"Yes, but that was four months ago. What's he done since then?"

     "Jesse's famous. We can't stop and pretend this didn't happen. He's been on the news; our paper just got accepted in Science," and she was the first author — well, technically she shared the first authorship with Tom, but her name came first thanks to alphabetical order. "This puts us on the — " She stopped as Jesse shot through the door.

     Jesse was a short man approaching middle age with long, black, unkempt hair and a perpetual five-day beard starting to gray around the chin. "Good, you're both here," he said as he breezed over to Nadya's lab bench. "I've scheduled a press conference for this afternoon." When he talked, his hands danced in front of his body as though he were a potter shaping his meaning from the air.

     "What for?" Nadya asked. She folded a leg underneath her as she shifted in her chair to address him.

     His smile lit his round face like the sun. "I'm ready to present what I've been working on."

     "Oh yeah," Tom said, his chair creaking as he leaned back. "What's that?"

     "Well, as you know, positivism is an invention — "

     "What's positivism?" Tom asked, arms crossed.

     Jesse's eyes widened. "I've never understood how it is that universities grant us Ph.D.'s — doctors of philosophy — without requiring us to learn any actual philosophy."

     "I don't remember you caring too much about philosophy before you underwent QEH," Tom said.

     "Such limitations. How are you to know where your work fits into things?" Jesse mindlessly ran a hand through his wild hair. "Positivism is the philosophical school upon which scientific research is based. It presupposes the universe is made of knowable elements governed by immutable laws we can discover through the application of the scientific method. But positivism isn't a truth, it's a tool. Scientific theories aren't reality, they're a model. Science reveals a map of the terrain rather than the terrain itself. To advance, we need a new tool."

     Nadya brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "Have you developed this tool?"

     "Yes." His eyes shone with mirth that his smudged glasses were unable to obscure. "I've created a system that generates a better model of reality. And, I've used it to make a discovery that will fundamentally shift the trajectory of humanity. You two helped me develop QEH. I wanted you to be the first to see my findings."

     His first discovery had already put humanity on a different trajectory. Nadya knew in her heart humankind was at an inflection point. Two labs had rejected her post-doc application before Jesse took a chance on her. Now, as a result of his faith in her work, she was at the forefront of an intellectual revolution as significant as the development of speech. Hope was replacing the years she had spent fretting about her career's future.

     Even Tom cautiously relaxed the cynicism etched in his expression, though he had yet to uncross his arms. "How will this discovery impact humanity?" he asked.

     Jesse smiled and spread his hands. "It gives physicists their long searched for Theory of Everything and does so in a way that leads to the possibility of faster than light travel."

     "Can you give us an overview of the details?" Nadya asked.

     "Oh, I can give you more than an overview. The answer is simple. I've translated it into a form baseline humans can understand." He passed Nadya a note written on heavy-bond paper in elegant, flowing script. She held it so she and Tom could read it.

From the One comes the point eats the six then the One. Now the eight makes us pass through the nought, and then — lo! — RNA. We will writhe as we fly. Five-nine-three, One-fourteen. One. Six. Fox!

"Uh …" Nadya re-read the script. "This is it?"

     Jesse nodded. "It's humbling, don't you think, to see the elegance of it?"

     "Right," Tom said. "I think we should hold off on the press conference."

     Jesse frowned. "You don't understand?"

     Nadya had been a post-doc in Jesse's lab for three years and was approaching the vintage where hiring committees might start to smell on her the taint of mediocrity. If she were unable to secure a faculty position soon, the only job her ten years of education would qualify her for was that of a glorified lab tech — the same path her father had walked. The success of QEH, however, was a bolt of lightning. This was her ticket, or at least that was what she had hoped. Nadya asked, "Can you explain it to us?"

     "This is as simple as I can make it. Reread it, think about it. There are layers within it."

     "It's gibberish," Tom said, taking the note from Nadya and tossing it on the lab bench.

     Jesse took the note and centered it on the bench, pointing to the first line. "See here, 'From the One.' Right? The One. Notice the spacing. That suggests the quasi-temporality of the stochastic supersymmetry between selectron-electron pairs along the x-axis …" As Jesse continued his explanation, his excitement growing, Tom passed Nadya an I-told-you-so look.

     "I'm sorry, excuse me," Nadya interrupted.

