The S Constant

“In the four years since the Great Shift, we’ve done tremendous research on the event,” Professor Gerald Watts, the country's preeminent mathematician on the matter, lectured in front of his college class, “We haven’t been able to figure out exactly why it happened or how to swap anyone back, but we can predict with 95% present accuracy which body someone would swap into.

“For instance,” He continued pointing to a student in the third row, “Why did I swap into the body of the young woman sitting in that seat right there? Why didn’t she swap into my 60 year old body? Instead, an athlete from the football team sitting way in the back did. It seems to be a function of what we’re calling the S constant. But a lot of variables act on the S constant, and certain factors act upon it, including distance, neuron function, and environmental factors. I’ll get into the details in the next few classes, but I will share the wildest spoiler for all this: We may be due for a second Shift some time in the future. We don’t know when yet though. It may be five years from now, or it may be in five million...”