ON MONDAY MORNING, Harry stood on the pavement outside the Karl Malden Building for the Advancement of Biology and Chemistry and Center for Fedora Research and Innovation. Inside the squat, beige brick structure, grad students conducted research to determine the nature of reality, undergrads snored through lectures, and select faculty ate lunch in their offices in the basement next to the janitor’s closet. Harry wasn’t here for class or to partake in any of the experiments advertised in the local paper and online. (The current experiment involved college kids floating in saltwater isolation tanks and being forced to listen to recordings of marching bands playing the top one hundred hits of 2006. The test subjects would try to claw through the tank when the bands played hit number forty-one: T-Pain’s classic, “I’m N Luv [Wit a Stripper].”) He was here to visit a friend.

Harry had never visited Timothy Henderson’s campus office. He was surprised by the size of it—or lack of size. To say Timothy’s office was small would be an insult to small offices. It was roughly the size of a tissue box and not the kind one’s grandmother covered in pink macramé and seashells. It was more like the travel-sized box one buys for short road trips during allergy season. The office was just big enough for a desk. When the door opened, it slammed into the desk, and whoever was visiting had to squeeze through to enter. It was a good thing the desk stopped the door, because if it hadn’t, the door would have collided with the bookshelf—really a wooden slat drilled into the wall—and knocked all the books onto Timothy’s head. Once inside, there was room for a guest to sit down, but they had to first unfold a chair, place it against the back wall, and face the door, then twist toward the desk for conversation.

“Greetings, Professor,” Harry said, sticking his head into the office. “Do you have a minute between shaping the minds of the youth of America for an old acquaintance?”

“Harry.” Timothy stood slightly, stuck behind his desk. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. How are you holding up?”

Harry filled him in on the fire and about staying at Sarah’s. He didn’t tell him about the fight he’d had with Amanda. When he and Amanda split up, Harry had called Timothy, and they’d cried over the phone together, lamenting the dissolution of his family. Harry didn’t want to burden his friend with another incident of domestic bliss gone sour. Besides, it wouldn’t matter. His paper would be published soon, and everything would return to normal.

“That’s terrible, Harry,” Timothy said. “How long do you plan on staying with Sarah? Do you have a plan?” He shook his head. “What am I thinking? The fire was last night. Of course you don’t have a plan yet.”

“Actually…” Harry twisted and leaned over the desk. His excitement communicated how close he was to the end of his mental expedition.

“No!”

Harry nodded.

“It’s finished?”

“I concluded the last round of edits at 2:31 a.m.”

“And?”

“It’s exactly what I expected, a work of unparalleled genius.”

He hadn’t told Timothy the specifics, just that he was working on something revolutionary. Harry was intentionally tight-lipped about his paper, not because he didn’t trust his friend of thirty years, but because he worried if someone else overheard them talking, they might steal his ideas. The scientific community at Indiana University Bloomington employed KGB-like tactics when it came to surveillance. Their desire to be on the cutting edge of every scientific endeavor led them to plant listening devices in every lab, office, coffee shop, bookstore, and library in town in hopes of catching students or professors discussing something they could use to pull in more grant money. They even sent spies to rival universities to steal work.

“So has anyone read it?” Timothy asked.

“You mean my definitive history of Who’s the Boss?” Harry asked, winking. This was their code word for Harry’s thesis, a title they decided on after watching the Cape Canaveral: The Second Generation episode featuring Judith Light as a Pegasi Cybernetic Warbot. When Harry mentioned Who’s the Boss, an intern in a basement room across campus threw down her headphones, frustrated she hadn’t discovered something worthy of getting her promoted from the underground listening station.

“The offer is greatly appreciated,” Harry said. “But you’re a chemistry professor. It’s out of your area of expertise. For a first read, I need someone who has made a career specializing in ‘1980s television history.’” Harry made air quotes with his fingers. The phrase “1980s television history” was their code for theoretical physics.

The intern kicked her chair across the room.

“You don’t think this is something I can appreciate?” Timothy asked.

“I didn’t mean to offend.”

“I’ve always appreciated the study of…that show.”

“It exceeds two thousand pages.”

“On Who’s the Boss!” Timothy leaned back in his chair and almost hit the wall.

The intern turned off all the equipment, flipped off the lights, left the room, and headed to the registrar’s office to drop out of school and begin her fallback career as a social media influencer.

“What I really require is someone who’s a well-respected expert in that field to whole-heartedly endorse it when I go public with my findings, someone whose reputation is above reproach, like Stephen Hawking—I mean, like Tony Danza.”