     "Did I lose you?" Jesse asked. "Let's start from the beginning. 'From the One.' Do you understand?"

     "I understand what all those words mean."

     "You know what?" Tom said, leaving the lab. "I'm going to call off the press conference."

     Jesse looked down at his note. "I thought you would understand. I really thought you would." His words stirred to life eddies of shame in Nadya's belly. She remembered one day near the end of her first year in Jesse's lab. That year had been a disastrous, unremitting succession of failed experiments. She had been at her bench, head in her hands, wondering if she should quit and become a street artist drawing caricatures for change.

     Jesse had approached her. "Still can't get QEH across the blood-brain barrier in your animal models?" She had responded with a tirade of frustration. She ranted about how she had tried everything she knew, yet nothing worked. If she was unable to find a way to get QEH across the blood-brain barrier, the only alternative was to drill a hole in the skull to administer QEH directly into the brain. No sober ethics board would approve that in human studies.

     Jesse had listened to her rant, shared some stories of his own failures, and then said, "Listen, if your methods are right, then the data never lies. Either you're methods are incorrect, which, looking at your work I don't think is the case, or QEH interacts with the blood-brain barrier in a way we don't understand." After that, she ignored everything she had been taught and started thinking creatively. Three months later, she had cracked the problem.

     He had believed in her then. She wanted to justify that faith now.

     Standing in front of her, Jesse stared at his note as he mouthed a whispered conversation. It was unnerving. From the words Nadya could hear, he was speaking a combination of babble and numbers. Her hands wanted to doodle. That seemed rude, though, so she fidgeted with her pen, getting ink on her fingers.

     "Fox!" he yelled, startling Nadya, causing her to flick her pen across her bench into nearby shelves. He pinned her with an intense, fiery gaze. "My discovery holds revolutionary knowledge. You must help me translate this into something people can understand."

     The quest began. Nadya started with the physics department. She lacked the confidence to present it as a Theory of Everything, and so told the faculty it was a 'puzzle Jesse created for the field of physics.' The faculty was still exuberant with Jesse's elegant solution to the energy crisis, so they devoted a half-day retreat to analyzing what Nadya had begun to call The Message. Nadya, Tom, and Jesse sat with the physicists in a cramped room that smelled of stale coffee.

     Some clever wonk noticed the string of numbers in the first two sentences assembled to form the Golden Ratio, which so many patterns in nature follow: "From the One comes the point eats the six then the One. Now the eight makes us pass through the nought…" Jesse perked up. The length and width of the paper also conformed to the Golden Ratio. Jesse nodded his head. The string of numbers in the last two sentences stumped them until a Ph.D. student decided to weigh it and discovered it was five-hundred-ninety-three milligrams. Jesse sat back, frowning. "Notice 'One' is capitalized," he said holding up a single finger for all to see. "It's a proper noun in this context. Does that help?" Nope. They left their retreat flummoxed.

     She tried the chemists and biologists and then worked her way through the remaining science departments. No luck. Tom stopped attending after the mathematicians debated some subtle point about the automorphisms of manifolds with Jesse for two hours over pizza and then admitted they could make no sense of The Message.

     Nadya persisted. She broadened her search to other departments: sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and beyond. In a meeting of the English faculty, a dowdy poetry instructor wearing a dress that had more colors than taste and who smelt faintly of pot noted Jesse had written the missive in anapestic meter: From the ONE comes the POINT …

     "Yes!" Jesse sat bolt upright. "Do you understand?" They did not.

     Of all the disciplines, Jesse enjoyed himself most with the philosophers. They made no better sense of The Message, but Jesse spoke with them late into the evening about epistemologies, ontologies, and aesthetics until Nadya fell asleep on her doodle-filled notebook.

     She had spent a month trying to decipher The Message, even missing this year's Comic-Con, spending the weekend studying the history of poetic meter instead. Why was this so hard? Though Jesse's solution to the energy crisis revealed hitherto unknown properties of matter, it was still decipherable.

     While she spent her days overthinking The Message, Tom had begun searching for faculty positions. Was he interviewing already? He was missing work some days and dressing up on others, though he had always dressed nice, business slacks and button-down shirts and the like.

     Thoughts of her career were a stress. She had thought getting into grad school was hard — it took two attempts at the GRE before she scored well enough to get in — but that Herculean effort seemed trivial compared to the ferocity of competition for faculty positions. She should be putting her CV out there and trading in her comfortable tee-shirts emblazoned with the logo of Celtic bands for fancy business attire as she hit the interview trail.

