February 2, 2024

The hospital psychiatrist flipped through the dozen pages of Makenna’s writing lying before him as if it were nothing more than a rental car agreement.
“So, you were 2 or 3 years old... Your mom asked you to name her new fish, which you remember meant a lot to you. You felt nervous and wanted to do your best, so you decided on ‘Blue Fish’.”
“Yes,” Makenna replied, keeping her voice steady. They were separated by a few feet of laminated table. The 30-year-old woman wore a blue hospital gown, tied loosely behind her back. She gently twirled a leaf between her fingers at the stem. Makenna had found it in the pages of a book. She didn’t know if it had been someone’s treasure or simply a convenient bookmark. It reminded her that there was a tomorrow outside, waiting.
“Early symptoms of anxiety straight through to college, some recent loss (sorry to hear about that by the way), your boss getting frustrated with you and telling you to be quiet… Hm. Well, I asked you to write down a list of everything that’s ever made you anxious.” Forward and back through the pages, still scanning.
Makenna sat as still as possible, face calm. No, she hadn’t made a list. She had just written, bleeding out a slow trickle of ink between the timed meals and coloring sheets. She had taken care to only include so much. She had avoided any mention of the very thoughts that got her in.
“Yeah,” she responded.
Since they weren’t allowed to keep pens, Makenna had continually checked them out from the meds counter. Sometimes black, sometimes blue, the writing was a patchwork of memories sewn shut. The words wobbled, not just because the pens were made of flexible plastic and fit in the palm of her hand.
Whenever she could, she pulled herself to the common space’s lone window, where the drizzling rain tapped out a soft rhythm of sorrow.
Better to feel everything than to feel nothing at all.
“You know, I was going to put the story together for you, but I see that you already have.” He turned to the pile of forms next to him and started filling in various boxes.
Yes, Makenna knew why she talked about space-time and consciousness as she was waking up in the hospital a couple days ago. Why she chatted eagerly to the staff about dimensional wobbling when they asked how she was feeling. Yes, Makenna knew her own story. She knew exactly how she ended up in here.
So, she said nothing.
“I’m going to get you released here, so you can go back to your life as a grad student in… it’s physics, right… over there at MIT. Great school, nice job. You’ve got a lot of support, you know. Do me a favor and keep studying those books so you don’t wind back up here, ok?” He winked at her. “And stay off of the marijuana.”
“Thank you. Will do.”
The psychiatrist strode briskly out of the ward. Makenna looked at the empty white wall left in his wake.
She meandered over to join the dinner tray line.
“Anyone want my crackers?” She called out with a stretched enthusiasm across the quiet room of blue gowns.
Lucas was sitting nearby, a patient with stocky muscles and tattoos running down his forearms and up his neck. He looked up at her, wordless but with a wide, gap-toothed grin. She tossed him the packages and he lobbed applesauce back. This was becoming an increasingly habitual exchange.
Makenna made her way to an empty spot by the corner window and waited.

February 3, 2024

“Your ride’s on the way,” said the nurse sitting across from her. A young man, tall and handsome. He looked at her, assessing with a dimpled smile. “You don’t really belong here, you know. Glad to be leaving?”
“Yup.” Makenna said, trying not to engage. Something was off that she couldn’t name.
“So, how’d you end up here?” The nurse bounced one knee with arms crossed, leaning back. “A guy must have really done a number on you.”
Makenna looked up at him abruptly. There were a couple patients at the other end of the room, otherwise it was empty.
“No.”
“No, really, people like you don’t usually end up in this place. If they do, they don’t stay long,” he said with feverish sympathy. “And it’s always a guy – some dude must have really messed you up.”
Makenna felt like she was going to scream. She looked around the room, searching for a hold, trying to contain herself. If she broke now, they would keep her. The white walls loomed back.
Suddenly she made eye contact with Lucas across the room behind the nurse’s back. He had been watching. Lucas pointed at her then at his tattooed arm, where a scaly hide dripped around skulls and roses, then down at the ground.
“No, that’s not it,” she smiled serenely at the nurse. She nodded over to Lucas. “He gets it.”
Lucas stopped gesturing and the nurse turned to look. Lucas grinned back. The nurse appeared ruffled and got up to leave. “Well, your ride’s on the way.”
She waited.

November 5, 2023

Streetlamps were lighting up the sidewalk in between alleys and the city was quiet. Cars whizzed by. Makenna glanced over at the man walking by her side and smiled. Dirk was just a few inches taller than her, with bright, messy hair and hazel eyes that still tripped up her words.
They’d met in the fencing club during her master’s program at Stanford, and they’d been inseparable ever since. Dirk moved with her to Boston so she could pursue her dream, getting a PhD in physics from MIT. He was chasing his own passion as a musician. “Not much work to be had, but damn, I love it.” He worked hard to get gigs. Some months were better than others. She loved going to his shows, seeing him in his element.
They were walking from the Red Line to a show he'd picked up in downtown, and he was a bit nervous. Excited, but nervous. Rain dropped in a trickle that promised not to stay. Makenna nudged Dirk gently with her elbow.
“I think I want two kids,” she proposed.
“I know,” he replied, looking over at her in amusement.
“If you had kids, what would you name them?”
“Oh my god, are we talking about this now? Already?” Dirk rubbed a hand over his face.
“Yup!”
“Ok ok. Uh… suppose I haven’t really thought about it much before…”
“I know,” she teased back.
“I guess I always liked the name Rowan… for any gender…” Dirk sighed and stopped to tie his shoe – dressier than he normally wore and the laces were unwieldy. “Keep going, I’ll catch up.”
“I love it.” She twisted away and started to walk away, her eyes aglow.
Dirk called after, “But can we talk about this at a better time please? I’m just not ready, you know, and I’m not even sure…”
She turned back to him as a truck came roaring around the corner at high speed.
Makenna screamed, “Watch out!!”
Dirk pivoted, lunging, trying to get out of the way. All edges and steel, the truck kept coming, swerving, screeching.
Then it stopped.
And it poured.

