The problem with college, I thought to myself, is that you don't have to go, but everyone expects you to anyway.

Consider: in our society, if you're the kind of person who gets good grades in math and science, you're probably the kind of person that people expect to go on to do Great Things with those grades. And you're definitely the kind of person that people (parents, teachers, relatives) endlessly nudge to apply for this and that scholarship, and with enough nudging you probably end up winning some of them. And then you're really in trouble, because you've ended up as the kind of person that has other people investing financially in your academic prospects, so you're now more or less obligated to make good on their expectations.

But here's the problem: you may not be the kind of person who even wants to do Great Things or any of that stuff.

I looked around the classroom. I could tell you plenty about why a number of the other freshmen were sitting in Introduction to Applied Metaphysics.^* Bruce Harper? The money, or at least the prospect thereof; he made no secret about that. I didn't consider that invalid, really. Eric Lidenbrock? Natural egghead; you could tell just by looking at him that he was going to spend the rest of his life buried in one research project or another. They probably couldn't have kept him out of the program if they'd wanted to. Tammy Greenfield? Granted, a stunning blonde with a face a sculptor would kill to have crafted was a little more out-of-place in this kind of milieu, but if your gaze happened to drift low enough to take in the fact that she was in a wheelchair, her legs obviously atrophied from years of disuse, anybody who knew anything about the subject could tell you why she was here. Emma Shaughnessy? Same as Eric, she just dressed better.

^* (Metaphysics, of course, being the study and analysis of higher-level patterns observed in conventional physics - the search for the reasons why the low-level mechanics of the universe behave as they do, and especially for the reasons why they sometimes don't.)

And so on and so forth. Five weeks into the semester, I could tell you a why for just about every person in the classroom - except for myself. Why was I here? What did I hope to accomplish? Hell if I knew. I was here because people expected me to be here, because they figured I was qualified for this kind of thing, and if I was qualified for it then I must be cut out for it, and if I was cut out for it then it only stood to reason that I should pursue it. Right?

A gust of cold late-autumn wind stirred up a pile of dead leaves outside the J.M. Oesterlund Building, and they clattered against the window. As if on cue, the ancient heating register tucked away in the baseboard rattled as a distant furnace kicked into gear.

It was the kind of situation where people tell you it'd be a "waste" not to use your natural talents, but nobody will ever tell you what you should be using them for. But we're so insistent on it as a society that you just get this critical mass of consensus built up behind you, pushing you on towards someone else's non-goal like a boat in a storm. I was here because everybody in my life thought I should be here, and told me I should be here, and I didn't have any more compelling reason to disagree with them than I did to agree...I thought...?

I could feel my gorge rising, feel the onset of the stress. I shook my head, trying to clear my mind and focus on the lecture. Brooding wouldn't help, would it? No; better to keep my thoughts on a constructive path. I flicked over the current page of my notebook and stared at the empty, neatly-lined paper as I listened to the professor drone on.

"Now, it's a common misconception, especially thanks to the popular-science rags, but let's be clear here: the morphic field phenomenon is not some kind of indicator of anyone's 'true self.' Just like any other aspect of physics, the universe doesn't have an opinion on what you should be; it only concerns itself with what you are."

A hand went up. Inevitably, it was Lyle - the guy you get one of in every program, who decides that his role in life is to be The Smart-Ass. You could practically hear him rehearsing that scene at the start of Young Frankenstein in his head. "But how can you say that, when there's been studies clearly showing statistically-significant trends in the end result of morphic phenomena? I mean, going all the way back to Montauk..."

Dr. Stufflebeam sighed. "That's very nice, Mr. Jacobi, but it's also not what we're talking about here. Yes, there are absolutely valid questions about that, and we'll be getting into that plenty later in the course. But since you already brought up the Montauk Project, it's worth noting that it was that very research which established that it took exactly as much energy to induce a transformation from a given subject's initial state to a new form as it did to change them from their new form to something else. In short, morphic field stability is a measure of a subject's resistivity to change in general, not a measure of their affinity with one specific shape."

We all knew what they were referring to, which was what made it so tedious that Mister Smart-Ass insisted on doing this. What Lyle was getting at was the debate over the Weak Anthropomorphic Principle versus the Strong Anthropomorphic Principle, easily the most basic divide in metamorphic studies and exactly the kind of thing that popular-science magazines would write an article on every couple of months in order to catch the interest of the casual reader who liked sounding knowledgeable without having to actually work at becoming knowledgeable - i.e., Lyle.

