Tricking Fate

In a not-too distant future, and a new ice age, a woman travels through the frozen wastes in search of a way to defy her fate.

Frøya Cassandra Norheim is a trans woman, an ancient priestess, and a decadent metropolitan. She has a degree and interests, sometimes a job, and has been published in places. Find her on Instagram @starlightwake.

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A metal frame buried halfway in snow and ice, sideways icicles formed by the relentless winds. The old oil rig looked almost sad here, in the vast expanse of ice and snow that less than a century ago had been ocean. The oil rigs had already been abandoned by then, reservoirs having run dry years before. Now, no one came around. The technology was old, the materials broken. Nothing of value could be found here, at the source of everything the old world had been.

Val looked down at the oil rig from above, soaring on the cold winds, held aloft by a pair of lightweight carbon fibre wings strapped to her back. She adjusted their angle, beginning a slow, spiral descent towards the hunk of metal and industry. The chill whipped against her face, and she could feel the bright, red sting of it even through the mask she wore. Making sure the jet thrusters were aligned to keep her balanced as she touched down, she let the wings fold in. Her heavy boots sank into one of the deep snow drifts that covered the platform deck. In places, the drifts piled up to almost twice her height, while close to the walls that sheltered against the wind, she could still see the metal floor, with only scraps of orange paint still holding on.

This rig had been part of Norway's northernmost oil field, in Lofoten, and their construction had been met with no small amount of protest. In the end though, as always, the demands of industry and money won out. Without this oil field, Norwegian oil production would have dried up decades before it finally did, and that was after all more important than the potential damage to the environment. It took a new ice age for it to finally end for good.

Val slipped off the flight pack and took off her mask, which she stowed in a big pocket at her thigh. She had a tired look with dark bags under her eyes, and she was vaguely aware that she wouldn't have liked anyone to see her like this. Good thing she was the only one here. 

Before focusing on the most important task, she pulled out a small deck of cards from another pocket. Sitting down on the metal floor, she carefully laid the cards out in a nook protected from the wind, in an array of three. This was her navigation tool, a tarot compass. Phrasing a very careful question in her mind, making sure to avoid revealing her true goal, she flipped the cards over one by one. Ten of swords, the star, four of pentacles. Okay. That would give her a good idea of where to go next. Packing the cards back up, and taking out a multitool, she set off.

About an hour later, with her arms full of various outdated electronics scavenged from control panels and communications devices, Val came back to the deck where she had landed. Some of her equipment had broken on the way here, and even the wing pack was having trouble since it wasn't made for this kind of cold, so she needed components to fix them with. The oil rig had been a lucky coincidence, as she wasn't really following a map, and wouldn't know where to find them. Though, she didn't really know if she believed in coincidences these days, at least not that they were entirely coincidental. Everything happens for a reason, they say, but Val believed it was the other way around: every reason has an event. Every reason will make something happen, and you're never going to be ready for it.

• • •

Val walked slowly through the snow. The winds had picked up, making it unsafe to attempt flight, so she had to weather this part of her journey on foot. The sun had set, and the sky would have been pitch black if it hadn't been for the northern lights dancing up above. The good thing about night was that without the risk of snow blindness, Val could turn down the dynamic tint on her mask. It felt better to be able to see clearly, even if only in darkness.

The patterns of the aurora fascinated her, precisely because they weren't patterns. Or rather, they weren't patterns that could be calculated and accounted for in any known model. This is a fundamental premise of quantum mechanics, the idea that certain processes on a particle level are subject to randomness, to chance, and can never be fully predicted. Or, it was, until they built the NORN reactors.

The first NORN reactor was built outside of Stavanger, Norway, and it was intended to perform experiments on subatomic randomness, to attempt to build an accurate, reliable model of prediction. Somehow, they succeeded. Problem was, no one knew exactly how to interpret the results.

What is fate? Is everything predestined to play out a certain way, or do our choices shift the stream of time? And what does it really mean if the former is true? Val touched her chest, feeling the locket she was carrying through the thick winter coat. That locket contained something she wished to defy, a greater will of beauty and sorrow.

The researchers at the first NORN reactor had discovered a substance which would later be called fate-strings. On a subatomic level, fate-strings were tiny motes of energy, vibrating with completely unpredictable fluctuations. At first, they didn't know what to make of them, didn't know how to fit this substance into their existing models of quantum mechanics, but a breakthrough was made when it turned out the fate-strings could accurately predict the outcome of any quantum event. By measuring the fluctuations in the fate-strings, and applying a complex formula that Val barely understood despite having studied the subject in university, one could create a model that never failed to predict the outcome of events that appeared to be fully random.

