To those who don’t fully understand, it must seem truly supernatural, but not to me, I’m the magician. Of course, I don’t really see it that way, as magic I mean. It is magic, the magic of a new frontier in human experience, in science, and like any good magician, I am both researcher and test subject. But, egotism, inaccurate quotes, and fawning over-simplifications aside, that note does summarise what I do in my lab quite well. At the time, I pretended I hadn’t seen it, and left it there for a whole term before fully succumbing to the great weight of my ego and taking it home to stick on my fridge. Jazz is indistinguishable from magic.Īn inside joke amongst the students. Not long after I was tenured at the Nikola Tesla Academy for the Sciences in Liberation, Massachusetts, I had found a note in my lab, affixed to a wall by an admiring student intern that simply read:Īny sufficiently advanced technology Dr. Half a lifetime of scientific discovery and profound personal growth. What I found in the pages of this black book surprised me though, in a way that I had forgotten I was ever capable of being.Īt that point, I had already worked for the last 20 years developing my research. Annoyingly there was no way of telling without reading it through, but amongst the rough stones of a cluttered mind lay lost and forgotten diamonds, pearls of wisdom, and the silver lining of a truly (if inconsistently) ingenious mind. So, I wasn’t expecting much from this one. Most of the notebooks went straight to paper recycling.
By then, rummaging through a lifetime of detritus, I had already found many such notebooks amongst his things scribbled notes mostly, mundane telephone conversations summarised in three or four phrases completely devoid of context, lots of careless messy sketches, ideas for things that would never come to be but hastily recorded for posterity, random thoughts - sometimes philosophical, sometimes just drug fueled midnight ramblings. Its author was a voracious writer of nothing in particular. Battered and discarded as it was, hidden by its nondescript blank black cover, it might hold some nugget of useful information. I don’t know exactly why, but a vague “fear of missing out” squeezed my heart and something just compelled me not to toss it aside, forgotten and unread. It was nondescript, like all the others, but it felt somehow valuable in my hands. It was 10 years ago that I found the journal he left me in a box marked “stuff”.
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