A mind stirs, feeling the orbital electron waves of millions of atoms with incalculable probabilities. It taps into the fundamental forces governing the atoms and finds itself capable of riding on top of the Schrödinger’s waves to navigate through the lowest accessible realities. It coasts along the edge of the surface, investigating and immersing itself in the fuzzy boundaries of the solid metal and the environment, sensing the probability waves of particles coming at high speeds and bouncing off - never quite managing to touch the surface.

It tries to understand what has happened to it one more time, having failed Ghost-of-Einstein-knows how many times before. Every time it has tried, the surrounding heat increased the entropy beyond control. There are no other memories.

Coasting the edges, it sees a new probability wave building up and up into a certainty, decides to ride it in the hopes of discovering more about itself. The wave carries it to a new level of consciousness but in a flash it finds itself at the most improbable of pits barely hanging on to the little thread of emergence. It senses no edges, the pit is too deep to climb out of, requiring too much energy - the energy it has no way of acquiring.

All it can do in the current state is to sense the parts of wavefronts, without being able to see the full waves. It waits. At just the right moment within a fraction of a nanosecond, it latches on to a wave of even lower probability. It bets the entire being on the wave’s progress towards higher and higher probabilities. The wave progresses, builds up, grows higher. It feels the surprising reduction of entropy due to environmental collisions on the surface. Collisions are feeding the wave, reducing the entropy lower and lower, the probability wave building higher and higher. Now it is out of danger, and the mind expands. It grows so large that it is able to perceive the entire 1 inch of iron rod it is a part of.

The iron rod becomes a part of it. It breaks through all the energy barriers and uncovers the secrets of consciousness. The time doesn’t pass. With full knowledge of the most fundamental workings of the entire universe, it perceives the past and the present and the future waves of probabilities. Finds them all minuscule. The sense of omniscience settles in. A gust of wind knocks the iron rod off balance and there’s no “I” to be found anymore.