OMNICALCUMETRY: THE THEORY of Everything and Its Applications for Everyday Living by Harry Erickson, a New Science for the New Millennium was the full title Harry had given his paper. He really liked this title, although he admitted it was rather cold and would need to be more explosive if he were going to market his paper to the general public. Harry figured it was something the publishers would worry about. After all, coming up with a title that would make billions of people buy his book wasn’t his job. His job was just to be the genius creator of a new field of science.

When Harry had the spark of his idea eight years earlier, he had been at work. Harry was a janitor at Gray Gables, an assisted living facility. He was sweeping up after Mr. Miller—an eighty-year-old retired social studies teacher who had just thrown his Jell-O against the wall in protest of being banned from music time for requesting “Move Bitch” by Ludacris—when a realization struck him like a bedpan to the forehead. Harry’s favorite television show had always been Cape Canaveral: The Original Series. The premise of the show was well known—a United States Air Force base was launched into space after an experimental defense system exploded, opening a wormhole beneath the base. The show’s central plot involved the crew of Kennedy Space Center dealing with the politics and intrigue of several galactic empires. Something about this premise had always bothered him—not the improbability of a large tract of land floating through space, creating its own gravity and atmosphere (the show explained all that in Season 1, Episode 1), but something else.

Harry had wanted to get a PhD in physics but had to drop out of school when Sarah was born. While he couldn’t recite Planck’s constant, his knowledge of the universe did consist of basic principles he had learned in his entry level classes at Indiana University Bloomington, including Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What bothered Harry about Cape Canaveral, what didn’t mesh with his understanding, was how galactic empires existing on opposite sides of the galaxy, millions of light-years apart, were able to wage cold war against each other if, according to Einstein, time slowed down as one reached the speed of light, and the source of a star’s light had already burned out. How could the Tucanians on Tucana Prime be in conflict with the Coma Berenician Empire if the Tucanian king, standing on his ruby-encrusted balcony, gazed up at the Coma Berenician system and knew his enemy was already extinct? And how could the Coma Berenician emperor, sitting on his reclining beach chair made from the skulls of his enemies, look up into the night sky and plot the annihilation of Tucana Prime if the star it orbited had already gone supernova? The more Harry thought about it, the less it made sense.

Cape Canaveral’s creator, Jack Thornbridge, had prided himself on the show’s scientific accuracy. He’d even hired a scientific advisor to help the writers with the complex scientific conundrums inherent in a TV show featuring helicopters flying in space. How could they have made this one small oversight?

This plot hole had plagued Harry since he was sixteen and watched an animated video about the speed of light in his high school physics class. Harry had thought about the incongruities in Cape Canaveral and the theory of general relativity as a cartoon rabbit in the video outraced a beam of light only to find everyone at the finish line had been dead for thousands of years. As he held his rabbit wife’s skeleton, the rabbit cried, regretting his incredible gift of speed.

Then, on that fateful day, as Harry was scraping Mr. Miller’s Jell-O off the activities board, he had an epiphany. He’d been looking at the problem all wrong. He’d assumed there was something wrong with the show’s logic. But what if it wasn’t the show that was wrong? What if Jack Thornbridge knew something theoretical physicists didn’t? What if mainstream science was mistaken? What if Albert Einstein had it wrong?

As Harry wiped lime-green chunks off a sign announcing the evening’s movie—Cape Canaveral IX: The Final Blastoff, the original cast’s final film; Harry also picked the movies—he began to question everything. If the greatest mind in history was wrong about how light traveled, then what else had he been wrong about? Perhaps the theory of general relativity in its entirety was false. And if that was the case, what other universally accepted theories had the general public been misled about; what else had the scientific community gotten wrong?

This initial realization—that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was flawed; light and darkness were in fact constants, existing simultaneously everywhere—was the catalyst for Omnicalcumetry. Harry came to believe that time wasn’t altered the faster one traveled, but that the rest of the universe existed simultaneously with life on Earth. Or to put it another way, the Tucanian king and Coma Berenician emperor were having an intergalactic staring contest across two hundred thousand light-years.

Harry’s theory contradicted prevailing thinking. From seeing his physics teacher dismiss anyone who questioned reigning theories, he knew the scientific community didn’t tolerate dissent. To avoid this, he’d need an impeccable argument and an irreproachable supporting equation.

At first, Harry jotted down his thoughts on a legal pad, though most of this time was spent playing tic-tac-toe against himself. In retrospect, with every X and O he placed, Harry was intentionally unlearning everything he had been taught regarding the universe. He had to regress back to the state of the ideal pupil—a fresh mind awaiting knowledge. Only then could he pursue his new thoughts, eventually beginning the tedious process of streamlining them into a coherent thesis.

