The petting zoo was a success, but the rest of the project wasn’t. Most of the people that Steven dealt with that week after the zoo trip were up to the usual things of life, ordinary things really. Combing one’s hair or just going to work. Or just having coffee with a neighbor, over some ham and eggs with a hefty smattering of complaints about relatives and the weather. Traffic was a favorite topic, combined with a long round of disbelief about venial politicians and why nothing works the way it used to.

Even Steven himself—he was part of the great masses, moving about with normal things to do as well. But none of his days had been very ordinary the last few weeks. He looked like an average guy with his blue shirts and khaki pants. His appearance was fine, albeit a little absentminded. And he realized that it was really true; he was becoming very absentminded.

A person can get that way wandering around in his own head. For weeks, Steven had been making connections that he had not thought about before. Connections that everyone else he had ever read or talked with had not made before. Not just the chemical details of what the world was, but rather what it was going to become. What he was going to make it become.

His mood was good, but it shocked him a little to realize what was happening. His work always showed the same thing: The life force is multidimensional, not just philosophically but mathematically. Whatever life is, it is not just about flowers growing in the rain. Life is also about the way the math feeds on itself and makes his equations come to life. The dissertation still didn’t interest him much, but the equations in it now interested him intensely.

Life is a result. It is the solution to the set of life’s equations. People search for it so hard, wanting to know its essence, and tear at life with tools to see how it works, as though the machines of life—its cells, molecules, and chemicals—are life or could ever reveal what it really consists of, or how it could be managed. What people pursued with relentless curiosity, Steven was finding, blew through them like the solar wind, erupting unstoppably from rocks or rain. Yes, he kept thinking, unstoppably. It is not going to be for us to say what is going to be alive or what that life is going to do in the future. Or when coefficients in the equations are going to demand a new form of life emerge. But we could find the equations—seeing the equations, we could see our lives, and, as well, we could see the limits.