This posed another problem though, as the model itself depended on measuring something that in itself appeared random. But it worked. It was like they had found a way to read fate.

In time, the world changed. It was impossible to attribute the change in the world solely to advances in quantum physics, but it would be equally impossible to fully discount its influence. An awareness of the interconnectedness of all things was taking root in the minds of people, and the ongoing climate disaster gave it all the nourishment it needed. People became increasingly concerned with their role in the world, not just what the world could do for them. Wars were fought. People died. But in the end, there was peace. Peace, and cold. And in this peace, a new purpose was found for fate-strings; a power source.

In the rush to find a new, sustainable source of power, the world turned to fate-strings. And in them, the world found an existential conundrum. Fate-strings turned out to be able to produce a steady, consistent power output for a near limitless time, but only as long as their use aligned with fate. And there it was, that complicated, existentially problematic question the world had avoided for so long. What is fate?

Technology powered by fate-strings could remain functional practically forever, but the moment one attempted to turn it against whatever purpose fate had decided, it stopped working. Scientists worked on models to understand fate, to know what would work and what wouldn't, but it was the seers and fortune tellers who had the answer in the end. For some reason, it turned out tarot cards and dice and bones and the patterns of the birds in the sky were the most accurate ways to predict the workings of fate. Val had always thought it made some sort of sense, that randomness — a shuffled deck, a rolled die — would be the way to find answers about these things. In time, this too was accepted. In time, seers became essential parts of any technological development project, any project at all.

Val had some experience with it herself. She was taught to read cards in university, though she was never great at it. The patterns never came to her, and the idea disturbed her, like some great, uncomfortable cosmic truth was lurking just on the other side of her deck, rearing its head whenever she shuffled the cards together.

• • •

Val had been walking for hours under the dancing lights when she spotted another, different light at the horizon. It flickered like a living flame, and so she set out towards it, figuring there would be a camp with other people there. In truth, she had no real interest in meeting other people, but felt drawn to find out anyway.

The camp was small, only a tent and a fire, and just one person sat in its heat. They noticed Val as she approached, and lifted an arm in a sort of stiff wave at her. This was someone who hadn't expected to meet anyone else.

"Hi," she said with a bit of an uncertain waver in her voice. How did you introduce yourself to another wanderer in a cold wasteland? Did the norms of society still apply here?

"I'm Mikkel," said the young man at the fire, suddenly relieving Val of all the pressure she had felt. "What are you looking for?"

"Val," said Val. "Looking for the Breach."

"You've come the right way then. Sit down, warm yourself up. You're not gonna get far if you turn into an icicle on the way there." She took a seat by the fire as he had told her, and felt warmth little by little creeping back into her flesh. The two of them sat in silence for ten, maybe twenty minutes, before Val spoke up.

"What are you here for?" she asked, and worried immediately that the question had come out more accusatory than intended. Who demands to know what another person is doing in the wasteland? The man let out a short laugh.

"I'm surveying the old cities." He pointed to a set of strange tools. Val recognised the handheld echo locator, but the other ones were beyond her understanding. "They left entire cities here to be buried in the snow when they started the ice age."

The ice age they found themselves in, which had left most of Norway covered in permanent glaciers, was man-made. After the wars, after the deaths, a decision had been made to set off an experimental device with the intent to permanently lower the earth's temperature. It was a last-ditch solution to global warming, an equally disastrous opposite, but one which contained at least a hope for a future. And hope was all that was needed.

"Can't imagine anyone would pay for that," Val said inquisitively.

"They don't," the man stated. "I'm doing this for my own benefit. I'm from here — well, my family is. Originally." Val looked the man up and down. He had straightened himself, speaking with just the barest hint of pride.

"So what was it like here, before?"

"Green," the man said, grinning. "Green and mountainous, and with so many fish in the sea. It was good here, even after the oil rigs came." He paused, taking a deep breath and letting out a soft sigh. "It's never easy being driven from the land where you belong. Well, I wouldn't know, but I've heard it told."

"I never thought of it like that," Val said in an involuntary whisper. "You must have lost a lot."

"No one asked for our opinion on freezing the world," the man said.

"You would have done it differently?"

"No, but it would have been nice to have been asked."

As the sound of those last words faded into the snowy night, the two sat again in a pleasant silence by the fire. Val stood up and started to set up her own tent, and Mikkel didn't say any more.

• • •

The next day was a long trek. Val knew she had entered the final stretch. Somewhere in what had been Lofoten, there was a place known as the Breach. It was the site where the ice age had been started, and it was also so much more than that. According to the scarce information that existed on the phenomenon, the Breach was a kind of anomaly where reality collapsed in on itself, producing an infinite fractal of disparate possibilities. It was a singularity of all possible options, a single spot in the entire universe where everything was true at once.

