The Billiards Balls

I climb the spiral staircase to the upstairs lobby, watching as dots of stars and rogue planets slow-spin themselves past the ship through the glass walls.

After hitting the toilet, I'm on my way back down to the bar when the voice calls me.

"Hey. Kid."

At the far end of the room, a mustached man in a flat cap is smoking a cigarette, the silhouette of his skinny body leaned against a pool table cut against the sprinkled darkness of stars and nothingness behind him.

"Wanna shoot some pool?" he asks.

"Is that slang for doing heroin or being a robot or some other weird shit?"

"What? No, it's slang for shooting pool. Here," the man throws a wooden cue my way. "You can break it."

I grab the cue and make for the table. "Yeah, sure. Why not? I could use the distraction."

I lean against the table, closing one eye and aiming at the white ball.

"Red one on the upper corner hole," the mustached man says, breaking my concentration.

"What?"

"I'm calling," he says. "You have to call the ball before you hit."

"But it's my turn."

He takes a big drag on his cigarette and puffs smoke into the air. "Just play, kid."

I hit it. The white travels quickly and bangs against the triangle of multicolored balls, sending them rolling every which way.

The red ball goes straight into the upper corner hole.

"You're odds, I'm evens," the man says, with a glance my way. "You go again."

"Wait…how did you know?"

"What?"

"That I was going to hit the red ball there."

"Because you did," the man says, frowning like he's not really understanding why I'd ask such an obvious thing. "Didn't you see?"

"Yeah, I saw. After I hit it. But how did you know before?"

The man leans his cue on the table and makes way towards me, all along keeping that expression like he can't fathom why I'd ask such a dumb thing.

"Didn't you see the way the balls were arranged? Their position before you hit?"

"Yeah."

"And didn’t you see the speed at which the white ball rolled towards the others?"

"Yeah, but —”

"Then how could you not know what was going to happen?"

I rest my cue too, looking up at him. "You're going to start saying weird shit now, aren't —”

"If you have all the information about a closed system at a certain point in time, you can predict with one hundred percent accuracy how that system will look like at a different, future point in time."

I've learned that, on this ship, if I keep quiet long enough, people will usually keep explaining things. So I say nothing.

"In the case of this table, I had all the information. I knew the position of every ball. I knew the strength you would use to hit the white ball, and the exact angle, too. I knew all I needed to know about this table at the point in time where you were about to hit the white ball. So I was able to calculate the outcome."

"Is that allowed in tournaments?" I ask, just to be a prick.

"Nah, I'm banned for life," the mustached man says. "But here's the interesting thing, though – your brain is filled with billiards balls!"

I frown, looking from the table to the smoke coming out from under his mustache. "Sorry?"

"Mine too! And everyone else's! That's what makes decisions so easy!"

"What are you saying?"

The man turns his back to me, grabs his cue again, and hits the white ball. It collides with a cluster of colored balls, sending them rolling in every direction.

The balls bounce off of each other and on the corners, one by one falling down into holes until the table is empty.

"I'm saying the same rules that govern these balls govern your taste in music," the man says, smiling as he looks up from the table. "These balls are made from the same thing as your head." He pokes my forehead with his cigarette-wielding hand. "And just like I can predict what's going to happen to the balls on this pool table, I can do the same with your thoughts. Meaning, of course, that they have been set in motion long before you thought them, and you are in no way accountable or responsible for them."

I wait, but he seems to be done.

"Okay, that can't be right. If you can —”

"You are going to ask me to prove it by saying what you are about to say before you say it."

I stop, widening my eyes at him.

"How did you do that?" we both ask at the same time.

"Stop!" Again, the both of us.

"Jesus, that's freaking me out!" both our voices ring as I turn around to face the stars.

"All right, I'll stop," the mustached man says with a chuckle. "But you get the point, right?"

"So everything I do is —”

"—predetermined. Of course," he says, nonchalantly. "The only real thing that ever happened in the universe was the Big Bang. All the rest are balls hitting balls hitting balls. Chains of events. Consequence."

"Shit, that sucks," we both say.

"Sorry, last one. I'll stop," he apologizes, grabbing his cue again. "Wanna play another game?"

"Well, you know the answer to that already," I say, trying to regain some leverage on the conversation. "Don't you?"

"Yeah, I do," he says, lighting another cigarette. "But it's nice to be polite, right?"

Behind him, outside the glass wall, the ship sails silently into a thick, giant cloud of indigo and violet, hovering through bright balls of incandescent fire and light.

"Molecular cloud," the mustached man says, raising his eyes to the view. "It's a type of interstellar cloud. They call it stellar nursery. Because it's the place where —”

"— stars are born," I complete, watching the shapes dance in phosphorescent waves through the window.

"Hey, that's what I was going to say! You're learning," he says, with a smile my way. "To analyze the system. Predict the outcome."

"No," I say, eyes still out the window. "I just remember that from school."

The man nods, bringing his cigarette to his mouth again. We watch the spectacle of color and light outside in silence for a while, with just the hissing and cracking sound of his drags filling the room.

Then I feel something between my feet.

When I look down, the cat jumps from the floor to the pool table, meowing lazily at the view outside.

It turns around, and its pupils straighten at me.

"What about quantum physics?" I ask, as the cat jumps out from the table and disappears behind us. "Is there any room for free will there?"

The mustached man drops his cigarette to the floor, smashing it with his cowboy boot.

He turns my way.

"What the fuck is quantum physics?"