universe hates me. I know how it sounds, but it's true. I've been lucky so far, but sooner or later, it's going to kill me."

"My universe? You think it's alive and out to get you? I think you'd better explain." He'd seemed like a good candidate, but there would be some fairly comprehensive mental studies performed on whoever was chosen. If he was crazy going into it… .

"You're a scientist. Well, so am I. My field is physics, transdimensional paraclivity, to be precise. I'm not from this universe. I'm from a parallel universe where we are quite a bit more technologically advanced. I'm here by accident and ever since I arrived, your universe has been aware of me. I'm an irritant to it because I don't belong here."

"Extraordinary claims…"

"Require extraordinary evidence. I'm well aware of Doctor Sagan's truism. This is about all I brought with me when I was caught in the gravity field surrounding the boson bridge. I was trying to send a sensor pod to a neighboring universe we'd detected. Yours." With that he produced an octagonal ID badge, very official looking, with what appeared to be a holographic image of him—shaved and clean-cut—on the front. The logo wasn't an eagle, it was a turkey. And it claimed that it was issued by the United Provinces of America. It could have been faked, but it felt right.

"I know your procedure will work, doctor, because we've been doing it for over a hundred years. I've been through it myself, when I was eight. Shuttle accident on a vacation to Luna. My mind was transferred to a force-grown clone. I went to sleep crippled, in pain, and woke-up whole."

"But the universe can't hate. Can it?"

"Probably not like you or I, but I'm an irritant to it. An itch it keeps trying to scratch. Every atom in my body resonates on the wrong quantum frequency. I have to keep moving, living off the discards of your society because anything I try to do will always go horribly wrong. You saw what happened when I decided to try and catch a bus across town, didn't you?"

"I'm beginning to understand, perhaps. But there are so many things that could go wrong with this procedure. If the universe is really after you…"

"Doctor, you're about to destroy my brain with a variably pulsating, multifrequency Excimer-Argon recombination laser. I don't think the universe will interfere with that. And once I'm in a body that does belong here, it shouldn't be able to tell the difference. It's my only hope."

I realized suddenly that I believed him. "When the world hates you, hate it back. But when the universe hates you…"

A faint smile graced his lips. The first I'd seen.

"HIDE!"