Light...!
What happened? Everything. The beginning of everything.
The universe filled with light.
The overflowing potential energy from the inflaton caused violent fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Fluctuations meant particles. These fluctuations manifested countless photons. And those photons went flying. They’re incredibly fast. Obviously. Photons have no mass. Particles without mass fly at the top speed achievable in the universe, the speed of light. That speed was far more than 300,000 kilometers per second. We’re talking ten to the power of thirty times that. This age had no truck with the tedious speed restrictions that would be applied later on.
Faster! Faster! The photons raced away in all directions. Covering light years, parsecs. Linking unbelievable distances in an instant, leaving no territories cut off. Diversity was the cost. The wave of photons from far, far away painted everything the same blinding white.
But in time, the age of the great race drew to an end. The universe was cooling off. It had used up the potential energy hidden in the inflaton field. Too many massive particles like electrons and quarks and neutrinos had been made. Quarks fused with each other to form nuclei, and electrons joined in, giving rise to hydrogen and helium, but the price was significant. The vacuum itself began to cool, and phase transition developed, like when water turns to ice. But in this case, it was dimensional compactification. There were once eleven dimensions but as the energy state degraded that number shrunk. Just as gases become liquids and liquids become solids, loss of energy always results in a corresponding loss of active states. Dimensions that once were infinite were wound up, their former shape replaced with something pathetically small, resulting in something hardly appreciably different from a mere three spatial dimensions.
As the dimensions froze, limitations on the speed of light became stricter. This was because the surplus compactified dimensions were causing congestion. Every time light tried to travel a certain distance it had to pass through the labyrinth of wound up dimensions. Winding around in this maze of excess dimensions required that light to travel a considerable additional distance.
However, not everything was wound up like that. They were rare, but some dimensions were not frozen. Merely supercooled. Water can retain its liquid state below freezing if and only if there are no impurities or catalysts to germinate cores. Likewise, in degraded-energy spaces, higher-dimensional status survived in certain flat domains. But this would not last long. Supercooled states collapse at the slightest stimuli.
Eventually, the areas that had maintained a supercooled state began to disintegrate. It was the inevitable result of laws governing micro-regions and quantum theory. Perfectly stable environments do not exist. Everything is uncertain. Inescapable quantum uncertainties greater than any chaos were destroying those supercooled dimensions.
As space continued to cool, the supercooled dimensions tried desperately to protect themselves. Fighting against a fate they could not escape, their destruction ever encroaching.
✦ ✦ ✦
Youko Sasajima’s mind was quietly dying. The culprit that had driven Youko to the brink was called Evolution Girls — Evo Gals for short. It was the most popular mobile game at the moment. The game revolved around anthropomorphized versions of extinct species. It had launched six months earlier, but the tie-in anime had just ended, leading to a spike in popularity.
Lately, the Evo Gals anime was on many fans’ AOTY lists, but when it first launched it had gone under the radar. You had to be a real hardcore otaku to have given it a look.
Youko wasn’t that hardcore. She was a lightweight otaku, only watching three or four anime a week. She had accidentally caught the first episode of Evo Gals in real time, but unfortunately, she had failed to grasp the appeal of the series.
The show followed the recent moe anthropomorphization trend, in which non-human things are depicted as characters. Evo Gals characters were based on ancient species. In the first episode, the main character travelled back in time five hundred million years, was rescued by some girls (who were anthropomorphized extinct species) and set off on a journey looking for a way back to modern times. This was occasionally interrupted by explanations by a museum curator, making it a very educational anime. The character designs weren’t egregiously sexualized, either, so it would not have been out of place airing on an educational channel. At the time, Youko decided this wasn’t what she was in the mood for and dropped the series.
The buzz changed after episode four. A guest character who appeared in that episode stated that a timeline in which mankind was born wasn’t supposed to exist. What people had taken for a relaxing educational show suddenly showed its heady sci-fi cards, and viewers got hooked on the concept. A group of them started doing deep reads on the show, calling themselves the Lore-Hunters.
Youko’s social media accounts got caught up in the wave. Youko hated being behind on these things, so she caught herself up by finding the second and third episodes online somewhere and pirating the hell out of them. Ratings shot up with each new episode. It became quite a Cinderella story for the little studio making the show. The contrast between the pastoral mood and the sci-fi underpinnings was the secret to their success.
And then the last episode aired. Youko found tears flowing down her cheeks. Afterwards, she felt an emptiness spreading through her. Loads of people online were describing similar symptoms. A feeling of loss, like the end of Evo Gals had taken a piece of their hearts with it. People started calling it the Evo Loss.
Fortunately, there was a way to recover from Evo Loss. Evo Gals was based on a mobile game of the same name. Youko installed it immediately. This was her fatal error.
The Evo Gals mobile game had a somewhat unusual system. Genre-wise, it was a mash-up of a rhythm game, a dress-up game, and an adventure game. Your standard mobile rhythm game involved customizing characters, forming parties, and playing the rhythm game with that party. Evo Gals added a fashion system to that basic gameplay. You could design entire outfits for the characters. Naturally, this wasn’t just a cosmetic change; the clothes had practical effects, too. Characters and clothes had four core stats — cool, cheer, purity, and passion — and the different rhythm game stages had attributes, and compatibilities with these stats. Scores were based not just on the skill of the player, but on the character level and rarity, compatibility with the stage attributes, and the rarity and attributes of their outfits.
This was not a simple system. Rarity was important, but even if you put all your rarest pieces on a character, if the resulting outfit clashed or was wrong for the character wearing it, you might not get the results you wanted. The game required a genuine eye for fashion.
Evo Gals had hit ten million downloads a month after launch, smashing previous records. The system felt fresh, proved very popular, and earned it five-star reviews across the board.
Evo Gals was a free to play game. Naturally, that meant free to download; to obtain a lot of characters and clothes meant paying the game company a lot of money, i.e. whaling. For the first two weeks she played the game, Youko didn’t spend any money on it. She was more the no in-game purchase type, and it didn’t even occur to her that she could spend money on it. But then one day she opened Pandora’s box.
Evo Gals’ rhythm game had both a Ranked Mode and an Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode involved a story that progressed by clearing stages, while Ranked Mode let you replay songs and compete for high scores with other players.
As she progressed through Adventure Mode, Youko hit a stage she just couldn’t clear. The stage was based on the Late Permian Period, one of the prehistorical geological ages. The characters she had in her party seemed ready for the stage. They weren’t that rare, but they were pretty high level.
She checked a FAQ online and learned something that surprised her. If you didn’t have the special skill “Resist Low Oxygen,” your score on the Late Permian Period stage would drop like a stone. To obtain the special skill, she needed a character that came with the skill, or a piece of clothing that granted that skill to the wearer. But all the Girls Youko had were unable to survive in low oxygen conditions.