The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies by Tom Simon

and I knew that the crisis was past. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Keep going.’
    ‘Me. Me. Me. Me, me, me, me me me me.’
    ‘There you go! The smaller you get, the more often you’ll be able to feel the whole Me. Isn’t it  good?’
    ‘Good,’ it said. ‘Me! Me! Me me me me me!’
    By now, it was no bigger than I was. The faster it chanted, the faster it shrank.
     
    ‘Memememememememe
    memememememememememe
    memememememememeeeeeeeeeeeee.…’
     
    It would not be quite true to say that the Monad disappeared in a puff of heightened self-awareness. It shrank down to the size of the original capsule, buzzing like a wasp, the pitch rising to a squeal. Then it became too high to hear, too small to see. A little later, a faint red point of light appeared on the floor amidst the wreckage of the lab. In a few seconds it flitted through all the colours of the spectrum to violet. By my estimate, the Great Me was appreciating itself several trillion times per second now. Its vibrations ascended into the ultraviolet, and to all appearances, it winked out. I filled a beaker with water at the sink in the corner and doused the spot where the Monad had disappeared; then, just to be safe, I scooped up the mess with a dustpan and dumped it into a hazmat can.
    I then retired to my office to write you this letter. Either the Monad you sent me had a manufacturing defect, or the design itself was defective. In my judgement, this product should never have been approved even for laboratory use. I am therefore requesting a full refund of the purchase price, and instructions on shipping the hazmat container back to you for safe disposal. You may count yourselves lucky, Gentlemen, that the University does not sue you for the damage to our lab; but that, I fear, is unlikely to happen. The head of our legal department is a bit of a Monad himself, and I suspect he will refuse to file suit out of professional courtesy.
    Yours sincerely,
    Lemuel Pangloss III
    Associate Professor of Particle Metaphysics
    University of [Redacted]

The wrongs of the matter
     
    Interim Report of the Consulting Psychologist
    Institute for Advanced Preon Physics
    March 21, 21xx
     
    Directors:
    As ordered, I have kept the members of Team 5 under close observation for six months. As the Head of the IAPP has wisely observed, cutting-edge research of this type, in which practice can actually outrun theory, can impose great psychological stress on the researchers. Only the most adaptable minds, easily able to free themselves from conventional thinking, are able to achieve the cognitive breakthroughs required to interpret the often bizarre data yielded by the experiments. It has been the position of the IAPP that the attendant risks of employing such minds, with their tendency towards poor socialization, antinomianism, and even dissidence, are justified by the results achieved. It is my contention that this policy has been carried to excessive lengths and should be curtailed.
    I was assigned to observe Team 5 shortly after they began to employ the Fleury–Vasilievsky process to generate rogue particles with specified properties. After a number of routine trials, Dr. Xi, the team leader, proposed that the F–V apparatus should be programmed to instantiate the so-called Anand Hypotheticals. That system of equations, as you will no doubt recall, indicated the theoretical possibility of forming quarks with charges not allowed for under the Hyperstandard Model. Dr. Anand, who may have been psychologically unstable himself, died in questionable circumstances before his mathematics could be fully verified, and there was, at this point, some doubt whether the Hypotheticals were valid.
    Dr. Xi is well known in the field for his informal style of communication. In his official memorandum ordering the experiments, he broke several protocols by employing the following locution: ‘No bugger can understand old Anny’s maths. Let’s get Mother Nature to check his sums.’
    After