“Cat got your tongue, Shrödinger?”
“Don’t be an ass, Buridan.”
“Looks like you’re having a devil of a time yourself, Maxwell.”
“Euler’s not acting like himself either.”
“Torricelli is, though. Look at him tooting his own horn.”
Indeed, of the five men, gathered on the head of a pin, only Torricelli trumpeted his infinitely limited successes to the nanonumbots capering in hive-like synchronicity to point dead curvilinearity. The microscopic mechs corkscrewed busily, popping holes in the space-time fabric which just moments before had seemed quite weighty and snug.
The collapse of the vacuum surprised them all. Thermodynamically speaking, they were eating heat and shitting bricks—absolutefuckingKelvincold bricks.
Immensity bound them with the prescient pressure of solid state hyperinflation. Heat death stared them down, while dark energy laughed, waiting in the wings.
At this juncture, so many camels squeezed through the eye of the needle that Lucifer himself blinked, crossed himself and ditched the elvisverse with light-searing speed. The five men watched his exit solemnly, for he escaped in photogenetic transversity. Light would no longer penetrate dark.
“Damn your demon, Maxwell!”
“My demon?”
“Your thought.”
“That’s a load of straw, Buridan, and you know it.”
“I think it.”
“Therefore you…”
“Don’t finish it for him, or for us, Shrödinger. We don’t all have nine lives.”
On the fringe of the area-less pin, Torricelli’s volume increased finitely until all that could be heard was the background radiation of stellar incontinence. Shit was hitting fans of insignificant size and irresistible number.
Nanonumbots hummed and thrummed. Mechlife gone mad for science. For thought. Once experiments themselves, they thrilled to test, measure, account and disseminate.
Truth. Beauty.
Beauty. Truth.
Thought. Existence.
Existence. Thought.
On the head of the pin, at the edgeless edge. Vacuum collapsed. This universe ended and the metaverse compressed. Five men. Five thoughts. Five questions.
“Why not experiment?”
“Why experiment?”
“Why not?”
“Experiment?”
“Now?”
The nanonumbots’ neuro-accumulators starved them close to synaptic collapse. A black hole, a singularity—but, not the singularity—formed around their last best guess. Struggling to see beyond the event horizon, beyond heat death, the five men stood upon each other’s shoulders (the shoulders of giants, no less), Torricelli at the bottom, Maxwell at the top. They wavered, their towering thoughts, infinite questions, ready to topple into the abyss the nanonumbots had prepared.
A swarm of the mechs with a mosquito-delicate whine clouded Maxwell’s view, and he tried to wave them away.
Buridan, below him, shouted up, “Can you see? Is it possible?”
Maxwell concentrated, rising up on his toes. “There’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” Euler whispered as if solving a reflexive equation.
“Ah, then we were all right,” Shrödinger gloated, flailing his hands to clear the collapsed vacuum of lingering cyanide.
Torricelli, never looking up, lamented, “Does eternity make my butt look big?
“Hey!” Buridan interjected, “I’m the one with the ass. And I’m starving.”
“No free lunch, gents. Energy in, energy out. All gone.” Maxwell took one last look among the swarming nanonumbots. “This is where it ends. Let me down.”
Once again, thought regrouped. A sorry lot now, watching the tiny mechs measure and build, measure and build their quantum playland right in the heart of humanity’s history. A triumph of reason—for an unreasonable species.
Responsibility? Never contemplated.
Salvation? None postulated.
A fundamental equation beyond the intellectual grasp of five thoughtful, yearning men. Buridan, Euler, Torricelli, Maxwell, Shrödinger.
And thus, on the fringe of that edgeless pin. Eternity. Space. Final frontiers. A conscious reckoning that free-range thought had ended.
Organic decay.
Mechlife ascendant.
Just in time.
Prime time.
This final frontier.
Kirk. Spock. Never McCoy. Existence. Survival. Cancels out programming.
Just a thought for the sake of thought.