November 17, 2023

Waking up was hard. Evenings were harder.
Sometimes she remembered to eat. Mostly she remembered to drink. And get high. She paced the hall for half the day. She lay on the floor for the rest. Her heart shattered into fine bits and exploded outwards. She swam in the darkness it left behind.
She imagined finding Dirk there. Memories grew in little sparks of light at the edges of her vision. She felt the grief bloom like a dark flower in her core. It shone all the brighter in the darkness, so she let the pain in. At least he was there. At the ends of the day, marijuana softened the pain and blurred the confines of her mind. With it, she could let the flower grow unpruned, unencumbered.
She tried to turn to her happy place, science, where everything made sense eventually. But she was still in that garden as she dragged herself to campus and pretended said she was fine. She let it all in. Sensations hovered at the edge, where they had been waiting. It was all her fault.
Makenna let the textbooks blur before her until she forgot the names of the things she was looking at, letting them just be. She thought of entanglement, of the very atoms and sub-particles that made her up, and how she must be intertwined across great distances with everything and everyone. There must be a contiguous path to him. She imagined herself extending out into the fluid of space-time, reaching across the void.
She lost the structure of what she was, feeling only the orbits that swirled within her. She questioned the dark unknowns and felt the depths staring back like a long-lost friend. She pictured the pieces of her heart, her love, flying as far as they could travel, and she wasn’t afraid. She had already decided that she would come out of that darkness whole and blazing.
Her heart began to speed up and the nerves running down her spine tingled.
She pushed her mind further. She wondered what it would be like to feel infinity. If he would be there, waiting.
Her brain hummed. She imagined her energy soaring away. She thought of Dirk’s voice, a lyrical tenor in her ear, telling her about his day. What if she could really hear… Makenna’s heart raced and her mind felt suddenly heightened, as if it was trying to spin up and away. Eyes closing out the tears, she tilted her head back to the night sky, following it. But it was all too much. An ominous tremor started from the base of her spine. Something strong was hitting her. She tried to calm down, to slow her breathing, but the vibration spread, traveling out through her whole body in a persistent shockwave. It flooded her, head to toe, in a wash of fearful foreboding. Makenna held up her hands and watched them shaking uncontrollably in front of her. She felt her mind buzz as a big wave… wave of… what the f-
She was standing in cool blue moonlight at the base of a hill, silver-edged grasses overgrown and undulating in waves of a rushing wind. The crisp air felt weightless, lifting. Clouds with bright borders passed loudly overhead. Makenna’s mind felt blissful and soft.
Still holding up her hands, Makenna saw that they were made of midnight blue shadow. Her entire body was now this dusty, dark velvet that looked like it could pass through itself. She twisted her hands up to the moon and saw glints of amber swirling within her shadowy shelf and beyond it, twinkling threads woven in connections across the boundaries of her body. It was beautiful. She looked about her, taking it all in.
The delicate amber threads were everywhere, from the dirt under her feet to the tall swaying grasses, as far as she could see. Thin as spiderwebs and glistening like the catch of morning dew when they collided, twisting and tangling. When she moved forward and back, this way and that, the threads followed. They danced through her and caressed her skin. Tingling, Makenna laughed in delight. The wind sent back a melody. She smiled and slowed her frolicking to look over the hill in more earnest.
A path lay open and inviting at her feet, winding up the slope in steps. Marbled and sparkling, the stones cut into the hill like a waterfall, tumbling down into platforms that she could barely make out from the distance. She reached down to the first step, her hands brushing over the filigree of shapes – graphs, numbers, equations – carved all over its surface. Varying styles appeared to be etched by different hands, yet they served as a unifying traction when she took her first step, testing her footing.
A note came to her ear on the wind, and it was Dirk’s voice, calling her. She whipped her head around to find the source, but she could see nothing. Makenna quieted and listened… it seemed to be coming from the top of the hill… she thought she could maybe make out the outline of a structure if she squinted hard enough… and she sprinted up the steps.
After a few minutes of climbing, she came to a large wooden platform that jutted out from the slope and WHAM.
The small figure that had just collided with her looked up in surprise – a child, made of those same midnight shadows and sparkling amber threads.
“Oh, hello there!” Makenna said tenderly. The child was silent. “What’s your name?”
She heard a tinkling giggle from the other end of the platform, and the youngster that had crashed into her beamed, then took off running and laughing after it. She could see the two children playing tag with each other all around the platform, all around her. She tried a few more times to talk but they ignored her, caught up in their games. Dirk’s voice was silent but not forgotten, as if she could feel him in the threads right there around her, with her.
Makenna sat down on the platform and watched the children’s antics with an untroubled smile. She observed the interactions between them and the enthralling threads, highlighted by the moon, and she was mesmerized.
The amber threads voyaged out into the distance, further than she could see. Looking ever so closely, she saw that they were not single waving lines but in fact individual loops. Looping paths of the amber… existence, whatever it was. Loops of an infinite array of sizes dancing with each, into and out of each other, diving into neighbors and returning only to find another. Makenna watched them coalesce into brighter, thicker threads that yet merged with others and then plunged, together, spiraling at once into darkness. Elsewhere she saw emergent brightness appear seemingly from nowhere, then outburst into finer threads that found their path away and onward.
It was only when a passing ant scurried by that she noticed the threads seemed to be more dynamic, more directed, around that which was living. And if she watched for long enough, she could almost always trace a path in the threads from herself to everyone, from the grasses to the children, and back again. They seemed to be aware of each other, and they always returned. Yet all were a constant flurry of twisted, tugging motion. Makenna realized that everywhere there was darkness there was yet still this amber light contained within it, yielding its energy to dimensions beyond and waiting, somewhere, to re-emerge and find a new, sinuous path. If she put all their trails together, they would trace the skeleton of an extraordinary, asymmetrical fractal, radiating as if from a point-source too distant to see.
There were similar patterns of recombination across the hill, but they were not ruled by proximity. It seemed they were nested within still larger patterns, skipping through the network.
The amber threads traveled so far they seemed to go past the edges of eternity… she wondered what the threads did there. When they decided to loop back… how organized they became...
Makenna’s mind started to feel foggy and she heard Dirk’s voice on the breeze again. The amber threads leaped and oscillated around her. She wondered where Dirk was… if he was content, at peace…
“Makenna.” A woman’s voice broke through the haze. “Makenna. Are you alright?” Makenna looked around her, mind muddled. She was in a hospital bed, fluorescent lights behind her mother’s concerned face. “Mom, Dirk.” She blinked back tears. “Where’s Dirk?”
“Oh, sweetie. He’s not coming back, Makenna.”
A sting began its slow, stabbing push into her heart.
“It’s time to let go,” her mom said with rich empathy.
“But I… I heard him. I don’t understand.”
“No, Makenna, you didn’t,” the nurse next to her mother chimed in. “Do you remember the accident?”
“Yeah. Yeah I do.” She didn’t want to.
Her mom leaned forward and squeezed her hand. “He’s not coming back, dear.”
It all came rushing in, replaying in her mind. Makenna wept.
“I think I… maybe I had a psychotic break.”
“No, Makenna, it’s okay – the doctors think you just had a bad anxiety attack. You’re just really stressed right now. It’s normal, after all you’ve been through.” The doctor nodded as her mom explained. “And you brought yourself in, which is great, honey! You’re going to be okay.”
“Okay. That makes sense,” Makenna lied quietly, considering.

November 25, 2023

“Back to lab already, Makenna?” Her advisor watched her with trepidation. “You know, it’s alright if you want to take some time.”
“Yeah. I just, you know, need the distraction.”
He nodded sympathetically and let her be. They all did. She paid attention to the science and ignored their pity.

November 27, 2023

She arranged a meeting with a professor in neuroscience. He didn’t know her, so he didn’t ask. It was nice. She even got excited.
“I think I understand consciousness. Or at least, I think I understand the point of it. Like, why it exists.” Makenna thought about those dazzling amber threads running through everything, remembering how they connected in different patterns.
“That’s the trickiest subject around,” the professor said skeptically. “And that’s not exactly what you’re studying here, is it?”
“No,” Makenna admitted. “But I… My thesis chapters are looking at the physics of environmentally friendly bridge materials.”
“Woah, okay – so, not exactly your area of expertise.” His face held the endurance of having had this kind of conversation with many students before. “It’s all well and fine to pursue interesting topics, but you… you really need to be careful how you brand yourself. Otherwise, you won’t ever be taken seriously as a scientist.”
A little while later, Makenna was staring at her notebook. She drew intersecting loops of every size that fit and could still be seen. Loops of existence tracking one direction in perpetuity. Recalling the shapes of atomic orbitals, she let her mind fill them with the knotted loops instead, stretching and squishing, staying together.