In brief, the Weak Principle held that metamorphic experiments tended to change subjects into forms that fit more or less closely with humanoid creatures from folklore and literature because the humans involved in the experiments (on either end) exerted some kind of subconscious influence on the process, while the Strong Principle posited that the observed trends were too pronounced and consistent to be the result of subconscious personal biases, and there must therefore be something in the nature of the universe itself that preferred humanoid forms of certain types. The Weak Principle was the more accepted theory, since it didn't require the existence of any such quasi-personal entity or force, but it wasn't exactly a settled debate, either.

The Montauk Project, of course, was the most infamous research effort in the field, even though its existence had only been officially acknowledged in the late '80s. It was one of those ultra-secret Cold War things, born from an incident back in World War II where a highly theoretical experiment in teleportation had briefly removed a U.S. Navy destroyer from existence altogether, before it returned to reality with every one of the sailors aboard transformed into a mermaid. Obviously they weren't able to hide something like that indefinitely, but the War Department at the time had spun it as very probably the result of some mysterious new venereal disease, likely engineered by the Axis powers. They'd even produced a propaganda film about it; it still got played on the kitsch-theater circuits.

It was the first clearly-attested example of large-scale metamorphic phenomena in the modern era, and the first to demonstrate a link between high-energy physics and transformation. The Cold War being what it was, much of the research that followed had been classified military stuff, but this eventually fizzled out when it became clear that practical, reliable application was too far into the future to be immediately useful for warfare, and on the whole it was much more practical to just bomb people - but not, inevitably, before both the U.S. and Soviet governments had conducted a whole lot of ethically-questionable experiments to see if it was possible to reliably turn someone into any kind of viable super-soldier.^*

^* (It wasn't.)

Modern metamorphic research, thankfully, was a much cleaner, saner affair, but not a much more predictable one as yet. Even the conditions for inducing a transformative event weren't nailed down with great precision; there were known techniques, but also much debate over whether things like low-energy radiation in certain frequency bands could cumulatively destabilize someone's morphic field - in other words, whether the spread of technology like television or cell phones had anything to do with increased rates of spontaneous metamorphosis since the beginning of formal study in the early 20th century. And the prospect of reliably controlling the outcome remained a tantalizingly distant Holy Grail.

The hell of it was, there were definite patterns hinting at some kind of correlation between circumstances going into a transformative event and the end result thereof - going, yes, all the way back to the Navy destroyer and the mermaid crew - but nailing it down to the point of being predictable, let alone controllable, proved to be far more difficult than just noting down recurring patterns. Every few years, some aspiring researcher would publish a paper proposing a new interpretation of the data thus far, and like clockwork, a few months later someone would document a new change that broke the pattern. It was maddening.

Or, at least, it was for serious researchers who were genuinely invested in solving the mysteries of the universe in general and metamorphic science in particular. For myself, I wasn't even personally invested in my own success in the field, let alone anyone else's. Other people were invested in my success; my role was merely to avoid being a disappointment. I was just...here. Here because I was expected to be here.

I sighed and returned to my note-taking, because that was the thing you were expected to do in class. The lecture droned on until it was finally time for lunch.

---

"Okay, so run this by me again. We're getting a what?"

Emma steadied herself against one of the pillars that held up the high, vaulted ceiling of the cafeteria. She was out of breath; she'd stayed after class to chat with the professor, and she'd clearly run all the way here, the better part of a quarter-mile. She was obviously excited about something, but apparently Tammy hadn't been able to make out what she was saying, either.

The three of us had become an informal group in the high-energy metaphysics program, which was why Tammy and I were sitting at the same table, eating our lunches while Emma caught her breath. It wasn't anything special, we'd just ended up as lab partners on an early observation assignment, and it'd kind of stuck. We weren't exactly friends, as far as I could tell, but they were nice enough and easy to work with, which was good enough for me.

"We're-" Emma gasped for air and tried again. "We're...getting...a probability...exciter."

Tammy gave her a blank stare. "And that is...? No, look, sit the hell down and drink something, already. Here." She slid her soda across the table as Emma sat. Around us, crowds of students drifted in and out of the cafeteria, carrying on their own lives, moving with ease and purpose: people who were comfortable where they were and knew where they were going, without even having to think about it.

