Entropy in a Closed System

[Frozen Smoke]

((Parker_Green - Day 1 - 08:15 Local Time))

Parker had sat with his legs over the edge of the cliff for some time, looking down the sheer drop to the rocks below, and the dark blue and white writhing mass of the tide breaking over them.

His first reaction had been a simple emotion, anger. It wasn’t directed at anything in particular, but everything around him, everything that had lead up to this point. At being on the island, at being picked, at having to deal about this, at having not prepared for this, at having meekly toed the line and accepted his entrance into the game. Horrible visions of fates vastly worse than a simple bullet to the chest had flashed through his mind in those minutes he’d spent, quietly angry at the world, at whatever deity passed his mind for allowing this to happen.

Eventually the anger had faded into bitterness, as he contemplated the situation more abstractly. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to people like him, it was such an infinitesimally small chance! He’d angrily done some maths in his head to prove that to himself. There were around 300 million people in the US, and he guessed that around 5% of them were in the age range of SOTF. That meant this was one in 15 million, assuming the choice was perfectly random.

One in 15 million. It was hard to equate that to anything. He’d need paper if he was going to figure out how many coin flips that was landing on heads in a row. Twenty flips in a row landing on the same face sounded close enough though. Enough to confirm his opinion that this shit wasn't fucking fair. At least doing the maths had drained some of the bitterness out of him, and replaced it with a sense of emptiness that gnawed at his stomach as he continued to look into the vortex below, and think.

That pause was enough to bring new questions to mind, though not particularly good ones that would help him. Wondering why they’d picked his school, it wasn’t like it was particularly noteworthy from his frame of reference, but they couldn’t be picking school’s randomly - that just didn’t make sense now that he thought about it. There had to be a reason for picking his school, and that set him on edge. Perhaps they had access to psych reports or something, and were trying to pick schools with high concentrations of people who were predisposed to violence.

It wasn't as though the senior year hadn't had it's share of violence without the impetus of a death game.

He inhaled, and exhaled. It was a slow, mechanical motion, but he needed to ground himself. Concentrate on something simple. He closed his eyes, and repeated the action. And a third time.

He opened his eyes.

He recognised the situation now for what it was. It was a Black Swan event. In the time before Oceania was explored, Black Swans had been a euphemism for something that didn’t exist. Then, humans - or, well, western humans, to be exact. - had explored Australia and found Black Swans there. Now the term Black Swan referred to something that people had no reason to believe wouldn’t happen, but strongly believed it couldn’t happen anyway, as they hadn’t seen it yet.

He’d pondered for a brief second about calling it an Outside Context Problem - A problem which most people encountered, as Ian M. Banks had so elegantly put it “in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop”. But that wasn’t correct. He knew of SOTF. Everyone did. He’d just written it off as an utter improbability, and sat down, and gotten on with his life like literally everyone had.

And yet here he was. Unprepared, for what was probably the final test of his life.

That was an archetypical nightmare, wasn't it? Having to go to a test you haven't studied for suddenly.

It probably explained why he felt so gut-wrenchingly nervous.

He… He needed to get somewhere safe. He needed to sit down and think for hours and there was no way he could avoid people for that long. He wanted to scream, or cry, or something, just pour the emotion out of himself until he could think straight, but doing that was a death sentence. The scream that had been building up died in the back of his throat and became a choked, sad, bitter laugh at the joke that had been played on him as he caught a flicker of light reflecting off one of the cameras in the corner of his eye as he looked around behind him.

He didn’t even check his bag for a weapon. He just grabbed it and began to powerwalk in a direction. He wasn’t sure where, he just needed a place to stop and be safe for a while. Just a little bit. That wouldn’t significantly decrease how long he had left to live. And maybe, just maybe, he’d figure out what the fuck to do.

((Parker_Green - Continued Elsewhere))