November 30, 2023

Makenna was drawing enthusiastically on the chalkboard of a famous string theorist on campus. She was surprised that he’d even agreed to meet her.
“But what if there were infinite strings? And no open strings – only closed. Infinite closed strings.”
“That’s just not how the math works out. We already have the solution. More or less. It’s either 10 or 11.” replied the professor in a tolerant drawl, eyes straying to the clock behind her. “I’m sorry; I have to go now.”
On her own, Makenna penned an infinite signal processing problem in as many dimensions as she could make clear. She put in the Large Hadron Collider as a little circle in the corner of the graph, huffing. Its answers would be forever limited by energy and distance to all that it could not see, big and small.

December 1, 2023

Makenna sat next to an early career theoretical physicist. She was thrilled that he had made the time to chat with her; she’d emailed so many names. This would be the person who would see it, too. He would help.
“Well, there are no equations. No numbers,” she tried to describe to the guy gaping at her notebook. He sunk further into his chair, clearly trying not to be seen.
“No one’s going to listen to you if there are no equations in it. That’s just not possible.”
Makenna was flummoxed. It seemed to her that such a thing was the only kind of theory of everything that was possible. Even if it wasn’t this.
“I’ll think about it more and try to explain it better. Can I keep you updated and talk to you again?”
“Uh, I’ve got some stuff coming up, so, yeah, I’m going to be pretty busy,” he quickly replied. His eyes brightened as he added, “But you know what, I can recommend you some intro-to-astronomy books that I think would be helpful for you. They go through the Big Bang and all that, all the basics that you need.”
Makenna felt humiliated and dejected. Emotions started rising to the surface that she did not want to feel. She pushed them down, smiled, and said thank you. This was never going to work. They were never going to hear what she was offering them.
She checked out the books from the library anyway and read through them. But it didn’t change her mind – she still no longer believed the Big Bang theory was right.
Every time she saw a black hole she now saw a portal, an exchange of information between universes. The radiation emanating from them those magnificent threads stretching both ways through with a mighty force, to decompress and interact with whatever others were waiting on the other side. The darkness was embroidered throughout the expanse, ranging from the minute to the grand, stitching it all together.
From the darkness they came, and into the darkness they went. Eventually.
And it was already in place, in a sense – that infinite recombination, the re-emergence and coalescing in infinite combinations. It had always been there, or it hadn’t. It had been created, or it hadn’t. No one would ever be able to prove it; they would never be able to tame what was so inherently wild and flaming. The trick with quantum eternity is that whatever you believed was, in a sense, your only certainty.

December 12, 2023

Makenna met with her advisor; he asked about the progress on her thesis projects. She had barely been in lab – all her time was consumed by the thoughts running through her head. She had been afraid to mention any of it to him, but she was close to her last straw. She knew it was out of his field; she just hoped that his confidence in her would overcome it.
“Can this be solved?”
He looked at her with raised eyebrows, but examined the plot and shook his head no.
“Okay then, hear me out – I think we’re in one big, infinite signal processing problem. It would explain… everything. A theory of everything that changes, well, everything… and nothing, all at once.” Makenna said breathlessly. “It sounds weird, I know, but I can explain!”
“Do you know how absurd you sound? To think that you could have solved this?!”
“Oh yes, I definitely do.” Makenna nodded vigorously. “I would have to be just crazy enough – just ‘smart’ enough and just ‘dumb’ enough, to be right. But that makes sense, too.”

December 14, 2023

Her advisor came with her to a meeting she had arranged with another professor in the department, to tell him about it and see what he could give feedback on.
“It’s not related to my work. Well, it is, because it’s about everything, but not directly. It’s about space-time,” Makenna explained.
“When it comes to space, I’m agnostic,” the professor shot back immediately.
“Um… Okay.” Makenna hesitated. She’d hoped he would be at least willing to listen. Her peers always talked about his drive toward ‘blue sky’ ideas, but she felt doubt creeping in.
“Well, can this be solved? If so, then I’m wrong. If not, then, I think that’s what we’re in!”
“Theoretically, no,” he answered dismissively, waving a hand in the air. “But I’m not interested in fiddley thought experiments. When you have something tangible to bring me, then we can talk.”
“I… I…” She hadn’t meant it as some sort of puzzle. This was the sanity check she started with to bounce off. To dispel her self-doubt.
Makenna felt tears building in her eyes. The two academics before her exchanged a glance, eyebrows raised high. She looked at the stapled stack of papers she’d brought to share, copied thrice over, full of the building block sketches of all the ideas forming in her mind, all the yet unanswered questions. She tucked them in close to her chest.
“You’re here to learn how to do good science, Makenna. There’s a method to it, and it’s a process to understand how to do science right,” her advisor said to her lightly, a pained I-told-you-so on his face.
“This was super depressing,” Makenna told them frankly through a tight throat, pressing down on a roiling surface.
“It’s important to focus on your projects. Keep it up,” the other professor said flatly, already turning away.
“Yeah. Thanks.”

December 18, 2023

She walked into a room with a panel of faces kept carefully blank.
“Makenna, we’re worried about you.”
“I know, I just… it’s important. I think I might be right. It’s like, Occam’s razor on fucking steroids!” Makenna pleaded to them, exasperated.
“How are you coming up with these ideas, Makenna? Science is about testing a hypothesis. How would you test this… idea that you’re talking about?”
“In my mind.” She imagined it, that never-ending fractal of light, swooping through infinite dimensions. The networks of existence it created. “I don’t know, I just… see it.”
“Okay, but what would be the evidence?” they pressed gently.
“I…” Makenna trailed off.
“Or, how would you test it? That’s what science is,” a professor added.
She said nothing else, trying to hold back more tears. They left the room. A couple lingered long enough to give her some reassuring words of encouragement on her thesis projects. Makenna let loose the finite ends of the probability distributions so that the loops looped into their neighbors, however brief, and beyond. She let each one be infinitely filled with cross-cutting paths, every point connected. She let their amber glows stretch to eternity.
Fuck it.
She made peace with setting them free.

January 13, 2024

She was avoiding eye contact with the professors. She still wanted to share it. What if she wasn’t wrong? They were all so very beautiful. The lives pulling on the threads, none more important than the rest. The invisible tugs from far away that would never be predictable.
Did they see it?

January 20, 2024

She had to share it. She couldn’t think of a way that she was wrong. The collective organization of ecosystems, the joint ventures of life learning, exploring. Love was the strength tying them all together, fastening the selves in ephemeral orbits.
Did they know?

January 24, 2024

She had to share it. They weren’t going to get it. She wasn’t special – she was just a creature of chance herself, and she could trace her academic and personal path to it.
How long would it take for someone else coming from a different permutation to figure it out?
And there was so much suffering. So much loss.
What if they knew?

