How I Became Acolyte to Primordial Chaos

CW: Transphobia

How familiar are you with chaos theory?

An old adage goes that if a butterfly somewhere in Brazil flaps its wings, it can potentially form a tornado in Texas, because everything is connected. Ask a meteorologist how often they consult butterfly wings when writing weather reports, and they might look at you a bit funny. But the metaphor still works.

So what if you could control the butterflies? Not just one, but all of them? Every single factor in the complex, nearly unknowable ecosystem that led to the destruction, or lack thereof, of dozens of homes?

Computers work that way. Nothing truly random can ever be generated by a computer, only deterministically chaotic. I first picked this up from speedrunners, people who try to complete video games as fast as humanly possible. Some games with very simple mechanics are subject to "RNG manipulation." If the strength of your party members or the difficulty of a fight depend on a roll of the dice, there's a way to rig the dice. The computer uses the system clock to generate a seed value, and that seed value will produce the same results every time, given the same inputs. So if you set the computer clock to a predetermined value, and take certain actions in the game, even if they don't seem to make sense to an outside observer, you can get beneficial results. Everything is connected.

Of course, most people believe the real world doesn't work this way. I thought so, too. Even if we lived in a deterministic universe, I thought, just the same as a computer, there were too many variables out there to control. Too many rolls of the dice, too much time elapsed since the seed was set. No one could control everything.

That's what I thought. Until I found someone who could.

How familiar are you with Chaos?

I met him when I was planting milkweeds in my mom's garden at age 17. He walked in an halting stride down my street, and stopped next to my front lawn. When I asked if he needed something, he stared at me a moment, as if he was thinking, computing some formulae only he could see. Then he spoke to me.

"On June 12th, your mother will water your garden in the early morning, before she leaves for work. If you water them again in the afternoon, her roses will perish, but the milkweeds will flourish."

"What?"

"Cause problems, boy. Cause problems on purpose. It's more fun that way."

I'm not sure why I said this, because I wasn't out at the time to anyone except some friends I knew online. But I said, "I'm a girl, actually. My name is Jade."

"Jade," he replied. His eyes seemed to glimmer with an odd recognition. "Thank you, Jade."

And he walked away.

That chance encounter made me who I am today. Because after I overwatered the garden on June 12th, the roses died. My mom was wildly upset with me, telling me off for what she saw as too feminine a hobby. Two days later, a windstorm hit our state. Every house in the neighborhood sustained damage. Tiles flying off roofs, massive limbs being knocked off trees. Every house in the neighborhood but ours.

I tried, at the time, to convince my mom this was because of what I did. But that made no sense at all, of course. She scolded me for talking to strange men, and my younger brother coughed in a way that barely concealed how he called me a pansy. My father continued staring at the newspaper, pretending he didn't hear what we were talking about.

But that wasn't the last time I saw that man. When I moved away to attend university, I started seeing him again. He looked different every time. Sometimes dressed in a smart blazer, sometimes working as a janitor. His hair and build often changed, but his eyes never did. I would wave at him when I recognized him.

One time, I saw him in the library. He almost passed as a librarian, but he was putting books back in the wrong place. I recognized an armful of "S" authors, including the specific tome I was looking for, but he was standing in the "R" aisle.

We made eye contact. I looked at the books, at the sign on the end of the aisle, and back at him. The words to call for an actual librarian almost left my lips, but didn't. Instead, I walked toward him.

"Hello, Jade," he said.

"Is that Harmonium by Wallace Stevens?"

"Yes."

"May I have it?"

"Yes."

He proffered it to me. He spoke again. "May I have something in return?"

I stared, puzzled. "...What would you want?"

"A pen."

He blinked at me. I blinked back. I shrugged, then pulled a pen from the side pocket of my backpack, and gave it to him. It was a black gel ink Callisto brand pen, I still remember. I had bought a dozen of them the week before school. Not my favorite, and not unique in any way.

He smiled, put it in his shirt pocket, and carried on putting the books back in the wrong place.

A week later, the library had to replace a few dozen books due to ink stains, black, seemingly transferred from the side of someone's hand onto the pages. Among them were all the volumes of an old book of poetry that was assigned for a notoriously hard introductory English class. All the volumes, but one. The professor offered an extension for the assignment, and I used the extra time to edit my essay a little more thoroughly. I caught three spelling mistakes, and got an A on the final product.

