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Emeric Maury
mailto:emeric.maury@free.fr
UIN: 8213504
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-- File: ranma.reflecting-chaos.txt
Author's notes:
This fic follows 'The Art of War' by the same author (of course). Notions of
Chaos theory if not necessary should give you a unique insight into this
piece of work.
Comments be sent to:
canal.vorfeed@free.fr
UIN : 8213504
A Ranma 1/2 Fanfic
Reflecting Chaos
***
Hearing heavy footsteps, Lachesis raised her eyes from her loom. She saw a
small limping burly man coming down her cave to meet her. The visitor smiled
hesitantly.
"Hello Lachesis." he greeted her.
"Hephaistos. What brings you to my humble abode?" the Parquae ansered him.
"Well, my visit is related to Athena's last experiment with you."
"Oh no! Please tell me you're not here to try your meddling hand at a
little Ranma modification." Lachesis grimaced. "I do believe that I shall
soon have to stop allowing such experimentations, all the more because as
you said, you knew what happened the last time your sister came here."
"Please hear me first. You see, I have not come here to have my own entry.
The fact is that two of my disciples, who greatly admire some of the things
that mortals invented, are bickering day after day about the importance of
their respective domains and which one is the more fitted to the study of
the real world, which one describes the best people's interactions, and so
on. Since I am becoming rather bored of such a fruitless debate, I finally
proposed them the respected trial-by-experimentation. We established some
rules and references by which we are going to judge the different
experiments. We aggred - rather I made them agree - on the fact that the
only change they are allowed is the addition of a book in Ranma's life. The
rules is that it is taken for granted that Ranma is going to read and study
it. After all, in an infinite multiverse, anything can happen. So we are
going to study those timelines. " the God of Science and Technology
explained. "Still with me so far ?"
"Hum hum. So you want to do the same thing as Athena. Is it a brother -
sister thing ?" irronically retorted the siting woman.
"Hmpfff. You don't understand me. I said it was for two of my disciples.
Anyway, I go on. Since the time the change is made is also crucial, we
decided it ought to be at the same time for both timelines. The problem was
that Ranma had to be old enough to at least understand a little of the
books. So we commonly decided to make it a few weeks after his arrival at
the Tendos, just before the Amazon Elder is coming. In fact her arrival will
probably be the first result of the experimentation." continued the God.
*Sigh* "I live but to serve anyway. So which books are we talking about. ?"
"Aha. That's were it's getting interesting. My two competitors are a
mathematician and a physicist specialized in mecanics. We are going to start
with the Art of Numbers, here are the specifications, let's see what
happens. Let's roll !" Hephaistos excitedly concluded.
"Methinks you are getting a little too much into this for someone
reluctant..." mumbled the Weaver.
***
-Roughly after the Ice Skating mess-up-
Ranma was moodily walking down the street, heading nowhere particular,
kicking the occasional pebble. He was not in a particularly peacefull state
of mind and was just postponing the time to go back to the Tendo house and
the mess that always followed. Truly, the past weeks had not been kind.
After a ten years long training trip, relatively uneventfull, lately it had
become pretty hectic, since the curse in fact. After falling in the Jusenkyo
pool, such peculiar incidents had happened, that independently were not so
bad, but that all put together were pretty discouraging. Consider the curse,
followed by the Amazons and Dragon hair's soup, then the engagement to the
Tendo, the Kuno double mess (brother and sister), the chances of Ryoga ever
finding him again, not once (it took him ten years) but regularly everafter,
then Shampoo managing to track him back, the Skating match... well that made
a lot. And this lot was beginning to take it's toll on the relatively
inexperienced teenager. He sighed deeply.
"Man. I wish I knew why all this is happening to me. Then I could do
something... because as it is now, I do not have a chance. Well, anyway
that's assuming there a reason to. I probably just have bad luck."
A few moments later, his strolling brought him to a part of Nerima he had
never been before. It was more peacefull than the rest of the district.
Getting a little more interested, he continued his walk, looking around him
occasionaly. Turning around a corner, he saw an older man trying to open his
door while holding a huge stack of books, towering way other is head. Taken
by an urge of conscience, he approched the man.
"Excuse me, need a little help ?" asked Ranma.
"Ah. Yes thank you. If you would be so kind as to relieve me from a part of
my burden, I would be able to open this door."
Later, as they were sitted around a small table, drinking some tea, the old
man introduced himself. Of foreign origin, from a remote part of China, he
fled his country during the troubled times that followed Mao's rise of
power. De Usexma China, as he was named, appeared to be greatly interested
in modern sciences. As Ranma looked to the books that were all over the
room, his eye was catched by the kanji in one of the titles. This kanji he
knew well. His interest perked, he showed to book to his host.