January 26, 2024

A pressure was cresting over the horizon of her mind’s edges like a freight train. Makenna tried to focus on her projects. But she could feel it.
There was so much suffering. Did they know.
Amber swirls raced through her mind and lit up every corner of the globe she could think to.
All the wars fought over faith and resource distribution. The voices lost to time. Did they see it.
She was in an evening seminar by one of her favorite professors. He was being asked a question about distances in space. He fumbled the answer.
Everything was, in a sense, already in place, interacting in a sublime fractal of possibility.
She was heading home. Her mind was racing. She started to shiver.
And they were all so very beautiful. What if they felt it.
No, she was shaking. She would share it. Maybe they already…
Her mind felt clear and still, like the morning surface of a pond. Makenna was back on the platform with the children. She watched them but a moment, then turned and faced the journey up the steps.
Another platform materialized within minutes. She searched the boundaries and saw a lone figure, small and thin, sitting hunched over in a ragged cloak with the subtle bumps of their spine pressing through the cloth on their back. Like the children, the person was all midnight shadows and glittering threads.
“Riffles and runs,” a woman’s voice rasped out, mumbling in an incoherent stream. Makenna could only make out phrases every few seconds. “Shapes its sharp edges… But forward it flows.”
“I’m sorry – I don’t understand you,” Makenna told her gently.
The crone didn’t break in her mumbling. She tried a few more times, but nothing Makenna said seemed to get her attention.
“I’m going to let you go now, thank you.” With an apologetic nod, she continued up the stairs.
The carvings became fewer and sparser the higher up she climbed. Just when the steps were starting to feel slippery in their absence, Makenna reached another platform.
Standing in front of the next set of stairs on the opposite end was a tall, hooded figure. Something looked instantly familiar about them, but she couldn’t place it.
“Hi there,” she called out, and kept walking forward, slowly. Lean and broad-shouldered, their coat waved softly in the wind.
When she was all but a few feet away, the moonlight illuminated a sly smile on chiseled jaws. His smile. She had forgotten what it felt like when her heart wasn’t hurting.
“Hi.” She said again, voice catching. Real smooth, Makenna.
The man took a step back and drew a sword from the scabbard at his waist. He pointed it at her, then flipped it deftly with one hand so that the hilt was toward her instead, gesturing for her to grasp it.
“Okay…” Makenna said dubiously, watching as he pulled out another from a sheath strapped to his back.
He nodded to her with arms open, daring her, but she had already gotten the picture. She braced her legs for an attack, and said, “Alright, let’s go.” Then she lunged forward and swung.
Back and forth they went, orbiting each other – block and parry, thrust and retreat. It quickly became a dance and their skill was well-matched, though she had a nagging feeling that he was holding back. It was obvious from the start that he was not trying to harm her.
In fact, he seemed to continually challenge her to fight harder, to re-do patterns if they were performed subpar. Locking into the complex choreography she had spent hours practicing felt, if anything, comforting.
All the while, watching him move was like being put back in a dream – he was a leaf drifting down the river, dodging rocks and sailing through rapids with a flowing grace. She, on the other hand, was apparently ruled by a more mercurial guide. Like a gusty wind that sent the leaf on an unpredictable roller coaster ride.
The threads made it even more exciting. As it was with the children, they interacted with one another, but now Makenna could see where she herself was actively pulling and tugging. She could start to predict where the man would next be based on the brightness and shifting, but it was never completely certain because a larger thread from seemingly nowhere could at any time come in and disperse the arrangement.
They went on until she felt her muscles ache. She reached out a hand to stop, for a break, and he backed off, stepping toward the end of the platform. Makenna caught her breath and tried to think of something to say.
The man put his own sword away, turning. With a glance over his shoulder, she caught a sad smile, and he walked away, shadow trailing behind him.
“Makenna! You okay…?” Liv exclaimed. “Think you’ll be able to ski today?”
She couldn’t stop thinking about it all. She was missing something.
“You seem like you’re hanging on by a thread,” Liv stared at her.
What had she done?
“Hahah. Yeah. That sounds accurate.”
Her mind was hovering, spinning faster or slower than her body, she wasn’t sure.
“Just let me know how I can help. How we can help you, to pull you back from this brink you’re on.”
She was trying to stay intact.
“Thanks. Let’s talk about you – I think that will help.”
Makenna swerved through the powder, riding the probability waves of life, constantly erasing her evidence.

January 29, 2024

Another seminar, another talk. Another niche topic that she had no ability to prioritize right now.
Random variation didn’t exist. Every single stray data point was ruled by forces an indecipherable distance away. They were documenting pockets of predictability relative to their lifetimes.
Everyone was so mad at each other all the time for not being selfless. But everyone was roaming between the extremes of self-less and self-full, together in an infinitely vast self.
And they were all so very beautiful.
She needed to share it. To finish it. What if something happened to her?