The wind was still blowing outside; I could see scattered leaves sailing past the windows on the far wall of the cafeteria, which looked out onto the "quad," the long courtyard around which most of the main buildings at Lakeside State College were located. The campus was built on the hillside sloping down into the lake basin, but they'd found a fairly even piece of ground for this, so the concrete walkways running around the central lawn were mostly level. Which was good; soon they'd be getting snow cover and tend to ice up.

We waited while Emma eagerly sipped down half of the drink, gasping less and less as she did. I took a moment to consider the scene. If Tammy was, disability aside, a sculpted beauty, Emma was more of a cute she-nerd. Not the Hollywood "standard vapid pretty person, but with glasses on" look, but the girl-next-door who happened to be an ace at mathematics. She did have glasses, in fact, huge round John Lennon ones, but she wore them well. That she was also heavily freckled, with artfully-tousled hair that wasn't so much red as vividly orange, just completed the look.

And then there was me. I couldn't feel more out-of-place if I had a big label reading "BACKGROUND CHARACTER" superimposed over my face, even though our interactions never felt awkward or like we were only hanging out together out of obligation. And it wasn't like there was anything particularly "wrong" with me by the usual metrics - I wasn't fat or scrawny or short or gangly or ugly or even terribly plain, I just...kinda wasn't there.

Something about going through my life never really having a reason to make the decisions I made just permeated me; I had no presence in my own life. Normally, seeing an attractive young woman (let alone two) spending time with a thoroughly average, boring guy would make people think what is he even doing with her? In my case, I felt, the immediate answer-back would be: Nothing much. Not that I had any specific interest here, but...well, it'd just be nice to think that people would consider it a possibility. Instead, it felt like I just faded into the background, only here because...well, because I was here.

I took a hefty bite out of my cheeseburger, trying to focus on that instead. It was pretty good: the bun just slightly toasted, the tomato reasonably fresh, the cheese made from stuff that had actually come out of a cow at some point, the actual cow ground nice and coarse, grilled just 'til it was cooked through but still juicy inside. The LSC cafeteria wasn't exactly gourmet dining, but it did at least manage "much better than institutional food service," if you were willing to wait for (and, admittedly, pay for) them to actually cook something rather than hustling through the buffet line. Though Tammy's assortment from the sushi bar didn't look too bad either; it helped that they had to keep that stuff chilled.

Once Emma had finally managed to catch her breath, she handed Tammy's glass back to her and took a moment to collect her thoughts. "Okay," she said. "So, neither of you know what a probability exciter is?"

I shook my head; Tammy shrugged. "I'm not up on the really theoretical stuff."

Emma tsk-ed chidingly. Tammy bristled a little, but I didn't mind; I'd gotten enough of a read on her to tell that she was the kind of geek for whom other people not knowing something was an opportunity to share her passions, rather than a chance to lord it over them. Granted, we were in for a lecture either way, but at least it'd be a good-natured one.

"Okay, just a minute," she said, getting up from the table and striding briskly over to the drink bar. A moment later, she came back with a steaming cup of coffee and a couple of those little capsules of liquid creamer.

"Watch this," she said, peeling the foil off the top of one of the capsules.

We both leaned in as she inverted it over the cup, the contents dropping into the hot coffee in one go. As we watched, the half-and-half bloomed up from the bottom of the cup, rising to the surface and spreading out in a pretty pattern before dissipating into the coffee, finally reaching homogeneity.

"Now tell me," Emma continued, "what is it that determines where the cream will flow?"

People telling it what it should be doing, I suppose. The bitter thought flashed across my mind before I stopped myself and took her question seriously. "Convection currents, right?"

"Yep," she said with an enigmatic smile. "But break it down further. What are convection currents? What causes them?"

"Transfer of heat between masses of fluid or gas at different temperatures," Tammy said. "Partly directional, partly random. I think I see where you're going with this."

Emma nodded. "The major currents you saw were fairly consistent, of course - the cream rises in the coffee as it warms, then settles as the temperature equalizes. But you also saw all the little curlicues as it bloomed out."

I nodded. "Those are more random - Brownian motion, right?"

She smiled. "Correct! Of course, at that level, it's more apparently than truly random - if you could track the motions of the molecules individually, you'd see all the little micro-interactions that cause the motions we observe on the macro level. But there's a probabilistic element to everything, if you drill down far enough."

"We're gonna start talking about cats in boxes pretty quick here, aren't we?" Tammy said dryly.

Emma chuckled. "If you want a different metaphor for unpredictable actors that are only in a known state when observed, we could always use your roommates."

That got a laugh. "The Little Divas? God, tell me about it."

