The Mote and the Model

Intro

This is the story of Raya, this is the story of Michel, this is neither of their stories. Cohabitating in each other’s mind, embraced as lovers and penetrated as enemies. This is a story of depression and elation and it is the story of the end. Most of all this is a story for which I spoil from the start, a story with no purpose other to satiate the authors, or perhaps the narrators, flights.

Raya 1

"Solipsism is a potentially fascinating, but ultimately useless, model of the universe" Raya answered. Students in her class could not really be said to be there

"Hot but boring" - Ryan Q.

"Take her for the outfits" - Mattis H.

"She’s a bitch" - Coogler W.

"Worst class I’ve ever taken" - Jenifer J.

"At least she has nice tits" - Pete A.

Reviews from rate my professor floated in her mind, perhaps she wrote them herself, perhaps not. "Shit, I’m drifting again"…. How long had it been? Two…perhaps three seconds? "That’s going to show up on rate my professor" she thought. 

"Dr. Jandic is the most plodding lecturer I have ever taken" - Someone, Probably

Wasn’t the chair here today? Did she remember him mentioning he was going to stop in? Four seconds now.  "Good question though" Raya stumbles out.  "But let’s put aside non-falsifiable models for now". The end of lecture, class, students shuffling out 

"Thanks professor"

"Thanks"

"See you next week"

"You too"

"Thanks"

"Thks"

There is the chair, seated 6 rows back, lost not in her loss, lost in his work. Did he see? Does he care? Her office now, typing, thinking. Does Raya think? She wonders and decides no, likely she does not think. This is interesting, of course she does yet, it does not feel as if she does. That’s probably something to probe into, something to dig her teeth into…” As if I need more to dig my teeth in”

Michel 1

Michel builds simulations, in another story she is the hero, she is more than a god, she brings peace to the families which war and brings war to the lovers who care. This is not that story. That story is from another time and another place, that story exists and is real, in some place, perhaps. Michel is mundane, a god among men with the importance of a fish in a tank.  Is it cliche to suggest it was a summer day? Perhaps it was, perhaps not, it matters little. It was warm, it was sweet, the campus’ green beat down on her with its joy. That feeling of…anger…Students enjoying the oppressive. That’s not right, it’s jealousy, or envy maybe? Does it matter, that was years ago. Michel’s models converged and they failed, she saw the things another might see but Michel could never know for that is not her place. Perhaps it was fate which drive Michel to such a deepness, perhaps it was physics. 

Raya 2

"What am I working on again?" Raya asks nobody. Some have said, nobody knows who, that the question was liturgical. Raya never dwells on it, the question is but a mote in the mind --- yet a mote may contain multitudes. Checking rate my professor, other sites, student reviews. Thunderous silence "I need to be writing" "I'm an academic, does it matter" "tenure dossiers are only 6 years away" "that's forever" "you know its not". Coffees and writing, obsession with problems and a drift towards...something. "What am I doing with my life". In all of this, the cacophony Raya knows, she finds her motes. It is true that she does not know the motes, nor even does Raya sense them in the pits of her mind where none of her kind dare wander. Yet they are there, rippling the surface of  her unreality, changing it in some way before joining some shimmering light both above and below. Raya notes all of this, she knows the motes for she focus on them and yet she never can know them. Perhaps in another story she would find a deity perhaps she would be one, that is not this story.

Michel 2

Problems exist, they always do after all. Informational event horizons which Michel cannot peer past. This is no surprise of course, not their existence, not the tautology of the universe; rather, their dwellings within that space. "Why must summer eves prove the most difficult to model" Michel thinks as she draws celestial fire across heavens. As Michel's days end that sun which was once such a cruel master caresses her skin, gentle warmth does enjoy preceding cruel night. Trips home across endless eternity, though historically the voyage took naught but minutes. Of course these things must adapt to the times, ending as they are.

Interlude

Perhaps this is a prelapsarian story, though are they not all? Perhaps the author fears what is to come. Dear reader I ask, me, the author, Emily Boudreaux, I ask you earnestly to consider the things to come. "Why yes, of course I have been" you might reply.  After all this is a story, a tale told to entertain, wishfully to provoke. Understand me when I say that you have not though. You have not considered any of what might come, and neither have I. There is an dread more elevated than the existential which I may have felt, have you?  I have not, for I cannot, and neither can you.  Why do I write this story, why do I sit in on my couch and write self referential tales of scholars studying nothing, characters without character, worlds within worlds outside of any recognizable reality. Perhaps I am egotistical, I think it likely, perhaps I am insecure, I know that to be reality. But I, in that frail and lame way that we of this planet do, want to, yearn to, believe that there is something more meaningful in what I do. There is not, perhaps.

Raya 3

"What have I been doing with my life" the document stares back at her from the terminal, a landscape of ill-formed ideas. "The referee is going to hate this, I would." And the mind that dismisses solipsism, for it should be dismissed,  wanders and justifies its wanderings. It does not matter if Raya believes these justifications, she has as little choice in that as you dear reader, do in the particular matter of whether or not you read these latest musings. It simply has been and what has been is real. 

Michel 3

Embedded in that voyage of minutes and eternity Michel wanders through those realities which she constructs. Yet that is a lie is it not, for Michel is in on a bus, or perhaps a train, she is not in the rooms, she is not present with the grand mathematics which so elegantly maps the infinite to the finite. She merely remembers, yet that which has happened is real, and she has remembered. And as Michel remembers those most challenging of summer days she thinks on the scholar she observed struggling to write a mediocre paper.

Raya 4

And as she wanders she finds a mote, consciously, the rarity of selection and collapse leads her into a reality. Raya elates as she constructs worlds so similar to her own and lands on a scholar changing and knowing the universe.

Raya and Michel 1

And the mote and the model gaze into infinity with each other, or, perhaps, it was nothing.

Interlude

Perhaps I need to go upstairs and lay down…