Rupert Wright's alarm clock, a depressingly reliable piece of Swiss engineering, performed its daily act of cruelty at 6:15 AM. It had done this for the past 2,817 days with such unfailing consistency that Rupert's subconscious had given up on the concept of sleeping in, much like how the Swiss themselves had given up on the idea of taking sides.
His studio apartment, which his estate agent had generously described as "cozy", was arranged with the dedication reserved for planning space rocket launches. Not that Rupert was obsessive. He simply believed that a properly organized drawer was humanity's last defense against the fundamental chaos of the universe. Right up there with the necessity of returning a shopping cart to its corral. The fact that he ironed his underwear was purely coincidental.
The morning routine unfolded as neatly as his towel. Shower for seven minutes, water temperature at 37.2°C.
After his shower, Rupert squinted at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, which was temporarily useless until he fumbled his glasses back onto his face. The world snapped into familiar focus, revealing a skinny twenty-seven-year-old who looked exactly like what would happen if you asked a LLM to generate an image of “engineer crossed with Milo Thatch.”
His slightly curly black hair was doing its usual morning rebellion against water and gravity, a battle it would inevitably lose to his methodical combing. His gray eyes, magnified slightly behind his glasses, had the kind of intense focus only belonging to men trying to spot god particles or figure out why their code wouldn't compile. At 5'11" and 150 pounds, his build suggested someone who had achieved the remarkably unhealthy feat of being simultaneously too busy to exercise and too focused on work to remember to eat.
The overall effect was less "nuclear engineer" and more "graduate student who had accidentally stayed on past his unpaid internship and was too socially phobic to admit the mistake." This was, of course, entirely inaccurate—he was getting paid for his work. Meagerly. It was barely a step above being homeless, but still miles better than being a teaching assistant.
He had laid out his clothes the night before: white button-up shirt (always white, tags removed—too itchy), navy slacks (pressed with two creases, tags also removed), sensible shoes (laced in parallel lines). Breakfast: two pieces of white toast (barely golden setting 2) with extra butter, one soft-boiled egg (6 minutes, 15 seconds), and coffee (no sugar, no milk, microwaved every two minutes to keep it piping hot).
He checked his backpack—laptop, security badge, lunch packed in identical plastic containers to yesterday. His bike was where it always was, locked with two different mechanisms to deter casual thieves, the combination locks and chain plated with titanium to ward off Gypsies.
He took a deep breath of spring air to oxygenate his muscles as he pedaled along the familiar route. Geneva was beautiful this time of year, though Rupert appreciated it more for the consistent meteorological patterns than the aesthetics.
The lake reflected the morning sun at the angle appropriate for the vernal equinox, and the (he hated using definite articles before a proper noun) Mont Blanc was visible in the distance, its beautiful and thoroughly useless snow-capped peak gleaming.
Some of his more annoying colleagues had encouraged him to take up skiing, a suggestion he found about as practical as taking up competitive yacht racing.
The Germans (he lumped the Swiss in with the rest of the Teutonic race, in spite of their protests of neutrality) had a peculiar relationship with skiing. They spoke of it with the kind of reverence usually reserved for beer, sausages, and declaring war on their neighbors, and seemed genuinely puzzled by anyone who didn't enjoy spending their weekend hurtling down frozen mountainsides at breakneck speed.
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Rupert had done the calculations on a napkin during lunch one day, trying to keep one of these annoying German colleagues from talking (he kept talking regardless). Taking up skiing would require approximately 4,000 Swiss Francs for equipment (a sum that could buy exactly 1,333.33 cups of coffee from the cafeteria, not accounting for inflation), 47 hours of instruction (time that could be better spent playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri), and a complete rewiring of his self-preservation instincts (which were currently quite content with keeping all bones in their original configuration).
The German insisted it was "Ya, yust like ridingk ein beeeeek!" which Rupert found unlikely, as his bicycle had never once attempted to send him careening down the side of Mont Blanc at terminal velocity. Besides, his current (minimal) salary as a nuclear engineer, was better suited to keeping him barely above subsistence level rather than financing an elaborate scheme by the Austrian winter sports industry to separate people from both their hard-earned money and their God-given ankles.
The whole enterprise seemed to involve far too many variables: snow conditions, weather patterns, the likelihood of violent collisions with extremely wealthy men who could afford better lawyers than he could, and the mysterious process by which ski lifts were boarded while in motion. No, Rupert decided. He would stick to video games, where the only thing he risked losing was time—a commodity which, unlike ankles, at least had the decency to be infinite in one direction (at least for the foreseeable future). Besides, he reasoned, if God had meant for humans to slide down mountains at inappropriate speeds, He wouldn't have allowed us to invent computers, or couches, or the granary, or the plow, or the entirety of civilization, all of which seemed specifically designed to keep people away from such asinine alpine activities.
In the grand scheme of things, when future archaeologists discovered the remains of human civilization, they would find it far more logical that humans spent their leisure time manipulating pixels on screens than strapping waxed planks to their feet and throwing themselves off cliffs. Though, he had to admit, both activities would probably seem equally baffling to any sufficiently advanced civilization.
The facility loomed ahead, looking exactly as one would expect a facility dedicated to smashing incredibly tiny things together at incredibly high speeds to look: like an office building, but more toroidal. Friday mornings at CERN were statistically quieter than other days, a fact that Rupert appreciated not because he disliked people, but because fewer people meant fewer instances of having to overhear conversations about why the cafeteria should implement a queuing system based on a true random number generator. None of that pseudo-random Microsoft Excel business. ("Did you know that Excel just pulls from a list of pre-generated numbers?", "Why yes I did.", "Let me tell you anyway!")
Other employees were already arriving as he chained his bike in spot B-17 (optimal distance from both entrance and security checkpoint). Friday brought a predictable reduction in early arrivals compared to other weekdays. Rupert didn't particularly care for Fridays. They were just another day, distinguished only by the following 48-hour period when the office operated at reduced capacity.
He swiped his badge at exactly 7:30 AM, greeted Marcel at security (who had worked the morning shift every Friday for the past six years), and headed to his workstation. Another day of data analysis began, each number in its place, each variable accounted for, the universe's secrets slowly revealing themselves through the divine alphabet of mathematics.
The birds continued their morning songs outside, their chaotic overlapping melodies a stark contrast to Rupert's carefully ordered world. He didn't mind—nature's randomness was, after all, governed by its own set of principles. Mainly thermodynamics. He opened his laptop, entered his 27-character password, and began his day.
The ventilation system hummed its usual 47-decibel, 30 Hz tune, a sound that Rupert had come to associate with the background radiation of the universe—constant, predictable, and annoying when you actually paid attention to it. But then again, he mused, the same could be said for most things in life, like people talking in meetings or his upstairs neighbor's dedication to tuba polka practice. So it goes.