     She wanted to make Jesse proud, though. He had been the only one to take a chance on her. She wanted to prove their work was a success.

     The fine arts department had analyzed his calligraphy. Nadya was reviewing their notes when Jesse popped into the lab. Tom, meanwhile, was checking e-mails, his pudgy fingers dancing over his keyboard.

     "Het K-point-five. Gaml ninety-three. Vav?" Jesse asked, sitting down beside her, the chair squealing.

     "I …" A knot of nervousness tightened in Nadya's gut. "I don't know what you're saying."

     "Right!" Jesse said as he snapped his fingers. "Sorry, it's code." He tapped his head as one might when struggling to remember a word. "Language is too inefficient. Sometimes it takes a moment for me to figure out which thought I'm speaking."

     "The Message," Nadya said sitting straighter. "Is it a code?"

     "What? No, it's a … Well, all language is a code." Jesse's eyes lost their focus as he whispered a string of numbers and letters. Then he shepherded the totality of his attention and pinned her with a stare that made her breath catch in her throat. "Do you know what I read today?"

     A chasm of silence opened between them. Was she supposed to guess? Did a stray thought distract him? Nadya glanced over Jesse's shoulder to Tom who pointed his finger to the side of his head and twirled it in the universal gesture that meant Craaaaazy.

     Jesse's gaze lost focus. Then, he yelled, "No! Tet nine. Tet nine again, you know that." When Jesse's attention re-focused on her, he said, "You look worried. Did I say something out loud?"

     "Uh … you were saying you read something?" she said.

     "Right. Today I learned the best person to instruct a student in a difficult topic is not the teacher, but a fellow student who just gained an understanding of the concept." He punctuated his speech with hand gestures so flamboyant Nadya wondered if it was sign language. "The teacher has too many assumptions about what people know. They have forgotten the stumbling blocks they once faced and how they overcame them. The fellow student suffers none of these deficits. Vav?

     "Over the past month," he continued, "I have created so much, but I realize I no longer understand how baseline humans think. If you cannot understand the message I gave you, then all the work I have done since then will mean nothing. I want you to take QEH, Nadya, and then read what I have written. Once you have undergone QEH, you will understand what I have done. Because you were so recently baseline, you will know how to make others understand."

     She had often imagined she would one day undergo QEH. What contributions might she make with hyper-intelligence? Though the science behind it was blisteringly complex, the process of administering it was dead easy. It took twenty minutes. She could do it over lunch.

     Jesse jerked his head as if distracted by a sound, whispered a string of numbers, and then left with a purposeful stride.

     Tom turned to Nadya. "Don't do it. He's mad."

     Was Tom, perhaps, jealous Jesse asked her instead of him? "None of the test animals showed signs of mental illness," Nadya countered.

     He adjusted his glasses. "I don't think the study of psychosis in animals is particularly well developed. You were here. You heard his babble at the start."

     "He said it was a code. If he's processing billions of thoughts, standard language would be painfully inefficient."

     "Stop making excuses for him. He needs help."

     "Week after week, his brain scans do not show any pattern consistent with psychosis or mental illness. I don't think he's crazy. I think it's us. We're not smart enough to understand. He's trying to put his concepts into our language, but we can't see the meaning."

     "His solution to the energy crisis, we could understand that," Tom countered.

     "That was early in his intellectual development," Nadya said. Yes, that made sense. Her answer formed in her mind, gaining momentum as she spoke. "He was building off knowledge humanity had acquired. Since then, he's progressed so far beyond what we know there's no common link for us to grasp onto." She realized, belatedly, she had entered into a debate with Tom.

     "Look," Tom wheeled his wobbly chair closer to Nadya, "QEH multiplies the complexity of thought. The insight that might take me decades to discover Jesse might gain over a sip of coffee. QEH does not, however, improve the validity of those thoughts. My insight, no matter how brilliant I think it is, no matter how many years I struggled to achieve it, might be wrong. I mean how many hundreds of generations of physicians lived and died believing an imbalance of humors caused illness before we learned about viruses and bacteria?

     "Whereas my brain only processes one conscious thought at a time," Tom said tapping his temple, "his processes billions. But his ability to determine which of those insights is right is no better than yours or mine. He is lost in a cloud of thoughts, unable to determine which ones are meaningful."