Val was trying to defy fate. A year and a half prior, she had learned something about her own fate that she desperately longed to avoid. Something disastrous and beautiful, perniciously alluring and the opposite of everything she wanted. She didn't want to acknowledge the details, just that she wasn't going to accept it.

The locket she wore swung side to side against her chest under her thick clothes, reminding her of her purpose. It almost felt like it was burning against her skin.

The problem with defying fate was: you won't get anywhere when none of your tools will cooperate with you if they know what you're doing. Val had accounted for this. Although her goal was only about half an hour away if she went directly, she knew the loss of the mask and her wings wouldn't be worth it. She was currently gliding just a short distance over the snow, sticking close to the ground to avoid the stronger winds higher up. Her path was a spiral, circling the Breach in ever tighter circles, all the while avoiding moving directly towards it. So far, it was working. In just an hour more, she would be able to see the Breach itself.

Then, everything she had feared would happen, happened all at once. First, her wings gave out, suddenly having lost their power supply. Then, her mask powered down, leaving her to breathe the cold air directly with no temperature adjustment. Finally, a snowfall came upon her, which in a matter of mere minutes turned into a full blown blizzard.

Val improvised as best she could. She set up her tent to give herself some temporary shelter from the storm, and took out her cards. She needed guidance in order to brave the storm. Phrasing her intentions clearly, undisguised, she flipped the cards over. The tower, the tower, the tower. Val took a deep breath to steady herself and crawled out of the tent. She wrapped pieces of wool cloth around the lower half of her face, tossed off the flight pack, and unfolded a pair of collapsible skis.

The journey through the blizzard was the most painful, exhausting thing Val had ever done. She truly believed she had been prepared, even for this, but learned that there was little she could have done to ever be prepared to walk through a blizzard for an hour. The wind was filled with shards of ice, and it ripped and scratched at her. Heat was sucked from her body, leaving her extremities so numb that she could barely even feel the pain of the cold gripping at her hands and feet. After a while, her fingers felt warm, almost pleasantly so, and she knew that was an even worse sign than any amount of pain could have been. The storm was ripping her apart, eating her up.

And just when she thought it was the end, when she could no longer carry on, the Breach came into view before her. It was beautiful, a swirling mass of luminous ribbons, red and green and blue, a whole aurora contained within a space no larger than a person. Val twisted her feet stiffly out of the ski bindings and forced herself through the last few steps up to the Breach. Clutching the locket at her chest, she stepped into it.

• • •

Thousands of realities overlapping each other stretched out before Val. She stood on a tundra covered in tiny, white flowers. She stood on a battlefield where nothing could grow anymore. She stood with water up to her knees. She stood in a cold desert, freezing winds howling over the dry, cracked earth. She stood in a building that was a city in itself, a megastructure encompassing everything. She stood in a potato field, watching the farmer's nieces and nephews pick rocks out of the soil. She stood on nothing, floating in a field of debris where the Earth had once been. She stood in a frozen wasteland.

As she reached her hand out, the realities shifted, revealing new possibilities. Some were almost identical to each other, with only subtle details changed. Val caught herself wondering what she was looking for, which reality would fix things, how she could make things right. But the spectral worlds gave no answer, just shifted before her eyes, an endless stream of fleeting images. Was there anywhere that would save her from her fate?

And then, as she took a step forward, one reality stood out more clearly to her. It looked a lot like hers, relatively speaking. The Earth was still there, humans existed. In it, she saw a green landscape. Green and mountainous. There was a fishing village nearby, but as she looked closer, she saw that every house was abandoned, paint flaking off walls, roofs starting to cave in. She took a step forward, and her view expanded. She saw cities where the death toll of the summer heat waves had become an accepted fact. She saw dwindling oil reserves and wars over their possession. She saw colonists leaving for Mars and starving to death as their resource use far exceeded their production capacity. And she saw herself, healthy, unburdened, free. No locket around her neck. No fate to defy.

All change is destruction and creation in equal parts. Val turned around, and she saw the snow again. The blizzard had stopped, and there was peace. Peace and cold. Slowly, nervously, she reached behind her neck, underneath her clothes, and unhooked the clasp on the locket, took it off, tucked it into a pocket.

She hadn't given up, would never give up, but she knew something more now. To defy fate didn't mean to struggle against it. One could mend something broken; it didn't have to be torn down and replaced. When humans set off the device that created the Breach, they had defied fate, and they had succeeded. How could that be possible if everything was predestined? Val didn't know, but she knew that the world contained an endless potential for compromise, and that was what she was going to do. She would offer fate a compromise. And with that, she started on her journey back home, knowing both more and less than she did before.

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