"What's this one about ?" he asked De.
The old man glanced at the title of the book and answered. "Ah. This book
is a study of Qualitative Dynamics and the Mathematical Theory of Dynamical
Systems, with an in-depth study about the relation with Nature." Seeing the
lost look in Ranma's face, he simplified. "In short, it's a study of Chaos :
the rules it follows, and it's appearance in our everyday life."
Suddenly, Ranma lit up with understanding. This book more or less described
him and his life, from a certain point of vue. Tentatively, he reached
forward and grabbed it, captivated with the potential of his sudden
discovery.
De took a look at his guest amazed expression and gently proposed :
"If you want to, I can lend it to you, you can bring it back when you want.
It's a field in which I am not as interested as before." he pointed to his
new acquisitions "As you can see, I have lots of new material to think
about...."
Later, after he took his leave of De, Ranma, the book under his arm, was
considering this opportunity of understanding a little his life. For the
first time in days, as he walked back to the Tendo's, he smiled.
***
"Well, what do you think ?" asked an overactive Hephaistos.
"At least this time he didn't steal it. " a blas� Lachesis shot back.
"Critics, they don't understand anything. Watch and learn."
***
-A few days later, his study of the book progressing favorably-
On the roof, one of the rare places he was left alone, Ranma was reading
his book. 'Of Chaos' was quite a find. He found amazing the way the book
described the rules of his life. But what he really wanted was a way of
action to enable him to get more control over his life. Therefore he was
resoluted to make his reflection on this peculiar topic the more sensible
possible. What he needed first was to identify the issue, the environment
and the variables. The first need was classification.
The point that came up first was, as a consequence, the need to know what
he was considering. The main issue, Ranma thought, was behaviour. Why some
people were ennemies, why others ignored him. The problem was definitely
behaviour. People with predictable behaviour (whether it be violent -like a
well known tomboy-, stupid -his father-, mercenary, emotional or unshakeable
to describe the entire Tendo family), with all their qualities and defaults
were just that : predictable. Their reactions were ordered and followed
precise rules that even if they could be bent a little remained more or less
the same as weeks and months passed. Considering his past experiences, Ranma
realized that new individuals always happened, stumbled upon him by chance,
coincidence, pure luck, or simply because they had searched for him. After
the initial surprise of meeting such strange people, their peculiar
personnal behaviour became soon as clear as the others, in the sense as it
became pretty easy to know how Kuno for example was bound to react. But
their initial behaviour toward him (on their first meeting that is) was
still as unclear as before. Therefore, he needed to understand this first.
As 'On Chaos' provided, 'The behavior is chaotic in the sense that it's
absolutely impossible to predict where the next iterate will appear'.
So extrapolating from people's behaviour to the behaviour of the world that
surrounded him, Ranma realized that it meant that since it was impossible
for him to predict what was going to happen in the nearby future (fiancees
might even keep coming, or phoenixes or who might know what), it meant that
he was right in the middle of a chaotic world. But as he read his book, he
realized that things were not as dark as they seemed.
Indeed, he came upon another definition, which stated that 'Chaos is
apparently random behavior with purely deterministic causes'.
Therefore, as he concluded, to put it simply, all the mess and the chaos
that surrounded him had to have reasons that could be understood and
quantified, therefore reacted against. But, those reasons could be anything
from him being born under a dark star to the curse being more profound than
he knew.
So he moved to the next point, the one with the most immediate
applications, the one which would enable him to understand his life, the
study of people paths : the State space. To simplify, the state space is the
collection of all possible configurations of a system, therefore all the
ways his life could have happened (had he not been taken away to the
training trip, had his mother come with them, etc. ) all the worlds this
world could have been.
***
"Wait! Wait! Break ! Stop it!" screamed Lachesis.
"What ?" grinned Hephaistos.
"You.. but.. it's... you cannot have him know about the bets and the
alternate histories, it's against the rules !!" studdered a red-faced
Parquae.
"Says who ? You said that, not me. I just gave him a mathematical book."
smiled the greek God.
"But.. bbut.. "
***
Reading 'On Chaos', Ranma frowned, things were getting complicated. It
appeared that 'The temporal behavior of a system is then viewed as the
succession of states in the system's state space' so that each time someone
did something, the world (system) simply moved to a new state, so that lots
of new possibilities emerged and many others disappeared.
The succession of all these different states defining the 'trajectories' of
the system variables, so that people would follow this and that and later
they would find themselves in this peculiar position. As he continued his
reading, he understood that 'The state the system starts in is called the
"initial condition". The system's behavior unfolds from the initial
condition by simply falling on trajectories'.