     Was Jesse crazy? Nadya turned to The Message. If she could pull even a glimmer of meaning from it, that would settle the debate.

     "When word of Jesse's mental state gets out," Tom said, "it will taint QEH — and it will taint everyone associated with it. You want my advice, get your CV out there while the world still remembers Jesse's solution to the energy crisis. That's what I'm doing. Baylor's flying me out next week to interview." So, her suspicions were right. He was interviewing. It had been a year since Nadya updated her CV. "We need to keep a lid on Jesse's … eccentricities until the paper in Science comes out," he said. "And we land a job outside of this lab."

     Nadya let him win that argument, but she saw no reason to assume their work was a failure. The science behind QEH was sound. Why beg for a faculty position when, with confirmation of QEH's success, the most celebrated universities would beg for her. All she needed was to understand The Message.

     She had spent weeks staring at the words. She dreamed of them. Their afterimage danced in her eyes while she ate lunch alone in the break room, trying to ignore the smell of microwaved burritos and hot sauce the previous occupant had eaten. From the One comes the point eats the six then the One. Now the eight makes us pass through the nought, and then — lo! — RNA. We will writhe as we fly. Five-nine-three, One-fourteen. One. Six. Fox!

     What was the deal with foxes? Or RNA? All living things have RNA in addition to DNA. Retroviruses, though, only had RNA. Could he be alluding to retroviruses? Maybe it was an anagram? From the one … Throne of me? Of other men? No, this was more than a child's puzzle. Was she over-thinking this? Could the answer be so simple it was looking her in the face? She stared at The Message, its flowing script on heavy bond paper.

     She spent a day in the library surrounded by reference texts and the gentle whirr of book-filing drones as she researched heavy-bond paper over strong coffee. How about that — it was so named because it was used initially to print government bonds.

     One of the fine arts faculty had identified the calligraphy Jesse used. She checked her notes. Chancery cursive. She lost another day learning riveting tidbits like Niccolò de Niccoli first introduced this script in the 1420s, and it happened to be the predecessor of what we today call italics.

     She tracked down Jesse in his office. It was more a closet than a room, windowless, and barely large enough for a desk, two chairs, a shelf, and several mountains of journals, laptops, and tablets. It had the musty smell small spaces get when a person lives in them too long. Jesse and Tom were arguing. "What are you doing here?" she asked Tom.

     Jesse answered. "He's asking me to take a leave of absence. Give my old noggin a break," he said, tapping his temple. "Why are you here? Will you take QEH?"

     "The ethics board won't allow QEH on another human subject," Tom said, helping Nadya move a stack of tablets off a chair so she could sit.

     Jesse was about to reply, but Nadya interrupted. "I'm here about the calligraphy." She placed The Message on Jesse's desk. "You used Chancery cursive. Why?"

     "I thought it was pretty. It's the precursor of italics, don't you know?"

     "And the heavy-bond paper?"

     A pile of books on the ground teetered as he leaned his creaking chair back. "My missive opens a new world of understanding. It warranted nice paper. Semk? Taw-to-the-eleventh power."

     "Uh …" She decided to ignore his codes. "But the paper's dimensions, the Golden Ratio — "

     "Right!" An avalanche of journals fell off his desk as he jerked upright. "The Golden Ratio is the Fox!"

     "Can't you explain what you mean?"

     "I just did. The Golden Ratio is the Fox!" They stared at each other for long moments. "Fox! Do you really not see?"

     Tom sat smugly, arms crossed.

     "I know the Golden Ratio is a ratio that frequently occurs in nature," Nadya said, brushing the hair out of her face, "but what's the fox?"

     "Fox!" Jesse corrected. "I have some insight into why you don't understand, but I don't know how to make you see. You have to undergo QEH."

     Tom adjusted his glasses, saying, "I don't buy that. Peasants living in medieval Europe knew nothing about vaccines, but if you could transport me back there — "

     "Pff. Time travel," Jesse scoffed.

     "If you could transport me back there," Tom resumed, "I could teach them about bacteria and viruses. I could give them the conceptual building blocks that would lead to an understanding of vaccines. I could teach them."

     "No," Jesse sat back with a thoughtful expression. "You couldn't teach them because they have a different ontology."

     "Ontology," Tom shot back. "Is that more of your 'code?'"

