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For all his love of spontaneity, Happy Chaos occasionally liked to plan things out ahead of time. Every now and then, a few thoughts would occur at once, and they just couldn’t happen at the same time. Sure, he could just clone himself and do two things at once, but that defeated the point. Why do all the fun just to not live through it?
Ergo, the schedule. The day before yesterday, he had started a garden. The simple wonder of Mother Nature even without humans—her most entertaining progeny—held a certain sense of beauty. With only the nutrients in the dirt that preceded planting, the rains that would follow, and the sun watching overhead as it had and always will, a mixture of seeds only slightly different from one another in shape, size, and color could grow into a lovely, diverse mixture of plants, all sprouting from the same dirt mere feet from each other. Though Chaos knew no metaphor or simile could properly convey the meaning of life, the plants gave a splendid effort, and how could he let that go unappreciated.
It was a stark contrast from his plans the following day: sitting in on a board meeting. However much fun it was to interrupt them, possibly converting the building into a flying machine and nearly causing an international incident in the process—ah, hijacking the G4 Summit had been one of his best ideas since sliced bread—he couldn’t do that every time. Even the spices of life would become dull if he stuck to a single flavor, and besides, enough times and they’d catch on and restructure the meetings into email chains.
No, that meeting went on undisturbed. The floor belonged to the humans, bright minds paid piles of flimsy paper to solve the greatest issues of their age: lagging sales in the second quarter. Still, they attacked the problem with vigor far outstripping the ultimate significance of their task. Chaos had peeked beyond the curtain of time before the meeting began, observing the late-night calls and the lunches spent perfecting proposals. Each keystroke was a new decision, each word a fresh invention. Such was the beauty of people. While the plants were ultimately limited to the seed they came from, humankind had no such restrictions. Their conversation could go a thousand different ways each second, the number of conceivable conclusions climbing into infinity.
And for all that, by the time all was said and done two hours, thirty-five minutes, and twenty-three seconds later, precisely nothing had been accomplished. They would reconvene in another week, and it would be as though the events of the day accomplished nothing, the infinite flow of human creativity plugged by their own stubbornness. Chaos found it a great shame, a feeling rivaled only by the boredom he felt by the end. He had half the mind to cause an “unfortunate” spark in the main gas chamber of the building, but he’d held off on the idea. At any rate, the next day would at least give them something better to talk about.
On a completely unrelated note, Chaos had some thoughts about infinity. As a strictly mathematical concept, it had the luxury of an exact metaphor: a single line. “How many points are there in a line?” the question went. The answer was quite clever: if one was to first find the midpoint of a line, they could find the quarter points of the line, and continue from there to derive an infinite succession of points. But what about a shorter line? A longer line? The rays and lines (not line segments) that every student of geometry learns about? Well, infinity was wonderful, but greater infinity held even more promise.
In a similar vein, Chaos considered himself an artist of sorts, and humanity his paint. While a single, unbroken line would be unlikely to receive high praise from anyone but a toddler’s parents, hundreds, even thousands of lines could work together in harmony to create a stunning picture. The days prior had been the tiniest of strokes, but today would be the day he painted the horizon line, infinite in distance and unbound by the edges of the canvas, joining the limitless reaches of the earth and the sky.
Yes, two worlds would be joined together.
Even Chaos could feel this was a momentous occasion, one deserving of a magnificent lead-up… or at least it would if anything could sufficiently lead up to it. Instead, Chaos simply magiced a speaker into existence, which played a lovely piano entry before transitioning into the lyrics.
“It took me/ten years to find the answer to something/I forgot about it in two seconds…”
Without any further ado, Happy Chaos snapped his fingers.