Therefore, if he could understand globaly how the system worked and globaly
define some initial conditions, he would have a global comprehension of
everyone's behaviour, and therefore could easily manipulate them a little
into changing trajectories, so that he would be at a relative peace.
So he had to -following the book- 'detect and analyze the different types
of trajectories and other objects in the state space that govern a system's
behavior.'
Further reading provided him with serious elements of reflection. 'The
long-time behavior of a (stable) system is called an attractor, which is
simply the list of states the system eventually moves towards.'
At this Ranma winced. "I know it is not very strict, but I do believe that
in the long-term, everybody moves toward me. *sigh*" he though. Considering
the dreadful possibility of him being an attractor, he decided to study it
into further detail.
The facts were simple : 'In fact, most systems have several distinct
attractors, so that depending on which initial condition the system starts
in, the long-time behavior can be quite different and end up in different
parts of the state space.'
"That's it ! " Ranma exclaimed. "I may be an attractor but I'm not the only
one. I mean, consider Akane, she undoubtedly attracts trajectories herself
too." he said thinking of Kuno, Sanzenin, Ryoga, and who knows how many he
didn't knew about. "But I'm probably the only attractor that has crosses
over with all the other attractors, so that in the end everything and
everybody falls on me."
As it appeared, 'Qualitative dynamics classifies attractors into three
rough categories---fixed point attractors, limit cycle attractors, and
chaotic attractors. These describe three different kinds of temporal
behavior---equilibrium, oscillation, and unpredictable behavior,
respectively'.
"All right. I finally found something interesting" thought Ranma. "Kasumi
must be something that entails equilibrium. Hmmm.. Akane must be the
oscillation thingie. And I have to be this chaotic attractor."
'The set of all initial conditions that go to a given attractor is called
the attractor's "basin".'
"So globally that means my field of action, the area I have influence upon.
Hmm. That could be Nerima, or Japan.. hmm wait, there's this Shampoo chick
too, so that adds China... Man, that's a lot." Ranma continued. "So
obviously the next question is : What is a chaotic attractor ?" he asked
himself.
'First of all, the set is an attracting set. So that the system, starting
with its initial condition in the appropriate basin, eventually ends up in
the set. Even if the system is perturbed off the attractor, it eventually
returns.'
"Hehe... that's me alright, even when I believe I will have a little piece,
like when Shampoo went away, everything just goes back to me full force
later on. Hmpfff.. Shampoo came back. And things are bound to go from
Charybde to Scylla." mumbled Ranma.
***
"I can't believe Ranma's a Chaos Attractor." murmured a devastated
Lachesis. "So that's why everything we have tried fails.."
"Oh yes. The reason is not, as you said to my sister, that 'You cannot
cheat Fate for Fate is a tangled skein', the lone cause for all failures is
Ranma's true nature." answered wisely Hephaistos.
"You know, I never met a Chaos Attractor before, I always thought they
looked more like those bugs from the Aa Megami-sama timeline." continued
Lachesis.
"Here, look at this, it's another extract from the book." said her guest.
'Chaotic attractors themselves are quite orderly---their often elegant,
geometric structures are fixed and unchanging---despite the fact that the
trajectories moving within them appear unpredictable.In this sense, the
chaotic attractor's geometric shape is the order underlying the apparent
chaos.'
"You see, that's why we didn't knew. No one suspected it. We would have
thought about Happosai, or even doubted Ryoga's Brownian motion. But since
against all odds, Ranma remains elegant and unchanging, we couldn't have
guessed." explained Hephaistos. "But there's more, look at Ranma."
***
'Second, and most important, once the system is on the attractor nearby
states diverge from each other exponentially fast. Due to this second
property, small amounts of noise are amplified. Once sufficiently amplified
the noise determines the system's large-scale behavior and the system is
then unpredictable.'
"What ?" screamed Ranma. "That's it ? If there's just a little parasite,
something a little strange (that is bound to happen), it's importance is
going to be amplified (think "I like okonomiyaki better") and what is going
to resultate is a huge centered on yours truly." sulked Ranma. "And all this
is inevitable just because of what I am..." sighed the pigtailed boy.
Moments later, he finally resolved climb down from the roof to join the
rest of the living world.
As he came back in the living room, ever-so-smiling Kasumi noticing Ranma's
downcast expression and asked him :
"Oh my! Are you alright Ranma ? You look a little down."
Akane looked up at him and frowned.
Ranma paused, and answered "I'm cursed."
"I knew that, Baka !" yelled Akane before maletting him in the sky.
***
***
"I still can't believe it." swallowed Lachesis.
"Hehe. Just wait for our next experiment. " grinned Hephaistos.
"Why me ?" moaned the Weaver of Fate.