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The World as Thrill and Calculation


by XXXX


Professor Immanuel Danda finished his Ph.D. at 21, which, according to most of his friends and a few of his enemies, makes him a genius, though, personally, he always found himself to be a scruffy loser, if one were to believe, above all else, the mirror and his empty apartment. 

He spent most of his time at bars now, contemplating numbers and the infinite variations thereof, how they cut each other off and form equations, about how they repudiate one another and fall helplessly into each other's side with the right operator. He never understood how he could do it. 

He did know that it came at a cost. The part of his brain that was supposed to be devoted to socializing, understanding other people, and spending time looking for sex was occupied instead by theorems, geometric figures, spirals in infinite regress, devils that defeated entropy, zombie cats, and Gödellian doubts. 

During his younger years he thought this was more than enough, but upon reflections on the vastness of the known universe and its infinite blackness, his Pythagorean dreams of a number-defined cosmos was invaded by the sterling epiphany of his own mortality and loneliness.
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