In thermodynamics, entropy describes how energy is spread out in a system. Higher entropy means energy is more spread out in a system making it less useful. Lower entropy however means energy is more concentrated and can do work.
For example : A hot cup of tea left on a table will cool down over time. Where does that heat go to. Its not like is just disappears, but because it spreads into the cooler surrounding air. Increasing entropy. This increase is also a one way process and you can never see the reverse, tying to the second law of thermodynamics, which says..." In an isolated system, entropy never decreases. It either increasess or remains constant.
Thinking of this, Hereon looked at his reflection in a cup of water. It had already been ten minutes. Cole was stairing, waiting for his brother to snap back to reality. He did not disturb him, thinking it was very normal for Medici to get trapped in his own mind. To cale, Medici was the smart one and he was the muscle. And he thought his brother was already thinking of ways to get out of their situation. If only he knew that the person next to him was, in fact a stranger. Confused and trying to create logic for his situation.
"What's happening..?? Why am i in the body of a cripple..? Who is that kid next to me..? Why is he stairing..?" Hereon lampooned, trying to make sense of what was happening. Wasnt he dead already??
He continued to wonder, his body and soul suddenly hit by a wave of emotions. He looked at the 13 or so year old boy and tears couldnt help flood out. Hereon was confused, but he was also clear on one thing: Whatever happens, he must protect this boy infront of him with his life if need be.
"Medici? Are you okay?" Cole called out.Supprised to see Medici cry as soon as he snapped out of his stupar. He reached out. Took the cup of water from his brothers hand and fed it to him. Hereon did not resist, tightly embracing cole as soon as he finished drinking.
"Medici. So thats his name? He must be close to this person. Judging from their striking resemblence, they must be brothers!!"
"Transmigration !! Shouldn't this only be real in fantasy novels. Wait..? What about cloud 9's work." He speculated. Cloude shannon also known as cloud 9 by his pen name had once writted a paper about something similar. Hereon, having a kind of, poetic mind himself found it intriguing. Mostly because Shannon looked at entropy differently. Not in terms of heat or pressure but as information. Hereon remembered her examples, showing that entropy was the uncertainty or suprise in a set of messages. " A predictable message; Aaaaa' has low entropy while a completly random one ' gd#&* ' has high entropy."
Cloud 9's paper questioned,"What if the soul wasn't a flame, but a pattern?
Not a glowing, immaterial spirit,but a compression of data, a construct of memories, impressions, choices, and impulses. A waveform collapsed into personality. Something that could, in theory, be measured in bits, if only we had the right lens.
In simpl terms, high entropy meant uncertainty—many possible states, no clear predictability.
And what was the human mind, if not a dense lattice of unpredictable patterns? The soul, she speculated, might just be the sum of informational entropy that the body sustains, refined over time through experience.
Hereon could not help but be excited, his heart racing as he thought about the possible answer to Cloud 9's finisher in the paper. "What if death wasn't an end, but a phase transition?
The system collapses;but information, as physics now tells us, cannot be destroyed. It must go somewhere. Perhaps in that moment of collapse, the soul seeks the nearest compatible system — a vacuum waiting to imprint that same pattern.
Like heat flowing from hot to cold.
Like data seeking structure.
Another world. Another reality. A mind or body just on the cusp of forming. A suitable low-entropy structure ready to imprint high-entropy consciousness."
Thud !!
Medici fell down. He had been too excited to even notice that cole was not hugging him anymore, but had noticed his trance like state and given him space. Now he was in the ground, having forgotten he was now a cripple. He had just wanted to jump in excitement.
" Medici ! " Cole ran to lift him up, only to hear him asking. " What's your name?" Cole was puzzled." Did you heat your head when you fell? Are you okay?" He asked with concern. Medici however didnt let go, still asking for his name a second time.
"Cole." He finally said it,wory still plastered on his face.
"Cole. Please help me with all source materials available."
Cole blinked at him. "Huh?"
Hereon looked at him oddly. "Books? Anything that has writing on it."
Cole scratched his head, confused. "We… don't got that. What would you want those for anyway? You can't even read."
That earned him a long, unblinking stare. Cold and surgical.
" What do you have, then? Pictures? Videos? Anything?"
"Videos?" Cole's eyes lit up. "Oh! Yeah—yeah, we got something like that!"
He turned and bolted from the cramped room, weaving through rust-stained curtains hung in doorways, his bare feet slapping the cold metal floor.
Hereon sat silently, his legs stiff under the threadbare blanket. The mattress he was on was sagging, likely moldy. This place wasn't a home.Broken walls patched with stitched plastic, flickering lights powered by who-knows-what, and the constant distant murmur of too many people, too close together.
Cole came back, panting, holding a dust-caked metallic orb. It was scratched, dented, and humming weakly.
"This thing still works. Found it last year in the trash pit. Everyone uses it."
He stepped beside Hereon's mattress and gave the orb a small tap.
The sphere buzzed, hesitated, then floated awkwardly into the air. It hovered with a sickly hum, glitching slightly as blue lines scanned the room. Slowly, grainy light spilled out, casting half-formed images across the stained walls.
The projections weren't clear—but they were mesmerizing.
Clips flickered erratically, pulled from fragmented archives burned into the orb's fading core.
Hereon saw fragments of gleaming towers, layered cities stretching into skies of unnatural color. Parks in the sky, hovering trains, glass corridors filled with artificial sunlight, and clean-suited humans walking calmly under the banners of corporations he didn't recognize.
Then it jumped to a vertical farm powered by sunlight lenses. A giant ocean turbine. A child playing with a floating drone in what looked like a clean, domed neighborhood.
The audio was static-filled, incomprehensible.
But the imagery—that was enough. Thoughts crissed crossed his mind.
"Cole," he said softly, eyes still locked on the flickering holograms, "Take me outside."
"Huh?"
"Outside. Now. I need to see it. I need to know where I am."
Cole looked uncertain. "Outside…? You sure?"
"I'm not asking again."
***
The moment Cole slid open the heavy steel panel serving as a door, a wave of stench hit Hereon like a slap.
Air thick with rot, sweat, and rust. Dim, greasy light seeped in from slits cut into the ceiling far above—just enough to see by.
With Hereon on his back, cole stepped out into a metal canyon.
Everywhere: people. Children barefoot, weaving through hanging cables. Vendors shouting over each other, selling scraps of food, questionable fluids, and hand-cranked tech. The walls of this sector were made of junk—literal layers of discarded upper-world machinery, melted-together alloys, salvaged paneling, and entire hollowed machines repurposed as homes.
What passed for "streets" were narrow passageways between scrap heaps, sometimes split by leaking chemical runoff, sometimes blocked off by aggressive-looking scavengers guarding barrels of filtered water.
This isn't a level of the city. This is the rot beneath it. The place they pretend doesn't exist
They lived here—millions, probably.
He looked over his shoulder. Their "home" was a collapsed unit—a chunk of what had once been a modular housing pod from above, now broken open, patched with old blankets, wires stuffed into walls. Twelve, maybe fifteen people shared it.
"Cole…" he muttered. "How long have you lived here?"
"Here?" Cole shrugged. "Always, I guess."
"And that orb? Do you… do you know what those places were?"
"Dunno." He grinned. "Pretty, right? Probably fakes. But makes good bedtime stories, right?"
With that, cole turned to take Medici back inside.