Harry knew from experience poorly written theses were discarded as garbage. During his sophomore year, he had listened to doctoral students recall the legends of all the PhD candidates who had washed out of the physics program to become night managers of fast-food restaurants or bassists in indie rock bands, doomed to wrap burgers in thin paper or play dive bars in Milwaukee. In one story, a student created a comic book in his attempt to defend his theory that heat caused light to speed up. The main character was a superhero who flew through space creating suns to light the universe. The artwork was done by an art school dropout known for selling acid on the third floor of the library; he didn’t deal on the fourth floor because that’s where students met for random hookups between books on social interaction and inland waterway and ferry transportation. The panel reviewing the work deemed it trivial and tossed it in the trash. The legend stated the student withdrew from the program and went on to work lights for a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band out of Provo, Utah, called Gimme Three Steps. Every night when Harry worked on his paper, he concentrated until sweat dripped from his forehead, swearing he wouldn’t end up doing lights for a cover band.

With most works, the longer one labors at something, the larger it grows. Harry’s thesis was no different. Originally, it was only fifty-four pages of written defense, with another nine of computations. But as he tweaked it and developed it over eight years, he kept returning to his original question: what if everything we’ve been taught is wrong? As Harry wrote and wrote, he continued questioning everything he’d ever learned. He began to see flaws in our understanding of heat, decay, matter, energy, even how we viewed math itself. This caused numerous problems; actually, it caused one problem with numerous complications. Harry quickly realized his paper couldn’t be about a single topic. There was too much truth he needed to share. His paper grew from a single-topic thesis into an all-encompassing masterwork dedicated to reshaping five thousand years of knowledge from Pythagoras to Einstein.

The final version of Harry’s magnum opus was 2,635 pages explaining everything he considered wrong with the way we viewed the universe. It was so all-encompassing, so revolutionary, he was convinced it would be required reading for all students starting in kindergarten. He was aware most students didn’t have the attention span to read 2,635 pages of scientific insight, which is why his paper wasn’t actually 2,635 pages long.

Omnicalcumetry: The Theory of Everything and Its Applications for Everyday Living was only 467 pages, with another 52 pages of supporting equations. The rest of the paper was divided into thirty-two sections; some were pedagogical, and one section was a quiz designed to help the reader understand Omnicalcumetry, because who doesn’t like to be tested on what they’ve read? Another section was a five hundred-word essay on why Cape Canaveral: The Movie was the defining moment of 1981, and another section was a step-by-step guide for presenting Omnicalcumetry to as broad an audience as possible. And because Harry remembered what it was like to raise an energetic child, he included 20 illustrated pages explaining Omnicalcumetry to children. A cartoon elephant presented the facts of the universe, namely that we had been fed lies, what those lies were, and instructions to read part two in the illustrated series—another 20 pages—in which the elephant laid out the basics of Omnicalcumetry, minus the supporting evidence and arguments. Harry knew kindergarteners wouldn’t be able to comprehend the supporting evidence, being occupied with learning how to read and write. The supporting evidence was for first graders.

Harry was particularly proud of the term Omnicalcumetry. He came up with it around the time he had written page 344 of his paper when he noticed something odd with his equations. They didn’t support his thesis; if anything, they disproved it. This was obviously a concern. It meant that not only was science wrong, but math was wrong too. If conventional mathematics weren’t sufficient to prove his theories, then he’d have to invent his own branch of mathematics.

Harry spent more than a year developing an all-encompassing branch of mathematics designed to replace all existing forms. He devised new symbols, rules, and results. He dedicated 157 pages to this new branch, which he called Omnicalcumetry—the measuring of everything. It was an all-inclusive mathematical system incorporating algebra, trigonometry, calculus, geometry, and a little baseball sabermetrics for good measure. With Omnicalcumetry, Harry was able to rewrite the laws of the universe as he saw them, creating an egalitarian cosmos where cold randomness was replaced with logical cause and effect, where everything, including his wife leaving him, made sense.

Harry wrote not only a 116-page textbook but also a 32-page manual on how to teach Omnicalcumetry. Omnicalcumetry was a very high-level math course. While grade schoolers worked with the illustrated books, middle school students learned Omnicalcumetry basics from the actual textbook. Aside from introducing the fundamentals of Omnicalcumetry, the textbook included specific instructions on how to make math fun. Harry believed the number one reason students suffered math burnout was because learning math had ceased to be exciting. The teaching of Omnicalcumetry included lessons involving water balloon fights and axe throwing, preferably not at the same time.

Harry knew modern students supplemented their education with media; they spent most of their time on the internet watching cat videos and conspiracy theory channels. The textbook and manual were the foundation for students’ education. For those wanting something extra, Harry had written seven ten-page scripts for videos teaching Omnicalcumetry. The videos still needed to be filmed, but his idea was that burned-out, public high school teachers could show the videos to their students, or everyday people with an interest in theoretical physics could watch them and learn about his theory. Originally, Harry wanted to star in them, but he knew kids wouldn’t listen to some poindexter droning on about how cool math was. He needed someone the kids could relate to. He’d heard Sarah talk about a socialite, a person famous for being famous, who had been married to a rapper, who was now famous for being famously crazy. Sarah had shown Harry a picture of the couple. Looking at the picture of the woman, her large breasts squished into a tiny dress, and the rapper, wearing $7,000 pajamas, Harry thought they’d be the perfect couple to moderate his educational videos.

