The Only Way to the Infinite Mattering

　　Colin knew nothing about poker except that it was a game of human behavior and probability, and therefore the kind of quasi-closed system in which a Theorem similar to the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability ought to work. And when Hassan turned over his full house, Colin all of a sudden realized: you can make a Theorem that explains why you won or lost past poker hands, but you can never make one to predict future poker hands. The past, like Lindsey had told him, is a logical story. It's the sense of what happened. But since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any fugging sense at all.

　　In that moment, the future — uncontainable by any Theorem mathematical or otherwise — stretched out before Colin: infinite and unknowable and beautiful. "Eureka," Colin said, and only in saying it did he realize he had just successfully whispered.

　　"I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."

　　Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice."

　　Colin laughed as Hassan returned to counting the pennies of victory, but Colin's brain was spinning with the implications: if the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything — there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

　　But there's another way. There are stories. Colin was looking at Lindsey, whose eyes were crinkling into a smile as Hassan loaned her nine cents so they could keep playing. Colin thought of Lindsey's storytelling lessons. The stories they'd told each other were so much a part of the how and why of his liking her. Okay. Loving. Four days in, and already, indisputably: loving. And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other — maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.

　　And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward—ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter—maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

　　And it wasn't only the remembered stories that mattered. That was the true meaning of the K-3 anomaly: Having the correct graph from the start proved not that the Theorem was accurate, but that there's a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

　　Almost without knowing it, he'd started writing. The graphs in his notebook had been replaced by words. Colin looked up then and wiped a single bead of sweat from his tanned, scarred forehead. Hassan turned around to Colin and said, "I realize the future is unpredictable, but I’m wondering if the future might possibly feature a Monster Thickburger."

　　"I predict it will," Lindsey said.

An Abundance of Katherines, P212-214
John Green
ISBN 978-0-14-241070-7