Alastair

Young Alastair approached his father, Aristotle, and asked him to play catch outside. The eight year old boy grasped his miniature ball glove in his hands and wore his cap doffed messily to the side, his unkempt blond hair spilling out the sides and back. Aristotle though was busy pouring over his equations, combing each line for the supposed mistake that he was sure he had made. Aristotle said, "In just a minute son." Alastair sat in the corner of Aristotle's expansive study with ball in hand. His small hands could barely make a sure-grip on the ball. He flipped it in the air to himself, keeping his eyes focused on the red seams. As the ball began rotating faster and faster, the seams blurred into a continuum. He strained his eyes in vain to keep each seam as a discrete mark as perceived by his poor vision. Alastair meditated on each individual seam, trying to keep them all separate from one other and in their rightful place in the order of things. The blur was strangely disagreeable to him, so he fought it as hard as he could. He pictured the ball as large as basketball and then a beach ball. Surely, at that size, the seams could be kept from unfairly intermingling with one another. The oversized baseball tumbled slowly in the air. The motion itself became discrete, as though rotating in front of a flashing strobe. The image made Alastair feel warm inside, and he began longing to go outside with his father. The longing began to tie knots in his innards, and he wanted to cry out and grab his father's attention away from his work.

Strange combinations of letters and symbols danced in front of Aristotle's face, mocking him for his efforts. By playing with funny topological spaces, he sought to unlock the world at the quantum scale. The small permutations that he made in his hand failed to make any sense. His concentration wore extremely thin, his eyes lost their focus, and the page became a blurry mess to him. His head came down with a loud thud, displacing young Alastair from his reverie. "Father!" He ran up and shook him, but Aristotle was unresponsive.

Not sure of what to do, Alastair started to cry. He ran to get his mother from downstairs.

• Alastair Templeton