I was a bit hesitant to engage when I saw him after that. I didn't know who he was. I wasn't quite sure what he was, either. But good luck didn't feel so good when it seemed to be coming at other people's expense. I stopped waving at him when I noticed him. After a while, I stopped noticing him.

That was, until spring semester. One of the general education courses all students were expected to take was Religion 101. My instructor, Professor Howell, refused to call me Jade. He refused to refer to me as a woman. And he refused, despite the alleged topic of the course being "world religion," to stop talking about the Christian God to the exclusion of all others.

When I complained to my advisor, she did not take me seriously at all.

"What do you expect, really? This is a Catholic institution, after all."

Every day I attended that class was miserable. No one seemed happy to be there. Howell got very little engagement, and eventually started calling on people at random. And of course, he insisted on using the names on the attendance sheet.

"One must be ordered in one's life," he lectured, with the same imperious tone you'd expect from a pastor. "Rules are meant to be followed."

Eventually, I stopped responding to my deadname. He called on me, repeating a few times as I stared him dead in the eye.

"Hello? Can you hear me, ----?"

"Are you talking to me? That's not my name." I feigned confusion, a few of the other students snickering.

"Last name, Wendon, first name, ----? Are you going to answer the question, or are you going to continue to disrespect me the way you disrespect your parents by pretending to be someone you're not?"

"Do I have a secret brother who enrolled here? My name is Jade. I know that. You know that. An outdated piece of paper does not change that fact."

"Ah, but paper is all we have! The Bible is written on paper, son, so-"

"Not your son."

He paused then. "Excuse me?"

"I'm no one's son. Maybe you need to get your vision checked, old man, but I mean." I stood up. "Look at me? I'm clearly a woman." I swished my hair for dramatic effect.

"Get out!" he shouted, pointing at the door.

I scoffed, and left the room.

That evening, I got an email that Professor Howell had told the dean a distorted version of what happened, and I was to receive a formal disciplinary hearing for "disrespectful behavior in a classroom setting."

That night, I took a long walk, angry and hurt. When I saw a familiar pair of eyes look up at me from a flower bed, I just walked past him. But he stood from his work and joined me, matching my pace.

"Do you need something?" I asked.

"Do you?"

I didn't answer at first, just continued toward the lake that bordered the east edge of campus.

"A million bucks? A reason not to throw myself into the lake holding something heavy? For people to respect me? I don't know!"

"Money is easy to get, Jade, if you know how to be lucky. My reason is to cause problems on purpose, because it is fun. And I hope it means something, but I respect you."

He stopped suddenly, then. I realized we had reached a flower bed, which he was now looking at attentively.

"Do you like computers?" he asked.

I stopped too. I thought about asking how he knew about computers. I thought about bragging that I just declared Computer Science as my major. Both of those options seemed dumb. So I just answered, "Yes."

"I do too. You know that random numbers use seeds, yes? Much like the seed of a plant, if you know what you have planted, and you know how much sun and rain it sees, you know what will result."

"Where are you going with this?"

"Your professor's God knew what He created when He created it. He made wheat so humans could make bread. He made grapes so humans could make wine. And He made you so you could be a woman. That is all part of the order of things."

I smiled at the familiar metaphor. "Are you God?"

"No," he smiled. "I'm something else. I existed before He did. I was the seed at the start of all things. I was asked many questions, and gave many answers. And those answers answered questions of their own, and those answers did the same. A moon orbits a planet, orbits a star, orbits a black hole. But I was tired of answering questions. I was tired of the stars orbiting me as if I was special. I was never special. Only first."

He had crouched down to examine the soil in the flower bed. Carefully, he lifted one seed from the dirt, then put another in its place.

"So now I garden instead. I pretend to be something smaller than I am. And I cause problems on purpose, because I find it fun. Like bumping into someone in bumper cars." He looked at me, that characteristic gleam in his eyes. "You can call me Chaos."

He looked no different than any other person. He had gotten good at that.

"Can I have some advice?"

He rose. "It may not make sense."

"I will listen regardless."

That night, he asked me to carry out a few tasks. Something between a ritual and a cheat code. And that if I did, "something like luck" would be in my favor. It took me until 2am, but I eventually dropped into bed, exhausted.