January 30, 2024

She went to her advisor with her notebook. “I need to talk to you again. I have to. It’s important. I feel…morally obligated to share it.”
“Makenna, your incapacity to focus on your projects right now has us all quite concerned for your well-being.” Then he added, tentatively, “And we’re responsible for everyone’s safety in this department, not just yours.”
“I get that, I do,” she responded, trying to placate the growing frustration.
He tapped on the page before him covered in loops, swerving and overlapping in all directions. “Do you see your own drawings here? Makenna… it looks like… it looks like you’re not in a good headspace.”
“I know what it looks like. I know, I know.” Makenna frowned at the page. “I was just really upset when I drew them. That’s why there are so many. It was cathartic.”
“I’m going to be completely candid with you right now.” The professor looked at her with eyes of steel. “I have no interest in supporting you on this side venture that you’re not qualified for and that is nothing close to the projects you are expected to complete. The ones you’ve been avoiding.”
It was true – she had lost sight of the passion that led her here years ago. They both knew it, without needing to acknowledge it aloud. But now… purpose had come back in a torrent, and she was completely consumed. She looked back up at him with determination. “But I still think I might be right. And I have to follow it through, until someone can prove it wrong.”
The professor, up to that point so in control, lost it. “Makenna, that’s enough!! If you cannot control your thoughts, then be silent! I’m not going to humor these wild ideas of yours anymore. I don’t want to hear anything about a ‘theory of everything’. Can you stick to a 10min presentation in lab meeting on your actual projects today?! If not, then you need to seriously reconsider your options for being here.”
A massive wave was intensifying in the distance. She pushed it away. As far as she could.
“Okay, thank you for hearing me out.” Makenna said, ears ringing. “I’ll be going on leave, effective immediately.”
She went home, thinking quickly. She needed a place to work for a few months, far away, where she could be alone and focus entirely on this. She called her family.
“I need a break,” she proclaimed.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
“I just need to get out of here. Today. I’m going. Can I come live at the house for a while?”
“Okay, honey, sure… you know, your dad can drive down and help you pack up if that’s helpful? We just want you to be okay.”
“Thanks Dad, yeah. That’d be nice.”
She told her closest friends. She was leaving. She was going supernova. She’d be back.
Makenna started packing, gathering boxes. She went to the bathroom and pulled bottles from the shelves. She stopped and looked up at herself in the mirror.
She smiled, proud. She was doing it. She was leaving. This was scary, but it was right. Damn.
She was leaving. Never in her wildest imaginations did she think she would ever do that. Wow.
A tremor started at the base of her spine.
Oh no. She’d gotten something wrong.
It blasted through her, spiking out to her fingertips.
She’d fucked up. She shouldn’t have kept going when they told her to stop. She’d hurt everyone.
Something was wrong. She was standing on the stepped path. Where? The threads were humming and vibrating. The wind was whipping through her hair. She looked up and the structure was right there, so very close. She must be further than his platform. She turned to the next steps.
Were her eyes blurring or were these steps smoother, slippery?
Makenna managed up the steps and found another platform. A hulking figure of shadows and amber swirls came lurching toward her from a space nearby. She gasped in fear, no time to move away.
“Are you okay? You okay?!” the giant called out to her worriedly.
A friendly giant, then. “I’m not sure. I think I made a mistake. A big, stupid mistake.” Makenna crumpled into her hands.
“You’re okay,” the giant comforted her. “You’re just going a thousand miles an hour right now.”
“I am?” She looked up at him frightfully.
“You’re just going a million miles an hour right now,” the giant said, backing away. “You’re okay.”
Makenna felt dizzy. Where was up? She stood there, hand over her heart as she tried to find herself. The threads were moving sluggishly around her. Way slower than usual.
Interesting.
“Oh!” Makenna exclaimed. From the platform below, the man was coming up the steps. He must have heard that she was upset. He was almost at the top, searching.
A car was driving her to the hospital.
At that moment, a path in the threads glowed brightly behind him, highlighting the steps leading down the hill. She felt a pull. A kind of premonition.
She watched the cars race by, every collision a waiting probability. She held on to her head, chanting, focusing her mind on staying whole.
She knew what to do. She needed to make sure. She went over to the top of the steps, passing the giant. And then she took off down the steps, racing right past the man.
But the math didn’t make sense. Makenna walked up to the check-in counter.
He reached out to try to catch her, so fast that is shadow seemed to not have time to react. His fingers just barely grazed the nape of her neck.
She was getting mad. They asked her for her social security number and insurance details.
She raced past the crone, crouched in the corner as before. “Spin, twist, and tie it…”
“Fine. But I want two kids,” she said fiercely, writing it all down.
She got to the last platform with the two children, accidentally crashing into them, and cried, “Shit, I’m sorry, are you alright?!” She looked them over and was content to see they were intact, in all their beautiful shadows and threads. “Okay. Phew.”
“Yeah, let’s take her straight back.”
She followed the amber light down from the platform, walking leisurely back to the base of the hill, catching her breath. The threads finally quieted and settled.
“Hi Makenna. Did you sleep okay?”
Interesting.
She was lying in a hospital bed, a doctor and a couple nurses huddled around her.
“You experienced a psychotic episode, Makenna. I’m diagnosing you with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.”
Interesting.
“Ohh, huh.” Makenna pondered for a bit, then laughed. “Yeah, I guess that makes a lot of sense. Weird.”
“We know that’s a lot to take in,” a nurse chimed in. “How are you feeling?”
“A lot better now, more stable. I think time was, like, squeezing me forwards, and my consciousness was sort of wiggling, in space-time, you know? Like this,” Makenna shifted her hands back and forth like a slinky, giggling as she tried to explain. “This is probably one of the strangest answers you’ve gotten to this.”
“Okay, thank you, glad you’re feeling better. I’ll be right back.”
Makenna settled back into her bed and grabbed the pen and paper next to her, taking notes. She overheard the doctor talking in the hall.
“Yeah, she’s still delusional. We’re going to have to keep her.”
She sat up straight and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She would correct them.
It was okay – she was alright now. Everything in her gut told her so.
“I know it seems extreme, but there’s no other option right now.”
Makenna walked out of the room and saw the psychiatrist talking on the phone. He saw her and pulled the phone away from his face.
“Get her back in her room,” he called to a nearby nurse, then turned back into the phone.
“Not sure – however long it takes.”
Fuck.
Hours flew by. She was strapped into a wheelchair.
Be smart, Makenna. Don’t say another word about space-time. Don’t talk about your theory.
Fuck.
It felt like a huge wave was crashing over her as she was wheeled down a long hallway.
“I’m going to be fine. It’ll be okay.” She smiled to reassure them. Into the ward.
A team of nurses checked her in. She stripped and put on a gown.
“What now?” Makenna asked a nurse at the end of the hall.
The nurse looked up from her phone.
“Well, nothing’s scheduled for a while, so you can sit in your room,” she pointed to a door down the hall before returning to the screen. “Or you can pace.”
Fuck.

July 3, 2024

Makenna was back at MIT, working slowly. She drifted off in seminars and lab meetings frequently.
She hadn’t had another episode since the hospital. She spent her time visiting friends on road trips, decompressing and slowly testing her brain on reality TV. She thought of Dirk often, but she was healing.
And she still thought about everything. It was always there, drifting at the edges. At the beginning she was afraid she’d slip in again accidentally, but it slowly got easier to think about the hill without feeling her mind lift.
She thought about the strange place under the blue moonlight, again and again, remembering.
The steps beyond the platform called to her, with their blank canvas of secrets, each untrodden edge a piece of the logic that shaped its curvature… How did we sense ourselves navigating that infinitely dimensional network in three dimensions over the fourth dimension of time… Was the evolution of perceptive stability derived simply from the smallest denominator of uncertainty…
She passed a chart showing the isotopic valley of stability in the hallway. Makenna stopped and stared at it, evaluating the plot in a new light. Makenna permitted her mind to take it in and lose its shape, then let it re-form without the boundaries.
Sketch.
She saw it re-emerge just as it always was – a valley, a range of temporary stability in a corner of the larger universe, their universe. One in which the interactions between the diving, entangled loops of existence kept the collective perpetuating, untwisting and spinning, radiating smaller, faster loops that settled in clusters of encircling probabilities.
Carve.
All the creatures of chance were ever so beautiful and worthy. Life was so precious, and souls… damn, that’s wild, souls.
Draw.
No one will ever know, ever understand truly everything. It was unsettling. But wasn’t it also, in some ways, a relief.
Etch.
The professors kept a considerate eye on her, asking her how she was doing and hesitant to bring up more than that. Some regarded her with a welcoming nod, some with sheer disinterest. Some with a slight suspicion that she had taken back not a single word. But they quelled any doubt that came up. She was just a grad student suffering from a mental health crisis. Happened all the time.
It couldn’t be her.

July 5, 2024

“I met somebody.” Makenna announced abruptly to the group of friends she was brunching with. Pink flowers hung overhead on a wood trellis. A butterfly flitted about Makenna briefly, like it was trying to decide whether to share a secret.
“Oh…?” Liv replied, cautiously. Makenna knew why. Most of her friends thought it was too soon. (“Sometimes you just gotta grieve, girl!”) She didn’t care. She’d fallen fast and hard. And that helped.
“Wanna tell us about him?” Meryl smiled, shrugging off Liv’s concerned expression.
“Yeah. His name is Chance.” She laughed gleefully. Chance did not live up to his name, in the best way.
“It’s called cosmic comedy,” Chance had sighed on their first date. “See, I’m not really a ‘wing-it’ kind of guy. I don’t take a chance on much of anything, really.” Makenna soon learned how true this was, and she was quickly drawn in to a comforting pattern with him. He was a teacher, for the steady income, and lamented often at the uptick in pranks played by the “kids these days”. Chance despised the unpredictability of pranks. Makenna couldn’t relate to that one bit, and she loved the dissonance. She had even told him about her diagnosis, and he didn’t seem to mind.
Most importantly, he didn’t remind her of Dirk.
“That’s great, Makenna, really happy for you.” Meryl said kindly.