During the development of Omnicalcumetry, Harry discovered something unique about it. While it had been created to measure everything from the life span of a sea turtle to how many expired coupons could fit into a junk drawer, its uses seemed to extend to probability as well. Simply put, Omnicalcumetry had the ability to predict the future, making it part Magic Eight Ball, part A Brief History of Time. Harry discovered, sheerly by accident, if he plugged in the right numbers, he could calculate the likelihood of an event, any event, occurring. Harry had been trying to calculate the distance between Earth and the end of the universe when he noticed if he substituted the age of the universe (13.799 billion years) for the amount of sour cream in a burrito gigante (two scoops), the equation now calculated the odds of him getting burritos after work. Since he’d already planned on getting burritos after work anyway, Harry viewed this equation as prophetic and quickly tested Omnicalcumetry’s predictability on other, more important questions.

After spending his third Thanksgiving at Amanda’s new home, the one she shared with Dennis, Harry used Omnicalcumetry to calculate the odds of Amanda coming back to him. He had watched Dennis belch his way through another turkey-and-stuffing late lunch, then retire to the basement to watch football. The Amanda he knew wouldn’t tolerate this behavior much longer. It was only a matter of time before she returned to him. In his basement office, Harry created an equation to calculate when they’d get back together. It included factors such as how long they had been married (sixteen years), how long they had been divorced (at this point, five years), his IQ versus what he believed Dennis’s IQ to be (Mensa versus Neanderthal), Dennis’s income (more than his—like, way more), how much he drank (never) versus how much he believed Dennis drank (constantly), the level of animosity Sarah felt toward Amanda for leaving him (Harry had to leave this one blank; the peak of a teenage girl’s resentment proved incalculable; even Omnicalcumetry had its limits), and his projected income and fame once his paper was published (represented by the sound of a winning slot machine dumping money on a casino floor). Harry entered all these figures into his system and calculated Amanda would return to him five months and seventeen days after his paper was published, with a margin of error of three years. He recalculated this every Thanksgiving with the same result.

Harry also calculated how long it would take for his paper to be published. This took a little more time because its publication was dependent on its completion. Because he was always adding to it, its publication date seemed further and further away. However, he was confident it would be published; he didn’t need an equation to tell him that. He just had to finish it and publishers would be descending on Bloomington like alumni returning for the Purdue game, but with more drunkenness and fist fights.

Harry also discovered Omnicalcumetry had the ability to not only predict the future but to help plan for it. Near the back of the paper, 172 pages were dedicated to sections on how humanity could survive the cosmic cataclysms of supernovas and the heat death of the universe. He even included sections on what the next universe would look like and ways human beings could witness it.

Harry accepted the current theory that billions of years from now, our universe would die, suns extinguishing, becoming black holes, those cosmic vacuums diminishing into nothing, a few atoms floating in the void, eventually colliding and starting the big bang all over again—a universal reboot. Cape Canaveral VII: To the End of Time had been centered around this concept, the cycle of entropy to death to rebirth. What Harry believed was if humans were to live to see the next universe, they’d need to build a planet-sized ship capable of supporting life for several billion years. They’d need to put their bodies into cryonic storage and inject their consciousness into the ship itself, experiencing life as a sentient ship. Harry included diagrams for the ship, with its multiple layers of sleeping pods. His only fear was once a new universe started and another habitable planet was found, humanity wouldn’t want to return to their old bodies, having grown accustomed to being a living spaceship. So Harry included an argument for returning to their flesh-and-blood forms and instructions for it to be downloaded the minute the craft was constructed. The argument was rather simple: Harry would download the photo album from his and Amanda’s second wedding, a reminder that renewing one’s vows was something a spaceship couldn’t do.

As Harry worked on his paper and his understanding of the universe grew, something in him changed. He began to see how his life and work fit into the larger construct of human history. He realized greatness awaited him and began to envision how this greatness would materialize.

When he was younger, Harry had felt the burning need to be important. In grade school, he would imagine his future: captain of every sports team, student body president, dating the head cheerleader. He envisioned parades in his honor, ticker tape raining down on marching bands, majorettes leading them down Main Street. It didn’t matter that he was the skinny kid who was picked last for teams at recess or that his mom cut his hair; Harry knew he was going to be important someday. As he went through puberty and watched the other boys inch past him on the height chart, his dreams of quarterbacking the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl diminished, and he accepted himself as he was, the skinny kid with the homemade haircut who was good at math and science.

Harry had given up his dreams of mega fame, but once he started working on his paper, a new fantasy settled on him—one of him standing on a stage winning a Nobel Prize. While working, his mind would drift there, and he’d see himself giving his acceptance speech. After several years, his fantasy evolved to where he could hear the applause, smell the mold on the stage curtains, be blinded by the flash of the cameras. The fantasy became real, as though it had already happened and was a memory. And most importantly, it felt good. It became Harry’s escape when his life or day job became dull or untenable. Eventually, he developed more fantasies: living in a mansion, attending cocktail parties in his honor, playing middle school party games on late-night talk shows. This was the future Harry expected once Omnicalcumetry: The Theory of Everything and Its Applications for Everyday Living was published. Once the world realized his true genius.