12: Univerity
Bill smelled like chips. That wasn't an inherently bad thing; she used to love the smell of chips, especially at this university. It was another tiny reason why she had always wanted to come here (besides the education and campus and intellectual conversations, of course). They were good chips, really. But working behind the counter for as long as she had, she was over the smell of chips. She would've gladly welcomed chocolate, or apple, or green beans for all she cared at this point. But it was always chips.
She turned down another hallway and passed a few students joking about how poorly they did on their last exam. A frown jerked at her lip downward. If only they knew how much she wanted to be one of them; to be a student here. She would never do poorly on an exam. She would break the spacetime continuum and study for 25 hours a day if she had to.
She put her hands in her back pockets, looking up to see where her wanderings had led her today. To her left was one of the lecture halls. She could just make out the voice of that legendary professor everyone was always talking about. They called him 'The Doctor', as if he were the only one with a P.H.D at this university. It was well-deserved, though. He seemed to know everything about everything. Today the topic seemed to be...it was hard to tell, actually. It was something between physics and poetry.
Before Bill realized, her feet had taken her closer to the door of the lecture hall. Just as she turned to get back on her path, though, her shoulder crashed into someone coming into the hall.
"Sorry!"
Bill apologized profusely as the girl she'd bumped into righted herself. She was hugging her books close to her chest, her jacket sleeves covering part of her hands, they were so long. Though her head was bent down, she turned her eyes up to meet Bill's as she smiled softly.
"It's fine."
The girl disappeared through the door quickly, but something about her had frozen Bill to the spot. The girl's face was perfectly symmetrical, except for one strange yet entrancing feature. Her left eye appeared to be shining, as if it were made of something gold.
Bill watched the girl go further into the hall and ultimately take a seat in the center. She took out a notebook and pen, twirling it in her fingers as she looked through her phone.
"You goin' in?"
Bill looked up suddenly to find a few boys waiting for her to move out of the doorway. Without thinking, Bill hurried into the lecture hall, not knowing what she was doing until after she'd found a seat across the hall from the girl she'd seen in the hallway. Silently, she called herself an idiot, but made no attempt to leave.
The professor at the front of the room, the mysterious 'Doctor' had paused in his lecture as the newcomers took a seat, glancing over his class roster with a furrowed brow. He soon shook his head and went back to the board, which read 'PHYSICS' in messy chalk letters.
"Where were we? Physics. Physics, physics, physics. What is physics?"
He put his hands in his pockets, then sauntered across the stage.
"'I'm here to share a secret; I am not who I've always been, The world that lies outstretched before me, Is not the only one I've seen, I've travelled on the tails of comets, I've burned up in the hearts of stars, I've been spat out of supernovas, That left me scattered near and far, I have dined in distant galaxies, And taught the birds to sing, I've danced for a whole lifetime, Upon Saturn's dusty rings, I've been here for long enough, To learn what makes the willow weep, I've sung celestial lullabies, That sent the moon to sleep, I've been both the flowing water, And the stone that blocks its way, I've been frozen, I've been molten, And I'll be again someday, Though I've been a billion things, This is the first one that can smile, I'm pieces of the universe, Living as human for a while.' Anyone know who wrote that?"
The boy beside Bill rose his hand and answered, "Erin Hanson."
The Doctor nodded. "And what is it about?"
At this, the boy faltered. "I...dunno. Someone who's immortal? Or a shapeshifter kind of thing?"
The Doctor shook his head and tapped the chalk a few times on the board, over the word 'PHYSICS'.
"It's about physics. And physics is about life. Energy. Chemicals. Objects. The pen Erin Hanson used to write this poem. It's all physics. And it's all connected."
He suddenly erased the board and started scribbling a series of complex, headache-inducing equations. As he wrote, furiously and madly, Bill glanced at the girl she'd run into earlier. She had her head resting on her hand, foot tapping against the floor restlessly.
The Doctor continued his lecture as he scribbled a few more equations. "Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. They're all great for what they do and the area they tell us about, but what about Erin Hanson's poem?"
He stopped writing abruptly and turned to the class. They merely blinked dazedly at him. "Equations are amazing. They're useful, no doubt about that. But they never tell us enough, do they? They don't tell us how amazing it is that the particles in comets and supernovas come to live in the waters, and the stones that block their way. Equations can't explain the wonder and the chaos that must come together to create each of you. You are celestial and cosmic; you have danced upon Saturn's dusty rings. You are all pieces of the universe, living as a human for a while. That is what physics is. Never let the equations and the maths get in the way of that."
Bill and, she noticed, everyone else in the hall was mesmerized, all watching the Doctor with faint smiles. Suddenly, though, he flew back to the board and started writing again. He divided this from one equation, added onto another, until they didn't resemble what they had only been a moment before. The class watched with growing confusion. When he finished, he had only one equation written on the board.
"Anybody know how I got here?"
The formula looked nothing like Bill had ever seen. It had symbols she didn't know existed; letters that had never stood for anything else in her previous physics classes in school.
The class around her glanced from the board to their notebooks, and back to the board repeatedly. Their eyebrows furrowed, teeth biting lips. The boy beside her wiped his face in his hands and erased a row of his writing. Across the room, the girl from earlier was shaking her head, frowning sharply.
Bill leaned forward, eyes darting across the board. A soft smile curled her lips.