Causality Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
John Lennon is famously quoted as having said that life is what
happens to us while we are making other plans.
Quincy didn’t know much about life or philosophy or John Lennon. But one thing for sure is that he didn’t
believe life is what happens to us. He fervently
believed that life is what you make happen for yourself.
It is easy to believe that when you can make things happen.
Quincy was obsessed with the nudge. Some people make a wish. Some people pray. Some people make a dream board. Some people read The Secret. Quincy knew better. He knew better than all of them combined.
Some call it magic. Some
call it luck. Quincy had his own name.
He called it the Nudge. Quincy
had the power to push life just a little bit one way or the other. Tired of a long line? Nudge the people ahead of you and make them
move faster, or make them make up their minds sooner, or have them grow tired
of the line themselves and leave.
Gambling in Las Vegas? Nudge the
front desk attendant and get that upgrade to a suite. Nudge your dealer and get the card you
need. Nudge the roulette wheel and make
your money on double zero. Quincy was
playing the odds and tilting the game in his favor.
Quincy always told people that life takes no interest in us
whatsoever. Life does not think. It does not care. It just keeps on going. Because of this Quincy knew life was mutable and
he could change or do what he wanted. He
was sure he could get away with just about anything and that no one would be
the wiser. Of course there are certain
things like laws of physics that nothing, nudge or otherwise, is going to
change. Quincy didn’t know about things
like the laws of physics. He just knew
if there was a chance of something happening he could make it happen. Probability Tampering might have been a
better term for what Quincy was doing, but he didn’t really know much about
that either. He just liked it when things
worked out his way.
The thing about a nudge is that it doesn’t make you all
powerful. Quincy was no god. He couldn’t invent a new reality or blink and
suddenly half the world never existed. There
was no redo button. It wasn’t going to
change the past or change the future, not in any grand sense anyway. Quincy was never going to grow taller or more
handsome or make certain women fall in love with him, no matter what he tried
to think about or cause to happen. There were certain limits that through trial
and error he had become all too aware of.
He had to think about what he wanted to happen and there had to be an
actual chance of it happening. Not some mathematical
trick to prove that anything can happen at any time if given enough
changes. This wasn’t some game with
infinite probabilities. There had to be
a real honest chance of the event occurring naturally and of its own accord.
Still, even with those limits, it gave Quincy quite a playground to
play in.
There are rules about action and reaction if you’re so inclined to
read about such things. Nudge something and
you make a ripple. Nudge a lot, you make
a wave. Waves push something else and then
those things have to push other things.
And so on and so forth.
Quincy really had no idea of all the things he was pushing all the
time. He never stuck around long enough
or studied the people he touched to witness his inadvertent causes and
effects. But even if he had, he probably
wouldn’t have cared very much. That was
just the sort of guy Quincy was.
But there are times when you nudge something and somebody and then
you are there to witness the effects first hand.
Nudge a stop light – not everyone can stop in time.
Crash through your windshield?
You don’t always have time to think about what probability outcome you
can and can’t nudge in that situation.
There are always rules and a little thing like a nudge isn’t going
to change that.
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