I suppose everyone has a story. The sort of thing they’d spill out to a close acquaintance after too much drink and finally cross the bridge over to friendship. You know, the sort of thing that defines you in some way, the sort of thing that you keep to yourself because it’s too sore a spot to irritate. Mine… It isn’t so important or defining.

I’ve always been somewhat of a… a blank slate, you might say.

I’m a facts person. I like them. Numbers, measurements, they don’t lie, they don’t have stories. Just absolute truths.

Others… They don’t see that. They get so caught up in these stories instead. They don’t seem to understand or realize that we’re all part of some sort of equation, a tangling of enzymes and cells in just the right places to produce just the right results. They don’t care about that. Hell, I shouldn’t. But I prefer it.

It’s safe, I suppose. Science has no tricks. It’s a world I understand very well. It’s something I could always sit back and observe, not actively participate in.

Not like this future I’ve managed to bind myself to, surrounded by simplicity and complexity all at once, sequestered in my own special brand of hell. I’m alone in a sea of unknown stories with nothing to take me towards or away from any of it.

I miss my past, I guess. My story… my one night where all my idiocy culminated into one act that became the catalyst for my future; it ruined what could have been. Everything was bright back then, not just a neurological wrinkling of ‘what if’ that now makes up my wishes and memories. I was well on my way to a world of discovery, accolades, fame, I was the top of my class. I was in my element. The universe was my sandbox and the worlds I could have built would have been colossal. I know I had potential for absolute greatness.

Instead I chose to live. To forget for a moment what I am and to sample what everyone else is. See where living gets you? Living gives you a story, and stories are bad things to have. Living forced me into this place I’m in now, surrounded by truculent imbeciles that don’t even know they can’t comprehend the world around them. The things that drive sentient beings… well… that’s soft science.

I’ve never understood it.

Maybe I’m the ignorant one.