Timothy leaned forward and folded his hands. Despite their desperation to be on the forefront of scientific research, the science department was still financially driven. Theoretical physics wasn’t high on the list of priorities for grant foundations. It fell somewhere between studying the history of Byzantine mattresses, training cats to fold laundry, and poetry. The university had stopped sending out grant applications for theoretical physics research, finding most foundations required a school to have a massive particle accelerator the size of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland. By sitting through numerous faculty meetings, Timothy had learned a particle accelerator was an unattainable dream; the accelerator would need to be the size of the campus, an underground loop. Sports being the dominate source of income for the school, the university didn’t want atoms flying through a tunnel and colliding under the football stadium unless there was a guarantee it would help their team win the Big Ten Conference. But there was a school nearby that didn’t rely on athletics to bring in funding.

The University of Chicago was a rival of sorts for the science department. While Indiana University Bloomington focused on monetizing their research programs, the University of Chicago preferred to spend their energy in contemplation. They were viewed as hippies, navel gazers, and new-age philosophers by schools in the surrounding states. The faculty ran meditation retreats, had rooms on campus called imaginariums filled with throw pillows and Led Zeppelin black light posters, and encouraged their students to micro-dose while they studied. During any given week, their science department would imagine how the universe functioned, prove it on paper, then dangle crystals over the paper to see if their findings were in harmony with the cosmic consciousness. It was the type of school that would accept any hairbrained theory, including Omnicalcumetry.

“I think I know a place that has someone who specializes in ‘1980s television history,’” Timothy said. “How soon can your paper be ready and bound like a dissertation?”

“I’d like to peruse it one last time for grammar, but it could be finalized by the end of the week.”

“You’re going to read two thousand pages by Friday?”

“I can forego proofreading the twenty-two-page coloring book.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Timothy laid out his plan for Harry. He told him how his team had been invited to compete in an E-sports tournament in Chicago. The festivities started on Friday. Timothy had already confirmed his attendance and would book a room in the hotel next to McCormick Place. While he was checking in with his team and getting registered, doing all the pre-event activities, Harry would be presenting his paper to a professor at the University of Chicago. Then Harry could hang out in Chicago all weekend while Timothy played in the tournament.

“Doesn’t Lexlitha live in Chicago?” Harry said. (Timothy had texted Harry this discovery the night Harry’s house burned down.)

“Yes. Yes, she does. But that isn’t why I want to go. This is a big opportunity for my team. But she will be there.”

Harry smirked. “Your quest to win her heart is still going well?” Like a lifelong friend should be, Harry was there for Timothy when his home life had deteriorated. He’d listened to Timothy talk about it, had seen the worry on his face, the uncertainty. And he’d seen the change in Timothy after he met Lexlitha, the glow in his eyes like the nozzle on a flamethrower just before it burned down someone’s house. Harry was happy his friend had found love, even if it was online.

“She’s being evasive.”

“Isn’t that desirable? You want her dodging all those bullets.”

“Not in the game. I mean when we talk. Every time I bring up the tournament—or try to—she changes the subject. I get the feeling she doesn’t want to meet up in real life, at least not if it’s just the two of us.”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘I get the feeling she doesn’t want to meet up in real life.’”

“Oh, yeah, right. I wouldn’t worry about that,” Harry said. Harry was often accused of not listening when other people talked, especially when the conversation turned serious. This is because he wasn’t listening, not exactly. Usually, about two seconds in, his mind would drift to one of his fallback fantasies or to some aspect of his theory. In this case, he’d been running an equation using Omnicalcumetry. Harry was trying to predict the likelihood that he’d convert a physics professor to his cause, that Timothy would woo Lexlitha, that Timothy’s team would win their tournament, and the odds Lexlitha was not a fourteen-year-old boy. (While Harry trusted his friend’s judgment, this was an internet romance, after all.)

“I’ve performed the necessary equations, and I can confidently proclaim that once we arrive in Chicago, all our hopes will materialize with a margin of error of 2.9 percent.”

“So then, we’re going to Chicago.” Timothy smiled.

“We’re going to Chicago.”

Despite being friends for thirty years, this would be their first road trip together. They didn’t possess the small-town fear of big cities like many in Bloomington, thinking they’d be mugged or contract E. coli. They just hadn’t made traveling together a priority. When they were eleven, they’d had an opportunity to travel out of town for a soccer tournament—both their parents had forced them to play—but Harry broke his leg in a non-related accident, Timothy faked being sick, and they’d spent the weekend playing Super Mario Bros. and Contra in Timothy’s basement instead.

“Oh, one more item on the agenda,” Harry said. “Sarah and I are hosting an exclusive dinner party Wednesday, and I’m officially extending a formal invitation.”

“I’ll be there,” Timothy said.

Outside the Karl Malden Building for the Advancement of Biology and Chemistry and Center for Fedora Research and Innovation, Harry gazed up at the block of concrete. He envied Timothy, who was shaping the next generation of scientists. Harry wanted to be in there with him. He envisioned himself standing at a podium in a lecture hall. Students packed the room. Some were standing in the aisles; others were outside watching the lecture on a large movie screen. He could see their awe. Hearing about Omnicalcumetry from its creator was something they could tell their grandkids.

