“Vola, Bombelas!” [FICTOID]

Bautista Fernandez drew interlinking Venn diagrams on his bar napkins, crumpling them up and throwing them on the floor.

Felipe the bartender scowled behind his thick black mustache and even thicker unibrow.

“Che, gil, you think those grow on trees?”

The hacker looked at him blankly.  “Of course they grow on trees, forro.  Where do you think paper comes from?”

“You’re going through my stock like there’s no tomorrow.”

“Maybe there isn’t,” Bautista said.  “I’m trying…no…never mind.”

“’Never mind’ what?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“First you come in a deplete my napkin supply, now you insult my intelligence!”

Bautista looked at him scornfully.  “Very well, I will tell you -- and yet you will not understand.”

“Try me.”

“I am trying to calculate the grand theory of everything.”

Felipe stood still for a moment, the gears of his brain making a sincere attempt to understand Bautista.

“What?” he said at last.

Bautista sighed, holding his head in his hands before shouting, “Everything, you dolt!”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“You mean like…birds?  And tides?  And the stock market?”

“Yes!  And love and hate and guns and germs and steel and diamonds.  Everything!”

Felipe knew Bautista as a low-level hacker for a gang that scammed Nigerian princes out of their Amazon gift cards.  “But…how?”

“I don’t know!” Bautista sobbed in despair.  “The idea, she circles around, just out of sight like a mermaid behind the breakers at twilight.  I want to crack this idea open, expose reality for what it is, show the world the truth -- the false truth! -- it runs on.”

“You’re loco.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t make me wrong.”

“So what’s with all the napkins?”

“I’m trying to plot out my ideas, to cover all the overlapping variables. 

“For instance, just now I thought I was onto something.  I thought if I could just plot out how all art funding in the world interacts not only with each other but all the anthills, I could finally grasp how the rest of reality worked.”

“But why work on napkins?”

“So I can crumple them up and throw them away when I see I’ve made an error.”

“Wouldn’t writing on a blackboard be easier?”

“Fool!  Ever try to crumple up a blackboard?”

© Buzz Dixon