Worlding (0.2)
Looking for the answer to all things, a white-coated scientist — doing what the training of all scientists trains scientists to do — abstracts from books and research reports and the carefully packaged samples (some of which smell very bad indeed) from years of previous experiments by countless other well-trained scientists to run new experiments and then experiments based on those experiments, and so on, and at every step along the way gradually reduces these things into even more purified materials, facts, equations and models — so pure in fact that — increasingly — they can only ever actually exist in this laboratory that — like all laboratories — is sealed off from uncontrolled influences of the outside world.
At each point the otherwise anemic-looking scientist’s excitement builds as actual physical experiments using impeccably clean beakers and bunsen burners and titration pipettes and assay frames and hoses stretched and snaked around the laboratory and printouts from printers connected to other lab equipment, give way to rows and rows of formal equations containing cryptic but scientifically-specialized symbols scribbled — with parts sometimes erased and new symbols scribbled equally cryptically but which are equally specialized — on chalkboards skirting the laboratory and balanced haphazardly in odd places around the room — and when the equations and emerging theories grow too long for the space and too complex for even the well-trained scientist to follow, the scientist writes cryptic but scientifically-specialized computer programs to keep track of their nuanced facts and actions — as textbooks theorizing the process of complex modern science indicate complex modern science must do.
Very early one morning — inauspiciously, as is the usual way of things in a laboratory — just after the unnoticed gray shirted, graveyard-shift-working custodian emptied the waste bin by the door — the only waste bin the scientist allowed to be emptied — and before any light from the day could attempt to penetrate the chalk-dust-covered windows — at the end of one particularly intense and productive period of work involving one last set of physical samples of an ochre substance that smelled a little bit like wasabe, with one absurdly simple keystroke at a keyboard teetering on a drumlin of scientific documentation and fragments of what might have been a liverwurst sandwich in one cramped corner of this otherwise highest of high tech labs, the scientist runs one more test — a test that is itself a marvel and testament to modern science — which — when the scientist inspects the results — shows conclusively that the formula — the culminating accomplishment of the work of countless scientists before this scientist and years of accrued laboratory effort and expertise in scientific logic and mathematics reaching back to the first experiment by the first person ever able to claim the title `scientist` — is so precise and so pure that it — as literally as the rune of symbols and numbers contained across all the chalkboards and computer code can — accounts for every thing that has ever existed and has ever occurred.
With this, collapsing in exhausted satisfaction on the suitably Spartan cot assembled makeshift so many months ago under laboratory benches that had been a bed for so long in this highest of high tech labs, the white-coated figure sleeps more soundly than science could have predicted possible — until this precise moment.
Hours later, waking from sleep and still satisfied the scientist leans and strains to open a window, squinting against the light and pungent spring air, and then — after checking the computer — the scientist is horrified to notice that regardless its immense capacity for accounting for things — it does not account for this very moment until the very next, and that while the formula is a perfect predictor of the past it does not account for anything else. Overcome, the scientist collapses in despair, where the scientist’s chalk-dust covered and floppy-eared dog eventually finds this (suddenly) anti-hero.
Looking up, the scientist asks the dog, “How will I fix this?”
The scientist watches as the dog raises its head and sniffs at the computer and then toward the scientist, then sits and vigorously scratches its ear with one hind leg, after which it shakes its head — chalk dust flying — flopping its floppy ears loudly as floppy-eared dogs do after vigorously scratching an ear with one hind leg.
After a momentary stillness the dog rises and walks to the door where it always waits when it wants to go out and — looking over its shoulder to the scientist, sighing, then slowly turning back toward the door — waits.
