The Probability Shift

Test Flight

Kevin's penthouse wasn't enough, and he had rented some gloomy industrial hangar to become his sanctum, a hermetically sealed realm where the outside world ceased to exist. The once neat professional space now bore the scars of his obsession—empty energy drink cans littered the floor, whiteboards scrawled with indecipherable equations, and an ever-present haze of stale coffee lingering in the air.

At the center of this controlled chaos stood his efforts' crown jewel—a tangle of circuits, capacitors, and processors that resembled more an arcane altar than a conventional machine. This represented the vessel through which he would project his consciousness, the gateway to the past he so desperately sought to rectify.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Kevin stepped back to regard his handiwork. The past sleepless nights, scouring every scrap of theoretical research, pushing the boundaries of known science, had led to this moment. He was poised on the precipice of the impossible, teetering between genius and madness. One day of the crucial access to the UN resources left on the clock.

The principle behind the device proved deceptively simple, yet staggering in its implications. By digitizing his consciousness—reducing the electrical impulses that defined his thoughts and memories to a precise data stream—he could then imprint that stream onto the fundamental fabric of the universe itself.

The simulations he had painstakingly constructed served as the conduit, a perfect recreation of reality down to the last quantum fluctuation. Once his consciousness data was encoded into that simulation, the quantum entanglement inherent in the universe's design would allow that data to imprint itself upon the actual past events being modeled. As long as a bridge could be maintained between the model and its past counterpart, any action he would take in the simulation will be shadowed across the continuum.

In effect, he would become a self-aware observer, existing simultaneously in the present and the fateful night he struggled to change. His will, his very being, would be projected across the boundaries of time, an invasive presence altering the flow of causality through its mere existence.

The implications weren't lost on Kevin as he made the final calibrations. He was toying with forces that could unravel reality itself if mishandled. The mathematical models suggested staggering potential consequences—from temporal paradoxes that could erase him from existence, to catastrophic alterations rewriting the universe's history in unimaginable ways.

Yet he couldn't deny the inverse truth—that if he succeeded, he could revise Vanessa's fate. Erase the searing trauma that had set him on this path and reclaim the life he had once known. Regain the other half of his soul that had been so brutally ripped from him.

His hands trembled as he initiated the startup sequence, power thrumming through the arrays of circuits and capacitors. This was it, the culmination of everything he had sacrificed to reach this point. Success or failure carried the same stakes—the entirety of existence hung in the balance.

Steeling himself, Kevin settled into the chair at the device's heart and closed his eyes. As the hum of machinery gave way to a high-pitched whine, he felt his consciousness begin to fragment, peeling away from the confines of his physical form.

Then, all at once,the simulation's reality subsumed his disembodied awareness, and his worlddissolved into blinding white oblivion...