     Jesse looked at him with a bemused smile. "That's your lack of philosophy holding you back again." Tom rolled his eyes. "Think of ontology as your view of reality, of how you understand the nature of the world. Medieval peasants in Europe lived in a world of angels and demons where God set social order. Illness was the work of dark spirits or divine punishment for straying from God's path. If you started talking of bacteria and germs, they would burn you at the stake as a blasphemer. Before you can teach medieval peasants about vaccines, you must first change their reality."

     Nadya leaned forward. "Are you saying we cannot understand The Message because we have an ontology different than yours?"

     "Yes."

     Tom leaned back in his chair, waving his hands dismissively. "Yeah, but our ontology is right, yours is mad."

     "Is it?" Jesse said with a mischievous smile.

     "Yes, we know science works. It gives us proof. Your message is nonsense."

     "Well, I'm sure your medieval peasants spoke with as much conviction in support of their views."

     Tom was about to say more, but Nadya shushed him. She turned to Jesse. "Can't you teach us your view of reality?"

     "I had hoped so, but after seeing the best minds at this university fail to catch even a glimmer of meaning from what I wrote, I don't think the baseline brain has the cognitive capacity to do so." He shrugged. "Resh-5. Perhaps by relying only on the minds at our university, we're limiting ourselves. If you don't want to take QEH, then maybe I should have that press conference to focus the minds of all humanity on my message."

     "No," Tom said.

     "Why not? It is my message to share."

     "Because you're insane, and the moment you go public the world will know you're insane. You'll taint my career and that of Nadya's. Is that what you want?"

     Jesse winked. "You think I'm a blasphemer, eh?"

     "You're delusional. You've had a psychotic break, and you need help. I'm not going to enable your madness any longer." Tom left the room, slamming the door behind him.

     Jesse looked at Nadya, his eyes bright with silent laughter. "I'm afraid the time I have left is short."

     "What do you mean?"

     "I told you that bit about burning blasphemers at the stake, right? Did I say that out loud? Of course, we no longer burn people. We have them committed for psychiatric evaluations and whatnot. The time is coming when you will have to decide whether to continue what we have begun with QEH, or you'll Tau-six-point-six-seven-times-ten-to-the-negative-eleven." She stared at him, incredulous. Then he smiled, saying, "I know, right? Am I mad or transcendentally intelligent?"

     Nadya imagined herself as an old woman withering in a seniors home, staring at the yellowed card of The Message. She contemplated working forty years as a lab tech, trudging along the same path as her father. If your methods are right, the data never lies. She knew they had done everything correctly. If she was going to premise her career on QEH, she had to have faith in it.

     She took the treatment. It was a simple thing — the automated catheter did all the work. An hour passed. Her thoughts remained unchanged. Security came for Jesse and escorted him to waiting paramedics who drove him to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Still no change in her thoughts.

     She went home and put on a rerun of Game of Thrones. On TV, she watched Jamie argue with Bronn. "… When we win this war all the castles in the Seven — " Her mind erupted.

     Her brain processed the scene on TV. At the same instant, she developed a list of institutions to which she wanted to send her CV while also ticking off the items she would have to add to update it. She simultaneously mourned what happened to Jesse and developed the details of a letter she would send to the hospital to seek for his release. And then … dozens of thoughts fluttered into her mind. Then hundreds.

     Within her head, an endless web of Nadya's began conversing. Was a letter to the hospital the best way to secure Jesse's freedom? The question gave birth to fifty streams of thought.

     She turned off the TV and then took The Message from her pack, placed it on the laminate surface of her kitchen table, and focused the legion of voices in her head on it.

     Layers of meaning lifted off the page. It was elegant in its simplicity and stunning in its power. As her eyes passed over the words, universes blossomed in her mind. The message held humor and compassion, potential and grace. She gasped at its wonder. Human language had yet to develop a superlative adequate to express its beauty. As she drew to the end of the passage, she knew a Truth. This was not a theory but a pillar of reality, not a lesson but a path. This was not a message. It was a gift. There was only one way to express it. It had only one meaning. There was only one way to state the Truth.

From the One comes the point eats the six then the One. Now the eight makes us pass through the nought, and then — lo! — RNA. We will writhe as we fly. Five-nine-three, One-fourteen. One. Six. Fox!

     <<<<>>>>