The most outrageous thing I have ever done in my life, the success rate is theoretically zero.
It worked.
When I was seventy-three years old, I was still an old man waiting to die in a nursing home. I wrote the program for forty-three years, and every step ran according to the code: going to school, working, getting married, having children, repaying loans, retiring, and waiting to die. I thought the program was over after reaching the last step, until I dug out a yellowed note from the bottom of the drawer—it was written by me when I was eighteen:
"When I die, I won't be under a roof. I'll be in the sky."
So I bought a hot air balloon and took off on the morning of April 16th.
It took me a long time to figure out what happened next: I didn't go up with that balloon. The balloon reached its top when it reached 5,000 meters, but something was still lifting me up - once, once, like someone putting the kicked-off quilt back on me when I was asleep.
Later I turned into atoms in space.
Later, I was fished out of an atom and resurrected.
And it wasn't until I stood at the top of it all that I finally saw clearly what it was that had always made me break through the dome.