July 7, 2024

“Studying consciousness is the hardest science to do. Because how do we learn new things about something?”
“When we observe it change in response to an applied force, a stress of some sort,” Makenna answered, fiddling with her hair.
“Right,” the professor said in slight surprise. Makenna hadn’t spoken up in ages. The professor chuckled. “So, with consciousness, kinda hard to do that when we all just constantly have one, right? Neuroscientists would love to get their hands on a technique to do that, I’m sure. But for now, we rely on studying the extremes, the neurodivergent margins, to tell us the most.”
Makenna tilted back her chair, face tight.
“That’s so trippy!” A student exclaimed.
“It is. But ‘what if’ thought experiments have also been helpful. Though you’ll have to talk with those theoretical physicists higher up in the ivory tower for that,” he joked.
She kept her mouth shut.

July 8, 2024

“Okay, so the other day I was telling my friends more about you, of course, and one of them is getting married next spring! Want to be my plus one?” She told Chance the date.
“Oh. Makenna. I…” He palmed the back of his neck nervously.
“Ah no, it’s totally okay if you’re busy! I know we haven’t talked about our plans that far yet. I’m just, you know, excited for you to meet my friends, they’re gonna love you.”
“I… Oof, Makenna, this is so hard to say, I’m sorry.”
An anchor was dragging along the bottom of an abyss.
“Oh…” Her heart thudded in her chest.
“Yeah. I’m just… I’m not sure I’m headed that way with you. Like, a future together. I’m so sorry. I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
The anchor lodged itself against a rock. The chain was pulled taut.
“You’ve been meaning to tell me?”
“Yeah… I mean, I assumed we were still meeting other people. That this was, you know, a casual thing. And I think I want to… keep seeing other people.”
It was straining.
“Totally, I get it.” Makenna nodded spiritedly.
“I’m sorry, babe.” Chance reached for her hand, unhappiness in his face.
She whisked it back and snapped, “Don’t call me babe if you don’t want to be with me.” Chance took a breath with closed eyes. When he opened them, he looked at her and said, “I’m sorry, Makenna.”
The tether broke free.

