"God does not play dice with the universe." —Albert Einstein (as most frequently quoted)
To The Stars is a Madoka Magica fanfic that takes place four hundred years in the future, where magical girls have come out of hiding to help fight an alien invasion of human worlds.
This fic has a lot of excellent worldbuilding and an interesting story.
Synopsis
The Incubator tactfully refrained from saying too much about what they would find there. Kyubey promised that humanity would reach the stars one day.
Excerpt
Quantum Entanglement
Shizuki Ryouko opened her eyes slowly, the ceiling sharpening into focus above her.
It had been a nice dream, involving cake.
She sat up and stretched, one arm raised high, instinctively querying her chronometer. It was 10:11:23, it seemed, the knowledge injecting itself into her stream of consciousness.
She grunted in annoyance. She had hoped to get up earlier than that. Ah well, it hadn't been worth setting an alarm.
Slipping out of her covers, she slid her feet into her favorite bunny slippers, the ones that squeaked as she walked. They had sentimental value, but she insisted to her friends that they were "just some old slippers that were a gift." Her diminutive stature seemed to cause her friends to think of her as a bit of a child, and she didn't want to do anything to further that impression.
Grabbing a change of clothes off the rack, she started pulling off her nightclothes. It was a little tedious; some people, especially many of her male classmates, were lazy enough to just wear the same self‐cleaning clothes all day, every day. Others, preferring a more personal touch, had robots to do the dressing for them.
Her family was a bit more traditional—and less well‐funded—than that.
Sometimes she envied adults, she thought, not for the first time, pulling up a nice skirt she had picked out the night before. Most adults used the standard sleep‐suppressing regimen of drugs and nanotreatments, and consequently slept anywhere from three hours a day to nothing at all, depending on preference. That same regimen was considered possibly unsafe in 14‐year‐olds like her, and not a good idea anyway; Governance ideology stressed the importance of having each new generation of children experience a little of the human condition, even the outdated parts. That way they wouldn't forget their roots and grow into soulless posthuman monsters, or something like that.
The government always made a big deal about these things. Governance ideology was responsible for the built‐in restrictions on direct mental communication and virtual reality, for instance. They were expected to move their lips to talk, except for deliberately slow long‐range messaging, and time tickets to activate your VR implants were exorbitantly expensive.
Anything else would be inhuman, after all.
Except for occasional moments of weakness, though, she didn't really mind sleeping all those extra hours. She didn't know what people wanted to rush for. Nowadays, there was nothing worth rushing for, and all the time in the world to do what you wanted.
Nothing at all.
She ordered her blinds open with a thought, then leaned onto her windowsill, observing the cityscape from her vantage point on the forty‐second story. Behind her, her long hair silently untangled itself, prehensile strands waking up for the day. That was one convenience that was not restricted—hair that maintained constant length, cleaned itself, and arranged itself was astonishingly useful.
She felt really stupid sometimes, like a square peg in a world of round holes. It had been drilled into their heads in school: the story of human history was all about escape. Escape from hunger, from need, from want. Now, humanity had really reached the end of history, and was finally on its way to building a perfect society.
It didn't feel perfect to her.
She looked out at Mitakihara City. The city hummed with activity, with transportation vehicles constantly on the move on the surface, along the countless elevated roads and tubes, and, she knew, deep underground. Air vehicles had turned out to be impractical and inefficient—the only true solution to congestion was to go 3D.
Pedestrians and bicyclists swarmed the skyways, drones patrolled the skies, and, if you looked hard enough, you could see the edges of the species diversity preserve, the SDP.
But, inevitably, her eyes went to the starport.
A seemingly unassuming structure, flat and squat against the horizon, its name was a bit of a misnomer; the starport didn't send anyone into space, not directly. Instead, it packed passengers into scramjets bound for the true ports, the space elevators ringing the equator. The Mitakihara starport was particularly important, and was thus unusually large and busy, jets going in and out constantly.
She looked at it with longing.