The time for metaphors was over.

In the days leading up to the Sixth Attraction, the final preparations to the finale were well underway in the Electoral Center on Mars. Creatures around the Multiverse waited as the few, tasked with a purpose, endeavored to put on a simple television show. A trio, Emilio, Marilyn, and Sophie appeared to know what the Sixth Attraction was all about. Liam was the only non-gifted with an educated guess. Everyone else was now probably on rails, incapable of action moving to what-ever-this-was.

Doctor Shin and Milly, each night set up a dinner, invited Sophie and still tried to refer to the finale as Sophie's birthday, but the girl genuinely didn't care. She slowly pushed the world away, moving to an intellectual version of herself. In her head, she held endless silent discussions with Liam, pausing only to visit her father's digital sub-conscience.

With all the kindness she could muster, she refused to talk about any celebration and dismissed LO's arrival. Stunningly, Sophie, who had spoken days ago with the Multiverse herself went her own way, as if nothing was shaping up ahead.

Milly's CNN coverage broadcasting back to earth focused on the Attractor's boring life; the calm before the storm. Sophie was even back to using her electronic tutor, a large book with screens as pages. At the moment, as earth was getting pummeled from the onslaught of the Heliocorium, the young student was memorizing geography lessons. Her calming Rho waves bathed the world, but growing in the Multiverse was a sense of powerlessness and restfulness.

If a general sentiment for humanity's state of mind existed, the closest analogy might be to that of a waiting heart recipient. The organ transplant was necessary and inevitable, terrible potential outcomes may lay in wait, but nonetheless, further delay in the process had become worse than the process itself. The old saying that sometimes it is simply better and faster just to rip the band-aid also served, for those remaining among mankind who preferred to keep their philosophical conundrums, literally, only skin-deep.

In the distance, about a million miles away, a hundred or so small globes inhabited by former mercurian castaways and two human psychopaths sped toward mars as fast as they could. They were impossible to see with the naked eye from the distance. Marilyn kept sending both men music from the past century interlaced with comedic wheels.

Blocks of cooling magma were raining down on evacuated portions of earth as the juggernaut advanced on schedule. Every color of fumes, fire, and visible electromagnetic radiation filled the skies as the night moon began to take its thrashing from the forthcoming onslaught. The lunar impacts in the low gravity lifted ash, creating a strange white hue as the light dust took forever to fall back to the moon's surface.

Humans and humanity were biologically and emotionally changing. Long gone were the brainless ballplayers and other entertainers; this was the rude awakening of a suddenly orphaned child. In the sky, the sun was no longer a white star when seen from mars or yellow from earth, it was a diffuse line of smoke extending sideways, interspersed massive lightning strikes.

Marilyn, momentarily silent in her core, saw now thirty-five green decimals of Pi. The God Bias was now close to ten percent. Even the computer was starting to feel the pinch of probability in her world as the Great Curvature forced the Multiverse to bend back from the Consequence to Cause model, then wrenching back to a Cause to Consequence. Her world, built on predictability, far from chaos, saw atoms move and age to precipitate outcomes.

Everything in the world was changing from a microscopic level to the most massive cosmological strata. Quantum physics warped as much as general relativity. Long established rules of existence, immutable facts, failed and shifted as the fabric of the Multiverse, once stupidly believed to be an empty void, suffered trauma. Humans were parasites on an elephant that was slowly rolling around in the dirt.

The Great Curvature changed the world. Rain, typically forced to fall everywhere, was now free to hug its neighboring drops on the long way down to splash down wherever the Multiverse desired. It now caused the consequence it desired. Molecules stuck conveniently and moved so they could fall wherever the Multiverse decided. The great mother no longer needed to work a long process for her results; she had them in the here and now. In places, rain fell from the sky directly into gutters without wasting energy and mass by first hitting the roof, then losing more via friction by sliding down into the gutter. The plants which needed water got the perfect amount, the rest fell around them on the pavement. Air and wind, also previously forced to flow and hit every surface, was now given purpose. Air could change pressure and push on sailboats more easily. Hurricanes pushed on objects but avoided breaking doors. Funnels of air grabbed leaves and lifted them in vortices and dropped mushed composts to selected bases of dying trees. Other typically random events ended. Smokestacks from building rose in the air as a line, games of chance were over.

Down on earth, every bachelor randomly walked in a place and met their true love. Scientists uncovered with a stroke of a pen their next Nobel. There was a strangeness in everyone achieving perfection at the same time. The world no longer played games. Opening the television got you to the right channel; entering a store got you to the perfect clothing selection. The Multiverse was done playing random, it now was in charge. Humans would have to get over themselves. The Sixth Attraction was nearing, and men lost randomality and chaos. The master was speaking.