A few students ran past Harry toward a crowd in front of another building, one bumping him and not turning to apologize. The crowd was facing a stage. Someone was speaking, their voice distorted by distance and blown speakers—signs of an impromptu rally put on by an underfunded student club.

Curious, Harry walked toward the crowd.

Several hundred kids surrounded a stage that had been set up against the steps of the Greg Kinnear Hall of Scientific Excellence. Giant speakers towered on the sides, and spotlights were focused on a man at a microphone. Behind him, a banner reading Flat Earth Society of Greater Indianapolis hung from the scaffolding.

“I don’t need to tell you, you can’t trust anything these days,” the man with mid-speech sweat stains under his arms said. “Everybody lies to you.”

The speaker had a full head of gray hair, slicked back and shaved on the sides. He also had a handlebar mustache and thick beard. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing the tattoos covering his arms. He looked just at home on stage as he would in a cubical, writing code for a mobile gaming app.

“The internet lies to you,” he said. “Your parents lie to you.” This line drew an enthusiastic cheer from the crowd of college kids exploring life free from the burden of parents who just wanted them to get to bed at a decent hour. “And your teachers lie to you. They fill your heads with falsehoods.”

Harry nodded in agreement, thinking the best part of college was students being exposed to new ideas and deprogramed from all the false belief systems they’d been force-fed by “Big Science.”

“Fabrications designed to make you a willing servant to the spherical industrial complex. Well, I’m here to tell you, you can unlearn everything they’ve taught you. I’m here to tell you, you can truly be free.”

The man raised his arms, expecting applause. But the crowd was silently searching their phones for a definition for spherical industrial complex.

“Um, and now for the man who’s going to show you the path to freedom: Hip-hop recording artist, Lil’ Froat$.” Music blasted through the speakers, bass and a beat slapping Harry in the side of the head. The kids screamed and rushed the stage. They chanted, “Froat$ie, Froat$ie!”

A white kid staggered onto the stage wearing an oversized T-shirt and baggy jeans. His stringy, brown hair needed washing. Barbed wire had been tattooed along his forehead, and the words B Really Real were written under his sagging eyelids. Harry later learned from Sarah that Lil’ Froat$ was from a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Harry thought he looked like he was descended from a long line of people who made bad life choices.

“Yo, who here’s as fucked up as I am?” Lil’ Froat$ asked, raising a red plastic cup. “Check it. I never went to no college, but that don’t mean I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

The kids screamed, pressing against Harry.

“I know how to make some sick beats.” He lifted his head, grinning and flashing his diamond-encrusted grill as the crowd cheered. “And I know for a muthafuckin’ fact, from the trap to the rap—” He held the mic out to the crowd.

“The earth is flat!” the crowd shouted back.

“That’s muthafuckin’ right. From the trap to the rap, the earth is flat. I’ve stood on stages all over the globe, and I can tell you that right there is the muthafuckin’ truth. The earth is flat.”

Harry turned to the kids around him, hoping someone would offer some argument. Instead, they all held their phones in the air, recording the rant.

“Froat$ie’s a low-key genius,” one kid said.

“I heard this before,” a girl said. “It’s the same thing he said at Coachella.”

Someone needed to stand up for reason. Harry wondered where the faculty members were, why no one was offering a counterargument. If he had been an award-winning scientist, Harry would have had the credentials to offer a rebuttal. But he didn’t need to be an award winner; all he had to do was speak up. He was the genius, after all. This guy was a charlatan with bad tattoos.

“Present your evidence for review!” Harry yelled over the crowd.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Lil’ Froat$ said. “Hold up. Did you just interrupt me while I was educating Froat Nation?”

“Don’t interrupt Froat$ie,” a kid next to Harry said.

Harry could feel the crowd turning on him.

“I simply said, if you’re going to make the audacious claim that the earth is flat, you should be prepared to offer supporting evidence.”

“Listen to this muthafucker talking like an SAT tutor,” Lil’ Froat$ said.

The crowd laughed, pointing their phones at Harry to record his humiliating defeat.

“You want evidence, Mr. Tutor? I’ll give you some evidence. Just let me fuck with this Henny first.” Lil’ Froat$ took a sip from his cup. The crowd cheered. “Here’s some muthafuckin’ evidence that’ll blow your muthafuckin’ mind. I don’t need no science book to tell me what’s up. My evidence that the earth is flat is my eyes.” Lil’ Froat$ pointed to his bloodshot eyeball. “I’ve been all around this world, on stages from here all the way to muthafuckin’ South Korea, and when I look out at the crowd, you know what I see on the horizon? A flat line, not a curve like I’d see if the earth was round. I’ve even sat on the beach, smoking a blunt and watching the waves. And at the end of the horizon, nothing. Just a flat line.”

