Volume 1 Chaos Comes Chapter 1: Girl in the Snow
My bedroom exploded.
My bedroom is not big. It only has a single bed, a set of tables and chairs, a wall of books, and a dozen boxes of draft paper.
I looked at the alarm clock embedded in the wall. Its hour and minute hands both pointed to twelve. I had just left the house at that time.
In fact, the bedroom was the house itself. The cabin was the only building on the island, and I was the only human on the planet. Now I had nowhere to go but to find a slightly flat spot on the cliff not far away and sit down, looking at the vast ocean below me.
The moonlight illuminates the sky and casts a glow across the ocean.
The water surface was shimmering, and in the clear night sky, draft papers were flying up and down. The nearby reefs were beaten by the waves, and their strange outlines were clearly visible under the illumination of the two moons.
This situation requires a cigarette, but unfortunately I don’t have that habit and I don’t have any cigarettes.
I took out the melted chocolate from my trouser pocket, tore open the package, put it in my mouth, and swallowed it whole.
“Everything is a beginning without an end, everything is a fleeting pursuit.”
On a winter morning many Earth years ago, I struggled to escape from the gravitational field of my bed, left the student dormitory and walked towards the road leading to the teaching area.
The road was crowded with people, and college students were enthusiastically discussing the final exams that had just ended. The old snow on the ground was a bit hard from being trampled, and I carefully avoided the soft parts that would soak my shoes, just wanting to get into the old building with heating as soon as possible.
There was a naturally grown poplar forest on the way, and the stone road covered with snow was very slippery. I tried to step on the gap between two stones and walked with my head down, with only the sound of my own breathing and the hoarse cry of the gray magpie in my ears.
Suddenly I collided head-on with a soft object that was even more unstable than I was.
It was a girl wrapped in a red down jacket. I saw her falling on the ground with her back facing up, seemingly stunned by the impact.
I stood there like a fool, subconsciously uttered a series of sorrys and then calmed down, my mind quickly thinking about how to react if the other party got angry.
"Why don't you help me up?"
There is no sense of anger in the voice that is as clear as water.
There was more than ten centimeters of snow where she was lying. I quickly bent down and held her arm with my hand. I felt the softness of her fluffy down jacket. The weight on my palm was very light, so it didn't take much effort to lift her up.
"It's winter break now, what are you doing in the physics building?"
She said this while brushing off the snow on her body, probably trying to ease the awkward atmosphere.
"I...received an email from Teacher Jie Kun...asking me to go find him now..."
"Ah, what a coincidence, Teacher Xie also asked me to go."
The brightness of the eyes opposite me increased slightly.
"He means he's going to assign you some reading."
"...Yes, he said it was published last month, and it seemed to discuss complex systems..."
In fact, I just took a quick look at the abstract and introduction after taking the final and took some brief notes.
"Well, I read about it. It maps the dynamic equations of a complex system into a space with more complex configurations, and obtains a general method for describing such problems."
I was a little confused by the long sentences, which killed my little desire to continue. Reading was too much for an undergraduate who also had to deal with coursework.
"Senior...are you a graduate student?" I glanced at her secretly.
The girl in front of me had black hair that fell naturally on her shoulders, and her bangs just touched her eyebrows. She had a tiny teardrop mole at the corner of her eye, long eyelashes, clear pupils, a straight nose, and pale red lips. Her delicate skin, which was bare of makeup, showed no signs of aging.
I was completely attracted by this beautiful face with a charming look. After a while, I realized that it was not polite to stare at it.
"No, I'm just a sophomore this semester and I just finished my final exams." She didn't react to my gaze and turned to pick up the light blue schoolbag lying on the ground. " It's too cold to stand in the snow. Let's talk while we walk."
After a series of physical contacts and stares, I was sure that I must have had negative comments in her mind and she was just pretending to be calm.
I followed her sideways, racking my brains for something to say. I wish there had been a special class when I was a kid that taught people how to come up with topics to talk about, my brain is sorely lacking in that area of training.
"Are you an undergraduate student as well?" The girl turned her head slightly and asked. Her profile was so clear that I tried hard to suppress my desire to take a closer look. Her long hair fluttered and brought some scent molecules, which was a bit like a mixture of laurel, honey and sandalwood. There was actually a shampoo with this scent in the world.
"I'm a sophomore like you... I'm studying physics. Are you also studying physics? I don't think I've seen you before..."
"Yeah, but I haven't been to a general physics class since I passed the exemption exam."
I passed that exam, but I still attended every general physics class, for fear of missing any knowledge points.
"I didn't attend every class this semester, so if you don't pay close attention, you might not notice me."
That's right, even now I don't dare to look directly at the beautiful girl who is so close to me.
Deliberately avoiding other people's sight will create a field around me that keeps all possible communication at a safe distance, which saves me a lot of energy in my daily life.
As we talked, we walked around the sunken square covered with ice and snow and arrived at the entrance of the old physics building. The physics building has only three floors, but it is very long horizontally. The sunny side of the building is covered with creepers, which are now all covered with snow and icicles. Through the small glass windows, we can vaguely see various strange instruments in the rooms on the first floor, and students and professors who are walking around them.
Unlike the bustling living area, the atmosphere is cold and serious, just like the intuitive feeling that the word "physics" gives people.
Walking into the main entrance of the building, the neat red bricks in sight give me a trance feeling of traveling back to the last century, although I have never seen what the 20th century really looked like.
After passing through the lobby, the Y-shaped staircase stretched out to both sides in front of us. On the wall in the middle was a short English sentence:
More is different.
—P. W. Anderson, 1972
She and I climbed the stairs on the left and walked slowly, chatting about trivial matters under the gaze of the portraits of great men.
I heard from the teacher in class before that most of the laboratories in the School of Physics have been moved to the newly completed Science Building, a modern building full of design sense. Only the Institute of Complex Systems and some equipment that cannot be moved remain in the old building.
The corridor on the top floor is a bit narrow, with posters on both sides showing the articles published by the institute in recent years. The display boards are printed with gorgeous phase diagrams of different chaotic systems in bright colors, making the entire corridor look like a corner of a postmodern painting exhibition hall.
