Zac lay back on my bed and held his head in pain. “Ehmagawd, my brain is melting!”

“Then get off my sheets! I just washed them.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, woman.”

“Go make me a sandwich.”

“No,” he said defiantly.

“Go make me a sandwich... please?”

“If you want someone to make you a sandwich, go find yourself a husband.” He turned his head towards me, then looked me up and down. “And you’re kinda screwed in that department. Twenty-seven years old with no looks, brains, or personality. Your prospects are slim.”

“Thank you for the radical honesty.”

Zac rolled his eyes and shut them. “How much more of this is there? My head hurts.”

“Zachary Borrowdale!” I jumped up on the bed, my hands stretched wide in grandiosity. “We’re reverse-engineering the universe here! We’re undoing centuries of stagnant thought that has hardened and solidified into dogmatic, unquestioning belief inside the walls of the very academic institutions we never quite belonged to-”

“Speak for yourself. I actually gradua-”

“We are bold intellectual explorers, navigating ‘crazy’ ideas without the shackles of authority chaining us to the status quo! No one to answer to but our own curiosity. No one to please but our own questioning minds. No cesspool of groupthink to marinate in while we collect our paychecks and look down our noses and laugh at all the plebeians who believe in ‘weird things’ like magic and wonder and that there’s something more to this world than the materialism force-fed to us in high school science textbooks.

No papers to write with word counts and formatting requirements. No exams, no essays, no academic jousting. No religious worship at the altar of atheism or gods or research grants or university presidents or profits or popes. We’re allowed to think what we want to think, and challenge assumptions we want to challenge, and be who we want to be without anyone telling us otherwise.

Don’t you see? Our greatest gift is that we’re not trapped inside a system gone mad! A system that’s gurgling and gagging and spluttering and drowning in the very liquified delusion that it continues to pour down its own throat. Progress on this problem has stalled for nearly half a century, but the universities just keep lying about it while simultaneously suffocating fresh perspectives. Lies keep the system churning, Zachary. If everyone lies to themselves and each other about how well they’re doing, and how much progress they’re making, then no one has to take any risk or think any differently. It’s intellectual communism at its finest, with everyone sliding down the slippery scale to the lowest common denominator where sameness and groupthink lazily slosh about in the sludge.

And then eventually the world has deviated so far from the truth — has filled its bloated belly with so much frothy delusion and foaming fake news and gassy fibs — that something has to give. So the beast’s reptilian skin becomes tight and uncomfortable, its insides bloated and bubbling and gurgling and straining until finally the bubble bursts and the whole world goes to shit. And we cannot allow that, Zachary! We cannot allow the world to go to shit because it is a beautiful world, and a privilege to be alive in it.

So we need to be truth-seekers, Zachary Borrowdale. If we don’t tell the truth, who will? You and I — we look illusion straight in the eye, and see right through it to the possibilities that lie beyond the edge of what’s reasonable. We are renegades, my friend.”

“Yeah! Renegades!” Zac pumped his fist in the air, his eyes still closed.

I bumped it and jumped off the bed, reinvigorated on our quest for answers.

The whiteboard pen had fallen to the ground. I picked it up and started scrawling again. “The double-slit experiment — tick for reality and consciousness are the same thing.”

Zac sat up, opened his eyes, and raised his hand. “May I make a request?”

“Yes.”

“Can you please add a winky face next to double-slit experiment?”

“No.”

Zac sighed. “Oh, well. My mom always told me, ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get.’”

“Wait — that’s what my mom always told me!”

“Oh,” Zac paused. “Oh, right. Well, maybe that’s where I got it from. I’m sure you can turn this morsel of maternal wisdom into a lesson for your audience one day when you’re recounting this conversation.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I’ve always found that the world will bend to your will a surprising amount of the time if you just have the courage to ask. Sometimes the right questions are impossible questions, and when you search for answers to impossible questions, you might just find them.”

“Wow, Zachary,” I smiled. “That was deeper than the Mariana Trench. Thank you for sharing.”

“You’re welcome. Now, does that pearl of wisdom warrant a winky face on the whiteboard?”

I turned around and drew a suggestive wink next to double-slit experiment.

Zac sighed. “My work here is done. My life is complete.”

I gathered up my thoughts and launched into the next phase of our intellectual adventure.