Igor and I had been microdosing industrial-grade psilocybin, chomping generic amphetamine and salt compounds, chugging homemade absinthe-and-taurine cocktails… chasing the spectral ghosts of physics that shouldn’t exist… when the city went dark.

Naturally, TeVud and KramBin, my two super-suped back-up generators, kicked in, pumping out 25KW without a voltage drop… unlike those hosejob Orfordork gensets crapping out all over the city. T&K kept the electrons flowing, but they couldn’t squeeze out the juice my Backyard Micro Particle Accelerator (BYMPA) needed. Thanks a gazillion to the short-sighted reptilian wingnuts running this quasistatic regime who derailed my goddamn hemorrhaging-edge science and nearly short-circuited all my sweat-drenched work. And Igor’s sweat-drenched work. (Though, credit to where it’s due: the lizards’ check for my expenses finally cleared… so we are royally flush with gear and equipment and technology!)

With all the bars and basement gambling dens shuttered during the Long Outage, I found myself consumed by this powerless sinkhole city’s absurdity, growing numb with boredom at this Fock state of mind’s impedance of free space. Even a highly prolific doctor of important scientific journalism needs an escape! A recharging outlet. A third fucking unimpeded free space faraway from formulae and figures and Igor. So it was either gouge out my eyes for fun or catch up with this Orator bullshit. Well, shiver me timbers, spank my booty, and call me momma Ishmael… to my ungrounded shock, Zweibel’s article about tetraboroxol’s origin sparked a mofo locofoco match of cerebro curioso in my otherwise rapidly bedolting brain. 

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