When morning rolled around to our side of the planet again, the conversation of last night felt like a dream. The more pressing concern was the alarm for my religion class going off. After the previous day's exchange, I was ready to have my womanhood challenged openly. So I made sure my hair and makeup were immaculate.

"The dean has insisted that every student has their 'chosen name' be honored," Professor Howell said as we walked into the lecture hall. "So for the sake of decorum and sanity, everyone will use their student IDs to address one another."

The students tried not to laugh. "The numbers are a compromise," he yelled. "They also make it easier to call on students at random. Behold!"

He switched the projector screen on. He had our student IDs listed as options on a random number generator. I quirked an eyebrow. The rest of the class murmured.

A girl named Liz, who had been frustrated enough being called "Elizabeth" up to this point, spoke without raising her hand. "What next, then? Patches and armbands? Trains to 'work' camps? Get over it and call her Jade. We all know what this is about."

An approving ripple moved through the crowd. I hadn't said anything, but the mood of the room had somehow shifted in my favor.

With a cough, Howell began his lecture.

Computers cannot generate truly random numbers, only deterministically chaotic ones. And last night, I somehow got Chaos himself on my side. So despite Professor Howell's attempts to catch me out, "random chance" protected me from all the most difficult questions.

While I was being pitched softball after softball, however, strays proceeded to pelt the rest of the class. Howell was losing his crowd, whether he knew it or not. Before, the class trudged, weary but willing, through what they saw as the difficult lessons of an expert. Now, they were dragged, chained to one another in a designated order, through what they now realized were deliberately obscure and unreasonable discussions. A few of my classmates, I learned later, used that class session to email advisors, parents, and other figures of authority, pleading for help.

By the end, the low energy of the classroom had sapped Professor Howell to an equal degree.

"Any more questions before we wrap things up?"

At that moment, I decided to take the advice of a trusted mentor: cause problems on purpose, because it's fun.

I raised a hand.

"Student…" He began to read my ID number off from his spreadsheet. "One oh eight-"

"You can call me Jade." I smiled. My lipstick gleamed ruby red.

"I won't be doing that. Your question?"

"Why did God make wheat?"

He blinked at me as if I were an odd slug. "Is that a rhetorical question?"

I shook my head, doing my best not to crack a smirk.

"Uh…" He inhaled. "God made wheat to feed and nourish his people. To give them their daily bread, as it were. Is that the answer you were looking for?"

"But if the goal was to feed people, why didn't He make bread grow out of the ground, instead of wheat?"

"Where are you going with this?"

"Is it disrespectful to make bread out of wheat?"

"Is it… Oh. Ugh." He groaned, seeing my direction. Some of my compatriots did too, as well. Others peered at me curiously.

"If bread was always part of the plan, why did He only provide the raw ingredients?"

"He made-"

"That one was actually a rhetorical question. I think it was because when God made us in his image, He understood us to be creators, in a reflection of himself as the ultimate Creator. So we could take part in the act of creation." I grinned. "And that's why my name is Jade!"

"Very good, ----. Class dismissed."

A stillness fell over the class.

"What did you just call her?" asked a boy named Jimmy, who sat at the back of the class and hadn't raised his hand all semester.

The last dribble of goodwill Professor Howell had had left the room in that moment. A meek girl named Maddy, who sat next to me, put her hand on mine.

"Did you hear me? Class dismissed!"

No one moved.

"I think it's a little early?" I offered.

"I dismiss you, not the bell. Now would you all just-"

The bell rang. We all stood.

After that disaster, Professor Howell had enough complaints stacked against him that my disciplinary hearing went hardily in my favor. Attendance plummeted, and notes were shared out from those who did go. After the professor reviews came in at the end of the semester, Professor Howell found himself unemployed.

The remainder of my time on campus, I always looked for my mentor in the eyes of every nondescript staff member. The further along I went, the more I realized his philosophy toward life had a pleasant byproduct. Systemic injustice, and its dogmatic insistence on orderly conduct, had a hard time standing up to a little chaos.

I graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's in computer science. These days I poke holes in other people's networks as a cybersecurity technician. My coworkers don't like me, or my skirts, or my swishy hair, most of the time. But I'm fine with that. I have a little luck on my side.