Something Happened
Listen: something happened. It's the 17th floor of some nondescript office building in Omaha, Nebraska, and the people inside don't know it yet, but they are careening through the critical moments of human existence. Unbeknownst to these fast-talking, typewriting automatons, a peculiar anomaly has manifested in the shape of an old, black filing cabinet. This filing cabinet, a relic from the Eisenhower administration, contains papers that should not — by any known law of physics or postal regulations — exist.
Inside are documents stamped with a peculiar insignia, a circle with three lines intersecting it like some ancient alchemy symbol. As it turns out, these papers contain the last unsolved equations of a German mathematician who disappeared in the 1930s. But that's not even half the story. Oh no, if he was just a mathematician, you could easily lock him up in some dusty textbook and forget about him. Wonderful thing about mathematics, it tends to stay put.
You see, this fellow didn't just mess around with numbers; he had cracked the enigma of time. And time, dear reader, is a slippery, fickle construct. One moment you're atop it with a beer and the next you're sunk in it like quicksand.
So there it is: a seemingly benign artifact with the power to warp the fabric of reality itself, sitting amidst a sea of coffee-stained memos and staplers that won't staple. If you stood there long enough, you'd catch glimpses of grand possibilities, and avalanches of consequence folding in on themselves, as time was rendered not as a linear progression but an intricate, looping narrative.
Was it fate? Was it cosmic absurdity? Too complex to say, and maybe not even important. What mattered increasingly, in that office, was this growing awareness of choice — laden with absurdity and poignantly human flaws.
Amidst pens running dry and phones ringing off the hook, an intern named Billy — with dreams as big as the moon and as fragile as a sandcastle — pried open the filing cabinet. Behind those mundane walls lay not only the chaotic tapestry of time untouched but a reminder: life is a miracle-filled footnote in the bloated manuscript that none of us fully understand. That's the kicker.
So it goes.