"So let's imagine it like this," she continued. "If you have one unpredictable actor in a box, you don't know what they're doing until you open the box, but there's only so many possibilities. There's a finite probability of any given thing happening, even if nothing is in a fixed state until you open the box. But if you have a thousand unpredictable actors in the box, all interacting with each other, and each interaction is its own probabilistic event? Well, God knows what all might be going on in there, until you open it."

"That...would explain a lot, frankly," Tammy mused, as someone off in another corner of the cafeteria started a loud argument about a rival sports team from the local Catholic college. "It's been like the freakin' Hangover movies every Saturday morning since the start of the school year. And that's with just the two of them."

"Right. Now let's imagine that you have a mechanism that can admit actors to the box without opening it, and then open it at a certain specific time. Given that, you could view the box as a means for storing what you might call 'probability potential.' You could use such a mechanism to charge the box to a certain level of potential, and then release it."

"And that's what a probability exciter is?" Tammy said. "Okay, interesting idea, but what do you do with it?"

"Well, that's the question," Emma said with a shrug. "It's still extremely new technology - they've only just started building the things in the last couple years, and most of the initial experiments have been the probabilistic equivalent of smashing particles together to see what they break apart into. But the potential is highly interesting, especially for metamorphic research."

I finished the last bite of my burger as I thought about what she was saying. "It's a means of making things more predictable and repeatable, isn't it?"

She grinned. "Exactly! That's been the whole problem thus far - the best we've gotten for experimental methodology is variations on 'expose subjects to slightly different high-energy fields and see what happens.' But if we can actually induce events at a specific level of probability, we can start to make meaningful determinations about the potential for inducing controlled transformations. This could be a leap forward for metamorphic research like nothing we've seen before."

Tammy raised an eyebrow. "As in, if you could work out the probability of a specific change, you could make it happen reliably?"

"Potentially. It's going to take a lot of research before we could work that kind of thing out ahead of time, though. For starters, it's going to be more inducing changes at specific probabilities and seeing if the results are consistent from subject to subject."

"Huh. Damn." Her disappointment was audible. What had she been hoping to hear? I thought to myself. It'd be natural to be disappointed when an apparent quick-'n-easy shortcut to your goal turned out not to be, but she hadn't even known anything like a probability exciter existed fifteen minutes ago. I wondered exactly what Tammy was willing to go through to fix her legs; what changes would she willingly risk? But I wasn't about to ask; at least she had a goal, which was more than I could say for myself.

Emma smiled sympathetically. "Scientific progress rarely comes as easily as we like. But it is a very promising technology; I'm sure that we'll start seeing some practical applications for it within the next five or ten years."

Tammy looked about as thrilled with that as one might expect. I figured that it would be good to redirect the conversation at least slightly. "So do they have any specific plans for the one we're getting?"

Emma shrugged. "Dunno; I only just found out about it today. I know Dr. Holland has written papers on the potential for therapeutic transformation, so I'm sure the department is going to be doing some work in that vein, but I don't know who's planning what or when." She sighed. "I mean, I'd love to have a crack at it myself, but I don't expect they're going to let the freshies play with a multi-million-dollar piece of high-powered bleeding-edge lab equipment."

"Yeah, s'pose not," I said. "Still, you could at least get to watch some pretty cool experiments, right?"

"Well, yeah, but...you know how it is. It's different getting to do what you want to do, even if it is basically the same thing."

Might be if I did want to do it, I thought. Well, it wasn't like it wasn't interesting, in the abstract, but I couldn't pretend to have anything like that kind of passion for it. "Maybe you'll get lucky," I said. "Most of the faculty in our department seem pretty decent. They might at least let you assist or something; I hear Dr. Curtis is pretty chill about student involvement."

She brightened a little. "Yeah, maybe. Hopefully by the time my grad project rolls around we'll have a chance to really put it to use." Then a dry chuckle. "But the only thing Curtis wants assistance with during the fall semester is lining up tickets for college hockey. I'm not sure what that guy is even doing in the sciences."

Tammy laughed. "Hey, he's pretty alright, other than the clown hair. And he does do actual research work. You know, when it's not hockey season."

I chuckled and nodded. "Well, maybe one of the other faculty, then. Gives you some time to think about what you'd want to do with it, at least." I wondered what she would do, given the chance. I thought about asking her, but the alarm on my phone beeped and I realized I was supposed to be getting over to one of my math classes. I said a quick goodbye and left Tammy and Emma to finish up lunch themselves.