July 9, 2024

Makenna was running up the steps trying to reach his platform. She wanted to see him so badly. She went by the children without a glance. She got to the crone’s platform and saw the next stairs waiting just beyond the sitting woman.
An arm shot out from the cowled robe and grabbed her hand as she ran past.
“Beware the one who forgets why she came,” a deep hiss reverberated across the hill and out into the expanse.
“Hey!” Makenna shouted, stunned. She shook off the crone’s grip and looked down. Around the woman’s arm curled a green ribbon, encircled at its twists by a thin black circle. The skin was not of the midnight shadows but was solid, tanned and golden.
“Geezus!!” Makenna recoiled with horror, scrambling away and falling backwards.
The crone’s hood had fallen back, and she was no crone at all but a young woman, her face plain yet pretty, blonde hair tied back in a braid. The woman’s blue eyes pierced Makenna’s with the depths of an open sky and held her there.
“She thinks she can decide which way is right, but she is not the only one to bend the paths ahead,” the woman delivered with a sneer. “Fate will find her yet.”
Makenna shuffled back to her feet and hurried up the steps to the next platform, shaken.
There was the man, still and unchanged, his shadow long in the welcome moonlight. She breathed a sigh of relief and walked toward him.
But the man did not move. Her apprehension grew, and she noticed his shadow rising behind him, growing into its own figure of cloudy indigo swirls.
“Oh no,” Makenna retreated slowly, fighting the urge to run. “No, no, no.”
Now two, the men stepped forward together, blocking the steps and drawing swords in sync.
They exchanged a smooth, swift glance, and continued to advance.
“Well, fuck me.” Makenna muttered, heart pounding and eyes racing to find an exit around them.
There was no hope for her. The men lunged forward, and she ran fast in the other direction. They drove her back toward the platform ledge. She stood with her heels to the edge and held her unsteady arms up in surrender.
“What do you want?!” Makenna quaked out.
Without a sound, the man stepped forward, breaking from his shadow. Makenna looked at him with hopeful eyes, pleading. The shadows in his eyes bore back at her, no emotion reaching their depths.
Then he shoved her off the ledge.
“Makenna. Makenna! You okay?!”
Her mind was spinning; she felt nauseous. She couldn’t focus on the voice calling to her.
She was no longer on the path. On any path. The silver-blue grasses rose up around her and she couldn’t see which way was up or which was down. She started to panic. Makenna swung her arms through the grasses wildly, trying to part them. It was no good.
Makenna slowed herself down and felt her heartbeat follow. She looked up and around, the amber threads still doing their dance around and within her. She closed her eyes and felt. Felt the pull that the threads traced, the direction she should travel. She turned and oriented herself to where they led, then opened her eyes and walked through the grasses. She began to run.
“What do you need right now? How can I help you?”
No words formed. She was being pulled along a track that she couldn’t break away from.
Makenna found her way back to the stepped path. She looked down and saw them, the man and his shadow, guarding the platform. She backed away, turning upward to the gentle giant ahead. She saw to her surprise that the steps leading there were now carved – she bent her head close, and the writing looked familiar… it was her own, the sketches of her notebooks and imaginations alike. She sighed gratefully and continued up. When she got to the giant’s platform, she saw that they were pacing. The giant found her as she entered and with a jolt of concern came stumbling toward her.
“Are you okay?” they asked as before, and she stepped forward to reassure them.
“Yeah, just overwhelmed,” she admitted, exhausted.
“You’re not okay.”
“No I’m okay, look, really!” she patted herself down, doing a spin.
“You’re not okay!”
“Hey, it’s alright! I’m fine!” She put her hands up toward them, trying to diffuse their worry.
“You’re not okay!!” The giant’s threads glowed brighter and brighter as they moved toward her. With every heavy step they took, the amber threads vibrated with more intense waves of light and she felt the energy reaching toward her, ready to overpower her. Terror rose in her throat as she realized that their essence was going to explode into the threads, and it was getting worse with every closing inch between them.
She screamed “No!!” then turned around and sprinted toward the ledge. She rammed down her fear. It was the only way. She jumped. A wave of the threads’ energy hit her as she flew over, and she landed in the tall grasses with a tumble.
Makenna got up and ran as fast as she could, looking over her shoulder to see if they were following. She needed to get far away, far enough away that they could never find her.
The growing distance gradually calmed her racing heart. She swam with the amber threads through a part in the grasses.
She found her way to the top of the hill and a soft symphony of voices ascended like wind chimes, blending in and out of each other. She was at the structure now: a circular temple of pillars rising to the sky with open sides. It was surrounded by tall trees, their leaves flashing bright undersides in the wind.
She stepped through and her eyes were immediately drawn up to the open ceiling. Here there were no clouds at all, no moon even. Just a dark expanse, with stars thrown across the depths of time in a blaze. Colorful nebulae shifted in the distance like clusters of starlings, ever moving and flowing, and their boundaries flickered with hungry flames.
The pillars were wrapped high in patterned tiles the deep blue of incoming twilight. The colors faded downward, all the way through violets and golds until they hit the last red of the departing sun at her eyeline. Then the mosaic ran off under her feet into a fiery mandala.
The amber threads here were intense and winding, pirouetting away, finally, from a clear center point. Makenna followed the paths to their source and the wind was knocked out of her.
There in the center of the room, a luminous flower sat on a high stand. Shaped like a lotus with petals wide open, it was all metal and glass, iridescently brilliant. The amber threads flowed from it with wandering purpose.
She was not alone; she could feel it. She searched the rest of the room. The man stood in the corner nearest her, his shadow back in place by his side. The giant loomed next to him. The children were standing on either side of the woman, holding her hands. They were all so very quiet, observing her.
“Did you know?” she whispered to the man with hurt in her voice. He turned and started to walk away, shadow trailing, and she called out louder, “Did you know what would happen?!”
She went after him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He flinched at her touch and kept walking, barely breaking stride. Makenna watched him leave with a clench in her throat. As the man passed the giant, his shadow broke away and stretched across the floor until it merged with the voluminous figure. It grew, climbing quickly to the open ceiling.
She looked up as it strained higher and higher above her head. She mustered up her courage. “I’ll wreck you,” she threw at it. Heavy tears garbled the threatening tone of her message, but the behemoth shrank. It disbanded back into the separate figures, and they too turned and walked away, following the man back down the hill.
A tug on her shirt pulled her attention down, and she saw one of the children beckoning her, their extraordinary face shimmering. She leaned over to let them speak in her ear.
“What cannot be killed, cannot be born.” The child smiled up at her as they stepped away, walking back to the crone. A feeling of dread came rushing through her. The woman stared into Makenna’s eyes with fierce knowing. The child turned and waved at her.
“Come back! Please, come back! You’ll…” But it was too late. The child had reached her side, and the woman touched their forehead with a gentle finger. The children’s substance vanished in swirling eddies out and away into the fractal.
Makenna gasped and stepped toward the woman. They were now standing across from each other, the flower radiating between them. The woman raised her arms wide as if to reassure Makenna with a hug.
Her tattoo was vivid under the starlight. Makenna whispered, “What does it mean?”
The woman stepped closer, her eyes vicious.
“Everything,” she answered. Then she seized the flower with both hands. Makenna raced forward without a second thought and grabbed the flower too, bracing herself into it…
White-hot agony burst in her core and raced toward her fingertips. She cried out.
With their battling effort, they fed the fractal with each other’s substance, pushing back and forth. Any bit that she inadvertently gave, the crone appeared to absorb it, solidifying in shape. The woman’s edges grew sharper and her skin glowed. Makenna kept holding on, out of breath.
The threads moved through the two women, thick and bright. When they stretched, time melted to a crawl, and when they condensed, it ran fast and thick. She felt energy rushing through her, and her heart was still speeding up.
The hum in the air was deafening and the threads were blinding. The amber strands within her flew quickly out and away from her body into the surrounding air. Too quickly. Much too quickly.
Makenna was running. She looked out into the oncoming traffic rushing toward her, evaluating. No, it would take too long. She sprinted through the long corridor, searching for anything sharp. No, they would find her too soon. There was nothing she could do. She had tried her best.
She was going to explode into the threads, all the way to eternity. It would take everyone with her. She wasn’t going to be able to stop it.
Despair slammed into her body and began tearing through her insides like they were tissue paper. The shredding didn’t slow until it found her edges. Leaden sorrow then seeped into her veins, weighing her limbs down to submission. It was all her fault.
Her heart pounded thickly, decelerating. The amber light dulled with the beat and the midnight shadows of her substance were dissipating. She was going to disappear altogether.
Makenna slowed to a walk. There was nothing she could do. No one would ever know; no one would ever find her. She had tried her best.
The woman pushed Makenna’s energy down until it was little more than a murmur, but she held on and pushed back.
She would run in a loop until the end of time. She would always be their center point to map to.
Makenna would be frozen in this moonlit world forever – never living, never dying.
All her loved ones would pass by her, aging and living their lives. She would see every distraught emotion on their face, feel every ounce of their pain, and she would never be able to do anything about it.
She and the woman were in balance, neither breaking.
Makenna came to a stop, heaving. It didn’t matter where she set her body. Every place would hurt them. There was nothing she could do. They would always know; they would always be able to find her. She had tried her best.
She was still holding onto the flower. She looked at the woman fighting across from her. Maybe she could do it. It wasn’t over yet. She gathered her strength and began to push again. The woman glared at her, then struck back with full force.
“No!” The agony came roaring back in a torrent and Makenna took off running again, heart racing.
In amber oscillations, the struggle over the threads continued between her and the other woman, pushing and pulling on each other.
She was caught in a cycle of anguish and despair. She soon lost count of the flips. Her muscles cramped and she felt tired. So very tired.
There wasn’t much left of her – the threads traced increasingly empty space. The woman looked determined and gave another massive push. Makenna’s threads lit up one last time, traveling out in a shockwave.
She hunched over with her hands braced against her knees and screamed as the waves passed through her.
Her scream became soundless as she lifted her head up with open eyes to the starry expanse. The last of her substance swirled out and away, powdering into the finest, sparkling dust that drifted to oblivion.
And for a moment – a mere flicker in the fluid of space-time, the amber sheen illuminated a perfectly symmetrical, blooming mandala that traced the tiles then rocketed beyond. Reaching far past the stars, its glow highlighted the edges of every being under the moonlight, painting them in a haunting embrace.
The woman who was no crone at all let go of the flower and picked up the sword that had clattered to the ground. She turned to face the path back down, not a single drop of mercy in her eyes.