Harry grinned. “As you were lounging on the beach, I presume you witnessed ships sailing away from the confines of the shore.”

“Muthafucker, I own a yacht. Bitches watch me sail away.”

“Then you’re familiar with the optical phenomenon of a ship sailing far enough away it disappears from sight. This occurs because the ship is traversing the curvature of the earth.”

“That’s your argument?” Lil’ Froat$ said. “The ships get small and disappear because they’re too far away for you to see them. Bitch, I got a telescope. I can see everything.”

“But even with the aid of the most powerful telescope, if you examine the horizon, you won’t find the vessel. It’s because your field of vision is a straight line, a straight line trying to view an object across a curved surface. The ship in question has already sailed over said curve and, therefore, is out of your line of sight.”

“That don’t prove shit.”

“Then allow me to pose another inquiry. How does your theory explain gravity?”

“Man, gravity don’t exist. It’s an illusion. See, the earth is a map hanging on the wall of Lord Boddington’s Explorer’s Club in 1889.”

The man with the rolled-up sleeves stepped up to Lil’ Froat$, whispered in his ear.

“Man,” Lil’ Froat$ said, “fuck ‘staying on message.’ I’m a muthafuckin’ educator.” Lil’ Froat$ turned back to the crowd. “See, Lord Boddington brought back an enchanted skull from his latest expedition to the jungles of Kwannaland. He had to steal it from a witch doctor while the witch doctor was sleeping. It was rumored that the skull could bring shit to life. Well, Lord Boddington had recently lost his son to a combination of tuberculosis, syphilis, and getting shot in the face, and swore he’d bring him back from the dead. When Lord Boddington returned from his trip, he placed the skull on the table beneath the map, thinking he could use it on his son the next night since it was gonna be a full moon. Well, there was all this Kwannaland writing on the skull, and since Lord Boddington couldn’t read Kwannese and his trusty sidekick and translator, Mickey, had been killed by a pimp in a whorehouse in Limelock, Lord Boddington had no way of knowing what would happen that night.”

The crowd was silent, their phones recording every word.

“That night was one of the worst storms of 1889. A bolt of lightning shot through the window of the Explorer’s Club, hitting the skull. The letters—written on it in human blood—started glowing, then the mouth opened, and light shot out of the eyes and mouth, hitting the map of the world, giving us life. Now, I know what your next question is, old man. You’re gonna ask me, ‘If it’s 1889 in the Explorer’s Club, why isn’t it 1889 here?’ That’s because time moves faster here because we’re smaller—that’s some Einstein shit right there. That’s why Lord Boddington guards the map so closely, because if any of his enemies, like Professor Cavanaugh or Lady Daphne Leroux—a.k.a. Madame Murder—got a hold of it, they could look at it under a magnifying glass and steal all our technology, making them unstoppable.”

Harry was speechless. He’d never heard anything so absurd in his entire life. Yet he felt a kinship with Lil’ Froat$. With the exception of the facial tattoos, Lil’ Froat$ was no different than Harry. The suburbanite whose parents had turned their wine cellar into a recording studio preached a theory most people considered ludicrous, yet despite this and the fact the flat earth theory had been disproven by Eratosthenes around 240 BC when he calculated the circumference of the earth, Lil’ Froat$ persevered. Harry hated to admit it, but he admired Lil’ Froat$ for this, despite his gold-plated grill flopping loose whenever he took a sip of Hennessy. Harry’s beliefs also contradicted conventional thought and were revolutionary. He knew the scientific establishment would try to discredit him with their expensive PR firms, their slickly produced podcasts, and their wordy op-eds in the New York Times. Harry hoped when the time came, he’d be just as immune to criticism as Lil’ Froat$.

Harry pushed his way through the crowd, content to let another person believe in the impossible.

“That’s right muthafucker,” Lil’ Froat$ said. “Keep walking. You can’t say shit when faced with spotless logic and impeccable rhetoric, bitch.”

The kids taunted Harry for even attempting to argue with their hero. Harry ignored them, knowing in a year, his paper would be required reading on every campus in the country.

“Now that that shit’s over with,” Lil’ Froat$ said, “let’s get turnt!”

Beats dripped from the speakers. The music was loud but muted, as if it had been mixed underwater. With the first notes of the groove, the crowd cheered.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lil’ Froat$ said. “You like that beat? This banger’s off my new album. It drops whenever the fuck I feel like it. I know y’all gonna love it, especially you, Mr. Tutor.”

Harry walked to his car as the kid from the suburbs serenaded him with a trap version of the Kwannaland national anthem.