Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods Read Online Free PDF

dating yet?”
    She leaned back, frowning. “Is it important to define our relationship?” She leaned in again and kissed me gently.
    I looked into her blue eyes, ran my finger along her jaw, wondering why she was here with me. Then I kissed her back.
    *
    In the next millennium, Columbus started gobbling up North American city-states: New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Cairo, until just Minneapolis remained independent of a pan-American empire based in the Yucatan.
    The centralized bureaucracy seemed to be favoring technological development, and in several placed iron working appeared to be under way. The bureaucracy was clearly using a logogram alphabet, though we didn’t spend enough time to understand the language. Ages of history were closed off to us, never to be surveyed again as we barreled forward to the inevitable collision of Europe and America.
    By 1000 CE, the Columbus Empire had collapsed, and in its place was an Alaska to Tierra del Fuego nation of seafarers, who hunted whales and caught fish, and traded up and down the western coast of the Americas, but never venturing beyond a dozen miles of shore. The Mississippi Valley was a confederacy of nation states, each governed by artisan syndicates, which drove technology forward. They had gunpowder, steel, and simple steam engines.
    “When Europe meets America, they will be on equal footing. There will be no wide scale destruction of culture. We have made them equal players.”
    We moved the hole up the line. And suddenly the Americas were overrun by orientals. Skipping by half-centuries, we had missed the invasion. But in 1150 CE, our experimental subjects were serfs of a Chinese empire, ruled by eunuchs. The cities were gone, turned under into the ground. The artisans gone, now slaves. The Chinese were slowly burning the Amazon to the Atlantic.
    “Those damn orientals!” Dr. Elk railed in the lab. “Why didn’t they stay put like they did in our world? They’ve ruined everything.”
    Beth tried to soothe him. “We’ve gotten great data, Professor. We proved that a good domesticated grain will raise the continent’s population by two orders of magnitude. We’ve shown independent technological development of language, gunpowder, steel . . .”
    “It’s not enough! We’ll do it again,” he said, and stormed out of the lab.
    “Again?” I said.
    Beth shrugged, then followed after Elk.
    *
    Spring break came, and Beth left for Fort Myers. She called once while she was down there, drunk, and in the background I heard male voices calling her back to the hot tub. She giggled and hung up. Hey, we weren’t dating. Though I wasn’t seeing anyone but her. We hadn’t even slept together yet. She dissuaded my advances, but we had kissed a lot. She was beautiful, and smart, and not my type at all. But here I was all jealous and smitten.
    Since the Chinese invasion, the class had turned into project prep time. Each student was doing a project based on the new universe’s data, and my time as TA was spent checking standard deviations and logic, correcting bad grammar and unclear arguments. Dr. Elk let me devise, give, and grade the mid-term. Beth got an A+.
    The week after spring break, Dr. Elk announced to the class that he had funding to build a new universe, enough funding to introduce a breeding pair of horses.
    “If the Chinese arrive now, our Native Americans will have the horses for armies,” he explained.
    I whispered to Beth, “Where’s he getting this money?”
    She shrugged.
    We started over, on an accelerated schedule. The maize was easy. The natives in all three areas took to it on the first try. The horses, donated by the Equine Science Department, were just-weaned mustangs. A special container was fashioned, ultra-light weight material. From birth the foals were trained to follow the high-pitched whine of a spyeye, so that once on the other side, the horses could be led to food or away from danger.
    We released them on the Great