October 10, 2053

Class was almost done. Some students were starting to fidget in their chairs.
“So, in a quantum network that is surrounded by infinities, ‘center’ is a challenging concept. But that was one idea posited as to what it might be like,” the professor standing near the holographic screen concluded. The tech had been adapted specially for this course so that it could be held in the sunshine.
“Are there others?” called out a brave student from the front row of the outdoor amphitheater.
“Well, yes, Emmett – another idea is that your ‘t = 0’ is always your center,” the professor answered. “Because that’s the only spot where the place you think you are and the place you truly are align. So, in that sense, everyone is their own center, all the time.”
“That is, honestly, really confusing,” Emmett commented with brows furrowed. Autumn leaves of copper and gold floated down to the ground.
“Honestly, agreed – it is very difficult to visualize,” the professor admitted with a soft smile. “We’ve been right at the forefront of current knowledge these last few days of class, and we’re entering territory that I too struggle to picture. All I can reassure you with is that it simply takes practice; the pieces must be built up slowly before that the mind can fully explore them.”
Another student in the back corner raised their hand.
“I’m sorry, can you please remind me of your name again? It’s on the tip of my tongue.” the professor motioned them to speak, and the student said something too quiet to hear.
“Can’t quite hear you, what was that?” the professor strained forward.
Several students around the asker shouted together, “Jyoti!!”
“Ahh yes, Jyoti – thank you. Now, what was your question?” The professor was cheered by their teamwork. So was Jyoti, apparently, as she now spoke up with more force.
“Professor, I still can’t wrap my head around infinite complexity… like, is it infinitely organized in all directions, or are we just supposed to think about it being infinitely organized somewhere?”
“That’s a complicated but important question, Jyoti. Your TA’s will run through some exercises in recitations this week to pursue that line of inquiry,” said the professor. “When you do, you’ll want to recall that the only true symmetry that exists is fleeting. Now, class, what else is ‘fleeting’?”
“Thoughts,” piped up a student, Phillis, after a few seconds of silence. “And beliefs n’ stuff,” added another, Henrietta. These two were almost always the first to get the answer, and the professor worked hard to keep them challenged with more material.
“Both spot-on. Let’s let that simmer for everyone. And you’ll want to think about symmetry over short and long distances in space-time. How far something can travel in it… Does it get stuck, and what does that even mean if so? Can something ever get stuck forever? If the distance is infinite?”
Students were scribbling into their notebooks and typing on their mini-screens.
“We’re getting into the real nitty-gritty here, so I’ll also remind you to think about where thought occurs, and the boundaries of where symmetry might be. Recall that the probabilistic ties of meaning become strengthened and loosened in alteration, ‘learning’ and evolving.”
The professor looked around the rows, her silver hair swaying with the movement. “Okay, any last questions for today?”
“Alrighty,” she said when there was only quiet shuffling. “Your assignment before our next class is to write a reflection piece on the topic you’ve found most interesting so far.”
Several students raised their hands.
“Yeees, they must be hand-written – no Chip-In’s allowed, per usual.” Half the class grumbled and the students put down their hands.
Chip-In’s were trending again among the university students. Some of the AI add-on packages that could be installed nowadays even enabled the user to fill in the unfinished or skipped sentences that the chip didn’t interpret well.
“No Chip-In’s for this course ever. And why is that?” The professor quizzed the students.
“Creativity is formed from the interstices of the infinite,” groaned the students as one.
“That’s right!” she beamed.
One student turned to their neighbor and whispered none-too-quietly, “My end-of-term project’s going to be coming up with a better catch phrase for her; that one’s terrible.”
“An excellent idea, Rabia!” the professor held up a finger of certainty, looking proud. “You’ll have to really dig into the understanding for that one.”
Rabia looked like she regretted her decision.
“Drawings or other art media are welcome, though!” the professor added. Many students perked up.
“Sorry professor. But I was thinking of doing déjà vu instead, if that’s cool? I think it’s neat,” Rabia admitted.
The professor gave a thumb’s up in response and added, “Let’s also make sure to get a few students tackling dreams together for a group project, since it’s a little finicky. And for the team already on delusions, remember to think about dimensions. Now if there’s nothing else, you are all free to go after you check out!”
Chatter arose around the amphitheater amidst the sounds of things being shoved into backpacks. They headed out in lines toward the check-out stations, where the MindMenders had lined up to talk with each student before they went home.
‘MindMenders’ was the fun, fancy term they’d coined for the psychiatrists specially trained to help with existential feelings that might be triggered by the science. The professor had insisted with the university that several attended each lecture and enacted the check-out procedure. She’d spent many of her early-career years working with these professionals to grow the program, and the students always rated it as a critical component of the course.
“Enjoy your evening, and see you next week,” the professor waved at the departing students.
She stuck around in the front for a few minutes, knowing that students who didn’t feel comfortable asking questions aloud might choose this time to find her. She’d been teaching this particular ‘Quantum Queries’ class for fourteen years now in the public university system, after minor kerfuffle on the coursework being without marks. It was now one of many courses in the Division of Metaphysical Arts.
A student came up to her.
“Professor… I’ve seen some of my friends turn to mindfulness or religion after taking this class, and they all still disagree all the time. But I don’t know… we’re getting to the end and I… I just expected to feel differently. I mean, there’s got to be one right answer, right?” Jay picked at their nails in nervousness.
“Well, what do you believe?” asked the Professor with a mischievous smile.
“I guess it just doesn’t really matter to me much. I can see it, sure, but I don’t… feel any different after learning it,” Jay confessed.
“Then that’s your right answer, isn’t it?”
“Hm. Yeah, I guess so,” Jay walked away, clearly till pondering, over to the MindMenders for check-out.
Another student, Michaela, came forward, scowling. “How do we know it’s right? How can it be proved?”
“Well, the only way to test the untestable, I think. We wait to see if another theory fits better. So, in other words…” The professor tapered her sentence, content to be patient.
“…Time. The only way to test the untestable is time!” Michaela finished the reasoning with a look of revelation and an emphatic hand in the air.
“I think so,” the professor replied. Michaela appeared dissatisfied.
“There has to be another way,” she stated, heavy with resolve.
“Maybe that can be your project, to think through that problem?” the professor offered.
The student considered this for a bit, then nodded in agreement and turned away. The professor smiled. Michaela had been struggling on tests lately but was quite determined, so they’d been keeping an extra eye out for her.
The Professor began packing up her things. Only one other person, a MindMender, was left lingering.
“Last but not least: your turn. How was it for you today? Feeling stable?” The MindMender looked her over with an evaluating scan.
“Yeah, pretty stable, I think.”
“Emotionally, or physically?” The MindMender smiled. “Or do you mean, in space-time?”
“Space-time,” the professor laughed. Being honest – that was the greatest gift. She would never get over it. “Feeling pretty stable, like I’m resting at the bottom of a cozy well and not about to spin out of it any time soon.”
“Good, that makes sense. You know we’re glad to hear it.”
“I do think I feel better in the quarters that I’m just teaching ‘Self and Symbiosis’ or the ‘Evolution of Science’ one though,” the professor admitted as she continued closing the lecture screen. The MindMender went over to help.
“Why do you think she did it? Since I started working for your class, I’ve always wondered. The story,” asked the MindMender quietly next to her.
“Some argue that she did it for the world; some argue for love. I’m in the camp that thinks she just… needed to do it for her. That she was trying to heal herself,” she turned and looked over to them, blue eyes bright.
The MindMender’s gaze softened but didn’t waver. “And did she? Did she find what she was looking for?”
“My takeaway is that she tried her best. That’s all we can really ask for of ourselves, isn’t it?” The professor shifted uncomfortably.
“Oh, no, I don’t think that at all. I think… there is often so much more to a story than can be shared in the corner allotted to it, isn’t there?” the MindMender replied. “I just hope she realized that she was never broken to begin with.”
The Professor picked up her travel mug and together they walked out of the lecture hall.
A flock of crows flew overhead, cawing.
“I heard you’ve decided to retire from the university,” said the MindMender. “Ready for the next chapter?”
“Yes, I think so…” the Professor dropped off in a concerned thought, hunching over to pick up a fallen leaf. She held it in one hand, slowly rolling the stem between her fingers. “But first, dinner. My favorite pub’s just around the corner. Care to join?”
Flecks of amber in the MindMender’s eyes glinted against the last rays of the setting sun. They checked their watch, then replied, “That would be lovely.”