These were only the surface changes, however. The actual alterations were more profound, much more rooted in the fabric of the Multiverse. Stepping on the sand at the beach no longer resulted in sand moving down under the weight. Each grain, if it wanted, was now able to lock itself to neighbors. Eating food now was metabolized to perfection and without waste. Sweating in the gym cooled and no longer drenched. Skin had no pimples, teeth no longer decayed, clothes did not rip. There was, to say differently, perfection to purpose.

Destiny and karma, now manifest, pushed accelerating progress as humans began to feel they were no longer free to act. In exchange, the Multiverse needed humans to connect to the machine to watch the game in a couple of days. Even those few who, for religious reasons, previously refused to connect to Electoral would do so, listen, and allow their Rho waves to power the system. Nothing would prevent it.

Men, with a single exception, were no longer in charge of their own destiny.

***

Emilio heard a knock on his office door over the loud commotion in his office.

Staffers, regularly working from lower floors of the United Nations tower in Berlin, were busy collecting information here. Distrust of Marilyn or the Great Curvature forced Emilio to create a digital war room in his office. He knew it wasn't Electoral-proof, but the crucial things he kept within the confines of his mind. Emilio penned a large word on the whiteboard rested against a wall; redundancy.

No one ever knocked on doors these days, there were now bells, precise schedules, and assistants. Emilio got up from his desk and moved to the door. A second before a knock, Emilio was ready. The little noise was refreshing. Anyone else would have been unable to hear it, but the President was no longer human in many ways. He was a champion with a purpose.

"Patrick, my friend, come in, feeling guilty you lost your Jester?" Emilio ushered Colonel Martin in, glad to close the wall of televisions and turn his attention to his friend. "What can I do for you?" The uniformed officer removed his hat, slipped it under his right arm, and saluted his President. Patrick was nervous.

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"What's this?" he pointed at the chaos in the room.

"The only solution to life's strange problems at the moment."

"As you can imagine, I don't follow. You mind translating to English?" After a short pause and a smile, he added "Sir."

"Everyone!" Emilio exclaimed, louder than necessary, then clapping his hands for punctuation and instant contrasting silence. It worked, Patrick half-smiled, indicating his understanding. "Take a seat Patrick, nothing wrong with repeating myself again. It's like most complex theories, only teaching them gets you a deeper, well-needed understanding of them. Guys, let the medias in." Small flying cameras flew into the room.

Emilio grabbed a marker, unclipped it open and began writing on his board after taking a short smell of the marker's fumes. "Remember Liam, aka the Oldest?" he asked with extreme redundancy. “The Multiverse got him out of his world because of his strange theory of consequences to cause. I am sure everyone here is confused by it. To all of us, we do something and that serves as a cause to what comes later as a consequence. We have sex, the cause, and we make a baby, the consequence." Pointing to a cup, he added, "We pour warm coffee into this cup, and that warms the cup. But we are dead wrong." The President drew an arrow pointing to the right. On the left, he drew a pot of coffee and the word "cause." On the right, the cup, and the word "consequence." "By the way," he took a sip of the coffee, "anyone noticed this Sixth Attraction is giving us the best of coffee ever? No? Is it just me?" No one laughed.

The President continued, "Now Sophie finds a guy, a creature old of billions of years old, and he tries to warn us we have this backward." Emilio wiped with a finger the tip of the arrow on the right and drew up on the left. "It's tough to wrap our little heads around this concept. But really? As the Sixth Attraction gets closer, the world and this world is changing." There was silence in the room. Emilio placed the marker down and used both hands to help convince his audience. "We need a real-life problem to understand it. Patrick, what's your problem?"

The man hesitated. "You have much better things to do."

"C'mon Patrick, everyone has a problem," insisted the Mexican.”You came here for that reason.” He was of course right.

"This is minor, personal."

"You shared the mind of the Jester, and if you remember, I did promise you a favor in exchange for sharing the body of a Siamese prostitute and having, um, intimate relations alongside that ghost. I'd say that qualifies as 'beyond the call of duty.'" Patrick and everyone watching cringed. This was important to Patrick, and there was no denying the President.

Patrick spoke silently, "My wife Dane and my daughter Stacy are in Khon. For days, I've been trying to call them, and I can't reach them. Each time the phone breaks, the line goes down or she is unavailable. The universe seems to have other plans for me. I want to say goodbye before the next Round. I even tried to rent a car; same random chaos."

"Perfect," said the President, returning to the board. He grabbed the pen. "Let me see what's going on, so we don't need to guess." Emilio closed his eyes. There were long flashes of dark unavailable futures. With concentration, more flashed inside his mind. Finally, he saw image after image of Patrick calling and failing to connect with his family. Each time Patrick failed, his frustration increased. Then, an image changed, and he saw beyond the future outcomes. Instead, Emilio saw what could have frequently happened. Patrick would call, talk to his wife, then she would pass the phone to their young daughter.

Then he saw it. The young girl says something like "I dreamt of Sophie daddy, she asks me not to watch her father during the final. Daddy, please don't connect." Emilio knew this was the reason. If Patrick called, his daughter would convince him to disconnect during the finale, so the Multiverse, selfish and wanting Patrick's Rho waves in the system, simply blocked the conversation.

Emilio opened his eyes. "Got it."

"What is it?"

Emilio walked to his desk and grabbed an old red phone, a throwback to the emergency between Russian and America during the Cold War. It was cordless and he placed it on the coffee table in front of Patrick. "This, guys, is all about what's here," Emilio poked at Patrick's head with a finger while speaking to the audience. "All he needs to do is think something concrete. Once he understands Liam's crazy theory, not only will he be able to call but this phone will ring, and she is the one who will call.

Emilio snatched up a random coffee cup. "Imagine you are the Multiverse, you need this warmed cup. You have millions of years, millions of humans and all the time in the world to get this simple cause done. So you can easily set that up. Humans will move freely, and one will ultimately be the consequence of cause you need. That's possible to achieve. But one day, you need everyone to connect to the game. You need energy and Rho waves into the computer system. Under no situation can you get that done under the cause to consequence. So what happens? You flip upon yourself to return to the way normal life understand things.

"The Multiverse needs you to connect to the computer in three days. That's the consequence it wants. To get each of you to get there, it removed part of our free will; it's moving everything around. It is playing with this," he pointed at the phone. "because it now is forced to lower itself to act like us. The Multiverse sets the causes on us to get the consequence it wants. So yes, reverting to forced causes on us to get the consequence it needs. We can live, be happy and have free will because she imposes consequences only."

"Why does that apply to me?"

"It applies to all of us. Give the Multiverse what she wants. It knows if you call, your sweet daughter will convince you, beg with you not to connect and here," he pointed at his heart, "you plan to give your daughter exactly what she will ask. Don't deny it, she sees what's going on outside, she knows. Here is the beauty, though: if you promise, in your heart, to connect irrespective of what your daughter says, the Multiverse will let you call. But you have to mean it. The virus works the same way."

"It's that simple?"

"Yes and no. I spoke to Takeda a few days ago because we all needed a better understanding of how the Multiverse works, how the God Bias works in reality. Turns out Takeda also missed one part of this relationship. Marilyn is the one who helped him understand it. Takeda infected a frog with his God Virus, which is based on the principles of the God Bias, and threatened it with boiling water. The virus was unable to alter the frog, and it died. Marilyn made Takeda promise the frog, if it passed this test of the boiling water, would be released in the wild and survive. The virus refused to kick in to save temporary the frog. Takeda promised, on his honor, he would let it live. He had to open a path to the future the Multiverse needed. So here Patrick, even if your wife tells you your daughter will die if you connect, you must commit to actually connecting, period.

"The Multiverse needs you to do or say something, and it knows if you call her, you will not be able to do what you must. I am not absolutely certain what the precise series of words you need to say, combined with the beliefs and commitments you hold. Normally I would think it has to do with mars, but recently I have come to reconsider things. It's now very capricious. It wants everyone to connect to the game." Emilio looked at everyone, "Do you understand, The Multiverse now operates more and more as a cause to consequence. She imposes causes to get the consequences she wants. Give her what she wants, the consequence, and you will pick the cause."

Emilio paused, blinked rapidly, and shook his head. "Really?" he said half to himself.

Patrick stood up, hopeful. "Let me show you."

"Patrick, I'm your boss, right?"

"Sir, of course."

"Here is a direct order. Close your eyes and make the heart-felt decision that if the phone does not ring in a minute or less, you will not connect to Electoral in three days. The only thing that can make you commit to taking part in the game is that ring of the phone."

Patrick looked sternly at the President, "One minute? That phone? No one has that number, sir. That's your private emergency line."

"Promise." Any other human might have hesitated, but Patrick would have pulled his sidearm on himself if asked by this man. He breathed in and closed his eyes. In his mind, he felt he was promising never to speak to his own daughter. He took comfort knowing his family would see this on television. He barely held his tears.

"It is done."

The longest silence of Patrick's life began. After thirty seconds, the man's eyes began to tear up. The clock hit one minute, and the phone rang.

As if his life depended on it, Patrick jumped on the phone, losing all of his composure. There was a distant voice everyone could hear. "Sarah, what are you doing, don't play with the phone." Patrick heard steps.

"Anyone?" began the voice. "Apology, my daughter misdialed this number."

"Dane?"

"Patrick?"

Emilio made a sign with his hand for the cameras to stop filming.

The President walked out of his office to the main elevator bay went to the elevator. Everyone watching was in shock. The Multiverse wanted everyone to connect, and everyone would, irrespective of their intent. The consequence was imposed, humanity could pick the cause, no more. He had regained power.

Understanding gave the President power.